Numbered, with states
Every artifact keeps numbered versions — Script v1 to v7, Storyboard v3 — in Draft, In review, Approved or Locked. Every edit or new take creates a version automatically. Generating never overwrites.
Features
The parts that make it a production suite.
Versioning that understands dependencies, a Story Bible that keeps a series consistent, a native editor, sound with a license trail, and storage that respects your drives.
Roadmap marks features planned after general availability. Everything else is in scope for the first public release; some arrive in stages during the beta.
Versioning
Three layers of history. None of them in your way.
You see stage versions and approvals. Git runs underneath, with an optional history view in Pro mode.
Branch the story
A noir cut, a comedy rewrite, a 15-second cutdown, a dubbed language. Compare with a text diff for scripts, a slider for images, side-by-side or wipe for takes — and pull a single scene or shot across.
Project-wide restore
SP Studio commits on approval, on a timer and on explicit Save Points. Restore the whole project to any Save Point, or back it up and sync it.
Stale-work tracking
Every artifact records the exact versions it was built from. When Script v8 is approved over boards built on v6, SP Studio flags the boards, lists the scenes that changed and redoes only the affected frames and shots — after you approve.
Provenance on every asset
Each generated asset records the engine and version, the full direction, reference hashes, seed, parameters, cost, duration and the license terms in effect. Imported media is marked as imported. Local takes can be re-run exactly.
Story Bible & Look Packs
One choice sets the look. The bible keeps it.
A Look Pack bundles genre, visual style, camera language, pacing, color and sound palette. Every later stage inherits it, and the Story Bible turns it into standing rules for the whole project.
- Layered inheritance. Settings flow Project → Series → Episode → Scene → Shot. Override at any level; the UI shows where each value comes from.
- Locked sheets. Characters, locations and props get reference images from several angles, wardrobe and variants — and characters get a cast voice.
- Packs are files. YAML, reference images and optional LoRAs. Export and import them across projects.
- Descriptive, not derivative. Packs describe looks and sounds in plain terms, never by artist or title.
| Family | Examples |
|---|---|
| Genre | Drama, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, romance, documentary, western, noir, action, musical, family |
| Visual style | Photoreal cinematic, 35mm film, 16mm grain, anamorphic, black-and-white noir, hand-drawn 2D, stylized 3D, claymation, felt, watercolor, graphic novel, retro VHS, commercial gloss |
| Camera & lens | Handheld documentary, Steadicam, locked-off tableau, dolly and crane, drone, wide-lens, long-lens |
| Lighting & color | Golden hour, high-key commercial, low-key noir, neon night, grade LUTs |
| Pacing | Average shot length, hook-first social, slow-burn drama, trailer rhythm |
| Sound palette | Score instrumentation, ambience density, dialogue clarity, loudness target |
| Delivery | Aspect ratio, frame rate (24, 25, 30, 50), resolution, platform loudness |
The built-in editor · Free
A project never has to leave the app.
A workspace bar in the spirit of DaVinci Resolve’s pages, a conventional track-based timeline, and a native Media Engine on FFmpeg and OpenColorIO for playback, color, audio and export. Good enough that most projects never leave — with clean handoff when one does.
| Area | Included | Later Roadmap |
|---|---|---|
| Media | Media pool, bins, smart bins, metadata, proxies; import footage, stills and audio; search across transcripts and shot descriptions | Albums and still-image workflows |
| Cut & Edit | Multi-track timeline; insert, overwrite, ripple, roll, slip, slide; J K L; markers, transitions, titles, lower thirds, keyframes, speed changes, captions; compound clips, compare timelines | Magnetic (trackless) mode, multicam |
| Color | Exposure, contrast, saturation, LUTs; primary wheels and curves, scopes, ACES color management through OpenColorIO | Node-based grading, masks and tracking |
| Sound | Track mixer, volume and pan, ducking, loudness meter; bus routing, stems, VST3 and AU plug-ins | ADR and surround |
| Graphics | Transforms, dissolves, titles; Lottie and HTML graphics | — node compositing is handed off |
| Deliver | H.264, H.265 and ProRes presets, AV1, per-platform packages, render queue, captions | Mastering formats such as IMF |
Live shots
A clip points to a shot and its chosen take. Right-click for Swap take, Reshoot region, Add handles or Show in Shoot. Reshoot and handles need a Paid plan
Status on the clip
Badges show approved, stale or needs-review, so an upstream script change is visible right in the timeline.
Context beside picture
The source panel shows the scene text and the board frame for the selected shot.
Familiar hands
Keyboard-first, with shortcut presets for Resolve, Final Cut and Premiere.
Sound, voice & music
Four lanes, and a paper trail for every track.
Dialogue, effects, ambience and music each take audio from the best source available: scratch audio from the take, cast voices, an effects library, or your own imported files.
Your music, by default
Bring WAV, MP3 or stems from a composer, a library or another tool. A spotting view marks cues on the rough cut, and SP Studio drafts a cue sheet — timing, mood, instrumentation and intensity — that doubles as a brief for whoever supplies the music. Hosted music generation is available but off by default.
Cast voices that hold
Each character sheet stores a cast voice for hero dialogue. When a take’s voice drifts, re-voice it in the cast voice while keeping the performance. Voice isolation cleans up noisy audio.
