Help & FAQ

Yes — a 3-minute tour of the whole app, from a project and its setups to the camera report and the live link your crew works from. It opens the first time you sign in to CamPlot Creator.

To watch it again any time, open your Account panel (top right) and tap Watch the tour. It's also on camplot.studio/creator.

A project is usually one production, like a competition series or a live event. Inside each project you can have multiple setups — individual plots for different moments of the shoot (intros, eliminations, finale, and so on).

Think of a project as a folder and setups as the pages inside it. Switch between setups using the tabs at the bottom of the screen.

Open your Account panel (top right), scroll to My Projects, and tap + New Project. You'll get a fresh canvas with one empty setup ready to plot.

Everything saves to the cloud automatically as you work — no Save button needed. You'll see a green dot in the top bar when you're connected and synced.

If you lose internet, CamPlot keeps working and syncs the next time you're online. A backup of all your projects is also saved once a day on each device you use (Settings → Backup).

Yes. CamPlot keeps earlier versions of every project by itself, from all your devices: one whenever a different device saves the project, and one every ten minutes while you work on it.

Open your Account panel, and under My Projects tap Version History (it is also in Settings → Backup). Each version shows when it was saved, which device it came from and what was in it. Restore makes it the project again — what you had goes into the list, so a restore can be undone the same way. Open as a copy opens it as a separate project beside the current one, to compare the two or keep both.

They all work the same way. Tap a tool and its menu opens: a search box, a grid of tiles and a line underneath that says what a tap on the plot will place.

Subject, Camera, Light and Mic are ready the moment the menu opens. The lit tile is the last one you picked (a standard subject, a standard camera, a Fresnel and a shotgun mic to start with), so you can tap the plot straight away. Cables, Set and Templates wait for you to pick a tile; tapping the plot first just closes the menu.

Picking a tile closes the menu and keeps the tool ready with that pick. Tap the same tool again, press Esc or click anywhere else to put it away. Tapping another tool closes this menu and opens that one, so only one menu is ever open.

To search everything at once, press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows) or tap the magnifier in the top bar. It finds what's already on the setup (tap one to jump to it), your other setups, every tool's tiles and camera models.

Tap the camera icon in the left toolbar. The menu opens with the last camera type you used already lit, so you can tap anywhere on the canvas to drop one, or pick another type (or search a model) first. Each new camera auto-labels with the next available letter (A, B, C…) and pulls operator/lens info from your Camera Roster if you've set one up.

Tap the subject icon in the left toolbar (the pink circle). The menu opens with the last subject type you used already lit; tap on the canvas to place one, or pick another type first. Subjects mark where your talent, set pieces, or performance zones sit.

Nine: Standard, Male, Female, Child, Crew, Cap, Referee, Football and Group. Pick one in the Subject menu before you place it, or select a subject and change its type in the properties panel.

Male and Female have a Hair switch (short, pony or bun). A Group shows 2 to 9 people — set the number under People. Each type is drawn in the subject's own colour and turns with its facing.

Subjects and cameras go down to Size 1 and lights down to 10%. Drag the Size slider to its left end, type a size (half sizes like 2.5 work below 5), or press , and . with one selected. To shrink a whole crowd at once, select them all and use Size in the panel.

A very small subject or camera is drawn as the small figure shrunk — its number and pointer shrink with it, so a block of seats stays readable. Zoom in and each one looks like a normal figure again. A camera keeps its full field of view and its details box at any size, and a light below 50% keeps the beam it had at 50%, so it still lights what it pointed at.

Select the camera, then grab the small blue handle that appears above it and drag to rotate. A readout shows the current angle while you drag.

On desktop, you can also hold Cmd and drag the camera body. Or use the rotation slider in the right-side properties panel for precise angles.

Every camera has a field of view cone that shows exactly what the lens covers. Select a camera to see its properties panel on the right:

