Making good cutscenes....

... is a lot of work, I've come to realize.

The problem is that the conceptualization keeps changing when the cutscene is being developed and sometimes, that involves reworking a few seconds completely and then, making sure it blends in seamlessly. As an example, I had initially planned for an actor to pour wine from a cup he held in his hand but later, I felt it would be better to walk to a nearby table and use a bottle. A very simple change but the blending with the previous and subsequent animations took some work and not least because I am still not that experienced with the cutscene editor.

The first really big cutscene I am working on involving 4 actors

I also had problems with the cup (and later bottle) as I was initially animating them separately. I thought, what the heck, let's post in the cutscene forum to see if there is an easier way and presto! there is! Sunjammer and Eshme pointed me to the 'Link to Actor' option and SJ, in particular, gave a very detailed post that was very helpful.
However, there were still issues with that - for one, the Use Offset is not really that useful as you still have to pretty much set the orientation in a lot of frames (I believe that is called 'bracketing'). The other one was that DA doesn't really come with a decent cup - there is a goblet that will look totally out of place in a tavern and a huge mug straight from the Prancing Pony in LotR (which was another reason to switch to a bottle)

Anyway, the cutscene is almost complete - after another minor rework once I realized you can't have a conversation cutscene if there are dialogue options.

Till later...