3rd Person Action Camera

Last time I tried to rid the third person camera, I had used this code when extending from UTPlayerController for my CustomPlayerController:

simulated event PostBeginPlay()
{
    super.PostBeginPlay();

    SetBehindView(true);
    bNoCrosshair = true;
}

The problem with this method (or perhaps I didn't follow a tutorial correctly), was that every time my character died, feigned death or hit a cut-scene it would revert back to first-person. I wasn't sure why, but quickly found another tutorial that worked easily and well from here.
It is an 3rd person action camera that allows the player to run in all kinds of directions, and it works well but...



As shown in the video, the animations are dreadful, and I'm not sure if I can fix it easily. The class I had to extend was UDKPlayerController instead of UTPlayerController, and I think the lack of guns and item pick up is due to the fact I'm no longer extending from UTPlayerController and UTPawn. I cannot feign death or do what the original UTgame allowed....

So which is better? Should I revert back to the previous method and try to redo the tutorials again? Horrible animations aside, this was the perfect camera setup for my game, but it has taken quite a few features away that I could have taken advantage of (though not sure if I would) like picking up items.

*EDIT*
May have found an alternative solution with this other third-person action camera, which is built to extend from UTPawn & UTPlayerControl. I will try to see if I can do this tomorrow, since it's a tutorial dating back 2010.