Mix to spec
Stems drive automatic ducking under dialogue. Four buses with loudness presets per platform — around −14 LUFS for social, −24 LKFS for US broadcast. Export a final mix plus dialogue, effects and music stems for outside finishing.
License Ledger
Every audio asset gets an entry: source, plan or tier, date, terms version, permitted use and the delivery it was cleared for. Before delivery, SP Studio checks each master against the ledger and warns when a track’s license doesn’t cover the use.
Backup, drives & Media Volumes · Free
A plain folder that survives the real world.
Text and metadata live in Git; media lives in a content-addressed store, so duplicate frames and takes are stored once and backups copy only what’s new.
- Media Volumes. Register “Studio-SSD-2TB” or “NAS-Projects” once. Projects store volume IDs, not paths, so a changed drive letter or mount point doesn’t matter.
- Placement policy. Originals on the big drive, proxies on the internal SSD, engine weights on their own volume.
- Offline-tolerant. Unplug a drive and proxies keep the timeline, script and boards editable.
- Relink by hash after a move or copy, and Prepare for removal finishes pending writes before eject.
- Verified backups to a drive, NAS, synced folder or S3-compatible bucket, with 3-2-1 reminders.
- Cross-platform drives. exFAT, NTFS, APFS and ext4 without symlink, path-length or case problems.
HarborLights.spx/ # a normal folder; or one .spxz archive project.yaml # type, formats, presets bible/ # style bible, characters, locations, props develop/ # spark, logline, treatment, sources script/ # script.fountain, beats, breakdown design/ # moodboards, concept, look boards/ # boards, frames, animatic shoot/ # S010-sh020/shot.yaml, takes/ edit/ # timeline.otio, grades, titles sound/ # dialogue, sfx, score, mix deliver/ # masters, captions, packages .studio/ # local cache and proxies (not versioned) .git/ # history for everything above
| Package | Contents | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Full archive (.spxz) | Project folder, history and all media | Move or restore everything |
| Light archive | History and manifests, no media | Share structure; media relinks |
| Review package | Proxies and a PDF of script, boards and look | Client or partner review |
| Masters | ProRes, H.264/H.265, image sequences per delivery preset | Final delivery |
| Sound package | Final mix plus dialogue, effects and music stems | Outside mixing |
| Captions | SRT and VTT per language | Platforms and accessibility |
| Edit handoff | OpenTimelineIO, FCPXML, EDL | Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut |
| Documents | PDF script, storyboard, lookbook, pitch deck | Pitching and approvals |
Queue & budget
Know the cost before you roll.
One queue
Local GPU jobs and hosted jobs in a single queue. Pause, reorder, or run overnight, with notifications when dailies are ready.
Estimates first
Before a batch runs you see something like “12 takes of 8 s at Standard — about $X or Y minutes”, based on a benchmark of your own machine, not marketing figures.
Spend caps
Set a project budget. Draft quality is the default, so iteration stays cheap and finals are a deliberate choice.
Teams · Indie, Pro and Studio plans
Multi-user from day one. A solo project feels no different.
Every version records who made it. Teams add roles, sync and review on top.
Roles
Owner, Editor and Reviewer. Reviewers comment and approve but don’t shoot or generate.
Sync
History syncs through a remote on your NAS or Git host; media through a shared drive or S3-compatible bucket. Collaborators fetch only the media they lack.
Review
Comments and approvals attach to a version — and for picture, to a frame or timecode.
Safe edits
Per-artifact locks for script, timeline and mix, merge helpers for scripts and metadata, and a side-by-side resolver for conflicts.
Roadmap A headless SP Studio Server for a shared render box, remote GPU, browser review links, localization with each language as an Alternate, and Look Pack sharing between studios.
Production types
Templates for how you actually work.
| Type | Length | Aspect | Structure | The template adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Series | 3–60 min / episode | 16:9 | Series, Season, Episode, Scene, Shot, Take | Series bible, recurring cast and sets, recaps, title sequence, batch rendering |
| Short film | 3–40 min | 16:9, 2.39:1 | Sequence, Scene, Shot, Take | Festival delivery specs, credits builder |
| Feature | 60 min + | 16:9, 2.39:1 | Act, Sequence, Scene, Shot, Take | Act structure view, 20-minute reels, heavy asset management |
| Commercial | 15, 30, 60 s | 16:9 | Concept, Spot, Shot, Take | Brief intake, product and logo lock, legal and claims checklist, cutdowns |
| Web ad | 6–30 s | 16:9, 1:1, 9:16 | Concept, Variant, Shot, Take | One master reframed to many sizes, A/B variants, CTA end cards |
| Social short | 15–90 s | 9:16 | Hook, Beats, Shot, Take | Hook-first structure, auto captions, loop-friendly pacing |
| Music video | 2–6 min | 16:9, 9:16 | Song sections, Shot, Take | Audio-first timeline keyed to the track |
| Trailer / teaser | 30 s–3 min | 16:9 | Beats, Shot, Take | Cut from existing material, stings and title cards, music-led edit |
Free to finish. Built to make.
Every post-production feature on this page is free. Pre-production and production come with the Indie, Pro and Studio plans.