Cinematic Lab (standalone)

Fab product: EQLabs Cinematic Lab · Version: 1.0.0 (first release) · Engine: UE 5.4 – 5.8 Modules: 5 (3 Editor + 2 Runtime) · Requires: Level Sequence Editor, Movie Render Pipeline, Enhanced Input, Takes, OpenColorIO

Cinematic Lab is one window that replaces the Sequencer / Outliner / Details-tab juggling a cinematic pass usually turns into. Ten tabs cover the pipeline end to end: set a camera body and lens, light the shot, grade it, stylise it, direct live virtual cameras, track shots and takes, capture gameplay, render through Movie Render Queue, hand off to an NLE, and upscale or denoise the result.

Cinematic Lab was never part of EQLabs Pro. It is its own product, and 1.0.0 is its first release.

The Cinematic Lab cockpit, showing all ten tabs across the top and the Camera tab open.

All ten tabs in one pass: a cine camera framed with a shot preset, lens and focus set, the sun warmed from the Lighting tab, Camera FX stacked, three Mirage looks, then shots, recording, the render queue and an OTIO / EDL / FCPXML hand-off.

Start here

Getting started and project requirements — installing the plugin, opening the cockpit, and the four project settings several features depend on. Three of them fail silently when they are off, so read that page before deciding a feature is broken.

The ten tabs

Tab	Subtitle	What it does
Camera	Lens & framing	Camera tree with folders, body + lens presets, filmback and focal length, shot-framing presets, composition overlays, DP assist, handheld operator profiles, dolly and crane moves, bookmarks
Lighting	Lights & mood	Light tree with folders, three-point rigs on a selected actor, cinematic rig stamps, full per-light property editing, time-of-day presets, IES profiles, a JSON-persisted preset library, and the Light Painter
Post Process	Look & grade	Post-process volume tree, ten grouped PPV sections from Bloom to a four-axis colour grade, a preset library, and Prism — 143 stackable camera FX with weights, ordering and saved Looks
Style	Mirage NPR	Scene-wide non-photorealistic looks, a keyable master intensity, per-actor and skybox exclusion
Director	Live virtual cameras	Virtual cameras that keep a subject framed at game time, follow and player-orbit modes, a coverage generator, composition presets, and an Auto-Director that cuts between cameras in PIE
Shot Manager	Shot list & review	Shot list from the active Level Sequence, per-shot Look State capture and restore, A/B compare and diff, take recording, circled takes, cast placement, per-shot render hand-off
Recording	Capture & replay	High-res screenshots, a replay-buffer ring with hotkeys, a runtime Gameplay Recorder for PIE and packaged builds, ffmpeg merger scripts, performance overlays
Render	Movie Render Queue	Render presets, burn-ins, OCIO with a parity check, per-shot look renders, a one-click dailies pass, and multi-pass / AOV EXR output for a compositor
NLE Bridge	Editorial hand-off	OTIO, EDL and FCP-XML export with circled takes as markers, a Nuke project skeleton, a Resolve LUT round-trip watcher, ACES working space
AI Enhance	Upscale & denoise	Real-time upscalers (TSR / DLSS / FSR / XeSS), path-tracer denoisers, and a post-export pipeline for Topaz, Real-ESRGAN and RIFE

What it is not

• Not a replacement for Sequencer. Cinematic Lab drives Sequencer — it writes keys, reads the active Level Sequence, and hands shots to Movie Render Queue. You still cut in Sequencer.
• Not a renderer. Rendering goes through Epic’s Movie Render Queue; Cinematic Lab configures it.
• Not a compositor. It writes multi-layer EXRs and a Nuke project skeleton; the comp happens in Nuke.
• Not an AI upscaler. The AI Enhance tab configures Unreal’s own upscalers and shells out to third-party binaries you install and license yourself. It ships none of them.

Shipped documentation

The plugin ships two reference documents alongside the code, both of which the pages above draw on:

• Docs/Prism_CameraFX_UserGuide.md: the full Prism effect library reference.
• Docs/RenderPasses_Encoding_Spec.md: per-AOV encoding notes for the compositor. It states plainly which encodings have not yet been verified against a rendered frame, and that honesty is preserved here rather than smoothed over.

Verification

Version 1.0.2 was cut with 106 automated tests passing and zero failures — 94 headless plus 12 in-editor UI tests — run against the release tree in a clean host project, then run again from the packaged plugin on each engine. It builds and packages green on UE 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8.

That is a statement about the test suite and the build matrix. Every tab has also been through a hands-on smoke pass on UE 5.4 before submission, and an end-to-end scripted showcase that exercises all ten tabs on one scene and keeps its outputs (renders, recordings, editorial exports) on disk for review.

The ten tabs, one by one

Every tab of the cockpit, one after another.