• Set the focal length (in mm) to match your real lens. CamPlot calculates the cone angle automatically.
• Type the camera in Model and the sensor buttons become that camera's real scan windows — ARRI, RED, Sony, Canon, Blackmagic, the 2/3″ broadcast bodies and more. Match Camera Sensor (on by default) is the switch for that: turn it off to pick a generic size instead — Full Frame, Super 35, APS-C, Micro 4/3, 1″, Super 16, 2/3″, 1/2″ or 1/3″. A model CamPlot doesn't know gets the generic sizes, and a 2/3″, 1/2″ or 1/3″ lens name moves the camera onto its size by itself. A URSA Broadcast G2 with a B4 lens offers its two sensor areas — 4K (the 2/3″ angle Blackmagic recommends) and 5.3K (wider; most B4 glass vignettes there, and the lens's coverage tag in the inventory is how you say yours doesn't). PTZ cameras bring their own zoom: type a PTZ as the Model — Panasonic, Sony, Canon, BirdDog, PTZOptics, Lumens or Marshall — and the Lens fills in with its built-in range, so the cone shows exactly how wide and how tight it can go — in the Viewfinder too. The built-in zoom is part of the camera, so it never counts as a separate lens in the inventory. Pick your aspect ratio too — it's remembered between sessions.
• Set the FOV Distance to see coverage at distance — slide it, or tap the number beside the slider and type an exact distance (250, 250'6" or 75 m), anywhere from 1 ft to 1,000 ft. With a scale reference set, it is real distance on your plot (a scale set in metres or yards works too) and Coverage shows the frame's width × height at that distance.
• Match Lens (on by default) snaps the cone to the zoom range of the lens you've typed — enter "35-80mm" and the FOV can't wander outside what that lens can actually do.
• Lens coverage: CamPlot knows what many lenses cover — B4, 1/2″ and 1/3″ broadcast zooms, Super 35 cine zooms (Fujinon Cabrio and Duvo, Canon Cine-Servo), full-frame and Micro 4/3 glass, and every series in the lens catalogue. When a lens's image circle is smaller than the camera's frame, the note under Match Lens says it will vignette and what clears it — the extender, a smaller sensor window, or cropping in with the Viewfinder's CROP (Super 35 glass on a full-frame 16:9 frame needs about 1.32×). Tap the small coverage tag on a lens's row in Inventory to say what it covers yourself.
• Extenders: a lens with a built-in extender (broadcast 2×, Cine-Servo and Duvo 1.5×) gets an Extender switch under Match Lens. Throw it in and the focal range and the image circle both grow by that factor — which is how a Duvo stops vignetting on a full-frame camera.
• Anamorphic lenses widen the cone by their squeeze. Write it in the lens name — "Cooke Anamorphic/i 50mm" or "50mm 2x" — and the cone shows the unsqueezed frame while the mm stays the real focal length. The line under Match Lens says how the name was read.

Yes, two locks in the camera panel (or the right-click menu). Both are the little horseshoe magnet button — tap it, then tap the subject:

• Subject lock (magnet next to Shot Type) — the camera keeps facing a chosen subject as either one moves. Subjects have the same thing as Look Direction, and lights have it next to their Details field.
• FOV distance lock — the cone tip tracks the subject's near edge, so your frame-size readout always reflects the actual camera-to-subject distance. Coverage numbers update live while you drag.

Turn on Jib Mode in the camera panel to give a camera a jib arm. Drag the square base disc to position it; the camera is then constrained to the arm's reach (standard jib = fixed radius, techno = telescoping min–max ring). An optional arc shows the sweep.

Set to Techno, the panel asks for the Techno type — Technojib, Technocrane or Super Techno (SuperTechnoCrane) — and its size: 15′, 22′, 30′, 50′ or 75′. That sets the reach to the crane's published arm, measured from the post to the nose (a SuperTechno 30 reaches 8′10″ to 31′4″), and fills the Support line with the crane while it is still blank or just says “Jib”, so the Camera Report and the inventory say which crane it is. The camera's own Model field is never touched. Drag Min or Max Reach to set your own.

Jibs work with movement paths too — the camera's path stays on the arm, and the base itself can have its own path (right-click the base → Add Base Position).

Give a camera the POV type, then set its Mode to Pylon (under Camera Type in the panel). The camera is now built into an end-zone pylon — the orange square — with its lens on the face it looks through. Pick where the pylon stands: Goal line, Back line (where an end line meets a sideline) or Line to gain (the wireless pylon the chain crew carries to the first-down line).

