Plateline Light: Batch Camera Setup from Plates

Plateline is a workflow accelerator for Layout Artists, Matchmovers and Animators. It automates the tedious part of setting up one camera per video plate and laying those shots out on the timeline.

Select your plates, or drop them straight into the viewport, and you get one camera per shot: background image configured, landing on the right frame, with a timeline marker bound so playback cuts between shots.

Light is free and always will be. Recursive folder import, lens metadata and proxy generation live in Plateline Pro.

• Two ways in: drag and drop plates into the 3D Viewport, or pick them with the file browser. Dropped files use the settings already on screen, so there is no second dialog.
• Placement modes: append after the last clip, start at the playhead, or start at a fixed frame. Add handle frames between clips.
• Into a collection: new cameras go into their own collection, reused across imports, so a whole shot list stays selectable and hideable in one click.
• Auto setup: a camera per clip, with the background image, opacity, depth and height configured.

This is the part most batch importers get wrong.

• One camera per shot, not per frame. Select all 500 frames of five sequences and you get five cameras, not five hundred.
• Any frame will do. Pick frame 0087 and the camera still anchors to frame 0001 with the full duration.
• Clean names. 0010_0010.0001.exr becomes a camera called 0010_0010.
• Stills stay separate. SH010.png, SH020.png, SH030.png are three shots, not one gap-riddled sequence.
• Sequences with dropped frames still occupy their full length.
• Awkward names survive: spaces, non-ASCII and CJK characters, &, +, #, brackets, dots as separators, inconsistent zero padding, and sequences starting at any number.

• Token patterns with separate sequence and shot numbers. @@@@_#### gives 0010_0010, 0010_0020, and rolls over to 0020_0010 at the next sequence.
• Separate start and step for each, so the film convention of 10/10 leaves room for inserts.
• The panel previews the names before you import, so you read the result instead of decoding the pattern.
• Search and replace on import, or keep the file name verbatim.

• A timeline marker bound to every camera, so scrubbing cuts between shots.
• Reorder Selected re-stacks the selected cameras and moves their markers and plate offsets with them.

1. In the 3D Viewport press N to open the sidebar, then pick the Plateline tab.
2. Choose a Placement mode. Append is the usual choice.
3. Choose a Naming mode, for example Pattern @@@@_####, and check the Cameras will be named preview.
4. Drag your plates into the viewport, or click Files and select them in the browser.

Dragged files use whatever is already set in the panel, so set the pattern before you drop.

1. Select the cameras to fix, in the 3D View or the Outliner.
2. In the Tools box, set the Start Frame.
3. Click Reorder Selected. Markers and plate offsets move with the cameras, and the scene end frame follows.

Requires Blender 4.5 LTS or newer. Verified on 4.5 LTS and 5.2 LTS. Windows, macOS and Linux.

1. Download plateline_light-3.0.0.zip.
2. Drag the zip into the Blender window, or go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install from Disk.
3. Enable Plateline Light.

No external dependencies. Nothing is bundled and nothing is downloaded.

Video: mp4, mov, avi, mkv, webm, m4v, mpg, mpeg, mts, m2ts, ogv, flv, wmv, dv, mxf. Anything Blender's FFmpeg can open.

Images: png, jpg, exr, tif, dpx, tga, cin, as stills or numbered sequences. Extensions are matched case-insensitively.

• Version numbers at the end of a file name look like frame numbers, so plate_0001_v1, _v2, _v3 read as one three-frame sequence. Put the version before the frame number, or in its own folder.
• Focal length is the value you set in the panel. Reading it from the plate is a Pro feature.
• Light and Pro share the same panel, so install one at a time.

Recursive folder import, lens metadata from EXR and EXIF, and a one-click JPG proxy pipeline live in Plateline Pro.

GPL v3 or later.

Demo plates shown in the images are frames from Big Buck Bunny, © copyright 2008, Blender Foundation, used under CC BY 3.0.