• Lenses in this pylon: up to 4. Each lens is its own camera — its own tag, colour, shot and row in the Camera Report — and one details box lists them all. Going back to fewer sets the extra cameras down beside the pylon; nothing is deleted.
• Tap a square in the compass, or turn a lens with its handle, to aim it through a face or a corner. The shot names itself — Down the goal line, Up the sideline, Into the end zone… Field is Left / Right tells CamPlot which side of the pylon the field of play is on, so the names are right on every corner, and Pylon heading squares the pylon to your field.
• Tap a lens on the plot to pick it. Drag the pylon and every lens goes with it.
• Sizes: with two or more lenses, the panel has a slider for the pylon and one for each lens, so one lens can be bigger or smaller than the others. Every lens stays on the pylon. With one lens, Size sizes the whole pylon.
• 4K pan & scan shows a 4K lens’s whole wide picture and the window reframed inside it.
• + Turf mic adds a boundary mic beside the pylon — there’s no room for a mic inside one.

Open the Mic menu. Under the mics is a Booms section: Fishpole (a boom op holds it), On a stand (a fishpole parked on a C-stand), Fisher (a studio boom the operator rides) and Mic stand (a stand with an arm, for music and podiums). Pick one, then press where the operator or the stand goes and drag to the talent. The run shows as you drag (“8′ 3″ of 12′”) and stops at the pole’s full length. Let go and the mic turns to the nearest person. A plain tap puts the pole straight up the page.

• Drag the mic to swing the pole and reach — the operator stays put. Drag the operator, the stand or the pole to move the whole boom.
• Pick a boom and its reach shows as a dashed circle: the pole fully out. A Fisher’s is a ring (its arm can’t bring the mic in closer than its own length), with a dotted circle where the counterweight end swings behind. Reach in the panel shows it when picked, always, or never.
• The panel’s Boom section changes the kind and the pole or model — K-Tek, Ambient, Rode, VdB, Fisher Model 2 and Model 7, K&M and Latch Lake, at their published lengths — and whether the mic comes from above or from below. Underneath, Mic on the boom picks what rides it: Shotgun, Super, Cardioid or Stereo.
• Already placed a mic? Put it on a boom in its panel and the boom appears behind it. Take the mic off the boom leaves the mic where it is.
• The boom writes the mic’s Mount line (“Boom 1 · K-Tek KE144”) in its details box and in the Audio report. The details box sits behind the operator, clear of the talent, and a cable to a boom mic runs to the operator.
• The Booms eye under the Audio layer hides every pole, operator and stand and leaves the mics.

Each camera's details box (operator / camera / lens / build / shot) has per-camera controls in the panel: show/hide, text size, keep tag text upright, and anchor (an anchored box stays where you put it on the plot instead of following the camera). Lights have the same show / text size / anchor controls for their own details box.

Shift-click several details boxes — cameras and lights together if you like — to align, distribute, or resize them as a group. To change every camera at once, tap the Cameras layer's name in the Layers list — its panel changes everything on that layer together (see Can I change everything on a layer at once? under Layers) — or deselect everything for Setup Options, which does the same for the whole setup.

Yes, on CamPlot Max and Enterprise. Open Settings → Details & Reports and pick Full breakdown: a camera then has 39 details in eight groups — Lens (Lens 2, matte box, filters), Build (key and additional support, dolly / track), Shot (location, platform / seat kill), Monitors & accessories, Control (focus puller, focus / zoom / iris control, FIZ, focus monitor), Specs (record specs, recorded on, sensor mode, media, timecode, paint), Signal & power (video transport, power, tally, audio, camera IP, color device IP) and Others (prompter, comms, vendors). The groups open and close in the camera panel, so the panel stays short.

Your own fields. Need a detail CamPlot doesn’t have — “Truck input”, “Fiber #”? In Settings → Details & Reports tap ＋ Add a field, name it and pick its group. ⇄ keeps it the same on every setup (it follows the camera number), ◫ makes it this setup only. It goes in the camera panel, the details box, the report, the CSV, the Breakdown, By department and the sheet like every other detail, and a sheet you import fills it when a column has its name. Up to 12 a project; Make these my default carries them to new projects. Removing one leaves what you typed on the cameras.

Who has a focus puller. Set a camera’s Focus puller to Yes (Control) and the plot shows it at a glance: an amber gear on the lens and a round FP badge at the back of the camera — in exports too. Every setup’s same camera number gets it. To hide the marks, turn off Gear + FP on the plot under Focus puller in Settings → Details & Reports.

How each camera’s signal leaves. Video transport takes up to three outputs — pick them from the list (SMPTE fiber, Triax, SilverBack, Tactical fiber, FIDO, RF, bonded cellular, SDI, HDMI, IP…) or type your own; each is a chip. The first one is the camera’s badge on the plot: a small pill in that cable’s colour at the back of the camera — SMPTE, TRX, SB, RF, CELL — with +1 or +2 when there are more. Tap another chip to make it the badge. RF means any wireless link, whatever the make — Vislink, Teradek, Hollyland, Accsoon and the rest all read RF. To hide badges: the Badge switch under the row (that camera), Transport badges in the Cameras layer’s panel, Setup Options or a selection (those cameras), or Badge on the plot under Video transport in Settings → Details & Reports (the whole project). Every output is counted in the inventory and checked against the cables drawn to the camera.

Each detail has two ticks: Box puts it in the details box on the plot, Report puts it in the Camera Report. A details box holds 6 lines — the meter shows how many are used, and Shot is always the last line; the report has no limit. In panel shows or hides a whole group in the camera panel. To add just one detail, tap + Add a field at the bottom of a camera’s details and pick it (or type to find it) — it goes on every camera in the project and into the report, and Settings then reads 2 in panel for that group. Make your own field… is at the bottom of the same list. The choice is saved with the project, so everyone who opens it sees the same boxes and report; Make these my default starts your new projects with it.

Details marked ⇄ belong to the camera number: type CAM 1's power once and every setup's CAM 1 has it (tap Just this setup if only this one changed). Lens, filters, build and location are per setup, and the report marks them ▲ when they change from the setup before.

With Mark gear Ours · Rented · Crew on, the small square beside a piece of gear says who supplies it, and the report writes it the way breakdown sheets do — “FG Sony Burano”, “Fuji Duvo 24-300 (S)”, “Preston FIZ (AC)” — with your own codes. The Camera Report exports the lot as a spreadsheet (CSV, this setup or all setups), and once a camera has more than a dozen lines its PDF is the Breakdown — every camera a row, every detail a column, on 11×17 landscape sheets (one or two for most shows), who supplies each piece of gear as a small tag after it (your own codes — FG, S, AC), a map of the plot on the first sheet, and a totals line. Export on the Cameras tab names each PDF: All cameras, one sheet (the Breakdown), One page per camera (every detail and the camera’s spot on the plot), By department (one PDF with a sheet for each crew — Camera & lens, Video engineering, Grip & platforms and Crew — with only that department’s details, whatever your report shows; Video engineering ends with an IP check) or, in the side panel and for shorter reports, the Cards — and the spreadsheet.

Full screen. The ⤢ button at the top of the Reports panel (Cameras tab) opens the camera report over the whole window: the Breakdown as a table you can search (a camera, a piece of gear, an IP), with groups you can hide and All setups; what changed since the setup before is marked ▲ and counted at the bottom. Pick a camera to see where it is on the plot, all its details and This camera’s page. Import, Export and Edit sit at the top right; the ⤡ button beside them (or Esc) goes back to the panel. On an iPhone held sideways, swipe the top up to fold it away and give the table the whole screen — the slim bar left at the top keeps the ⤡ button (Undo, Redo and Done while editing), and pulling it down brings the top back.

Edit (CamPlot Max, in the Reports panel or full screen) opens the report full screen as a sheet you type in — a row a camera, a column a detail. Return moves down, Tab across, ⌘D fills a column down (camera IPs count up: .101, .102, .103…), and a block copied from Excel or Google Sheets pastes straight in — with more rows than cameras it offers to add the cameras; a list under each cell offers what the project already uses, and who supplies it. On an iPad a tap opens a bigger editor that also asks whether a ⇄ change is for every setup or just this one; on a phone the sheet shows one detail at a time for every camera, with Fill down.

Import a sheet brings a whole breakdown in — an Excel file (.xlsx), a CSV, or rows copied from Excel or Google Sheets. It finds the header row under any title rows and reads your own column names (“HOUSE PLACEMENT”, “MULTIDYNE / RF / FIDO VIDEO TRANSPORT”…); you can point any column somewhere else or leave it out. Who supplies the gear comes from the text first (“FG …”, “… (S)”, “(AC)”, “AC PROVIDES”) and then from the cell colour — orange ours, yellow rented, blue crew, each one yours to change — and the colour of the camera-number cell can colour the camera. Cameras are matched by number: a blank or N/A cell never erases anything, a camera that isn’t in the sheet is left alone, and rows without a number (totals, spares) are skipped. New numbers can be placed one by one with the Camera tool, parked under the plot, or left out, and one Undo takes the whole import back.

Video transport. Type a MultiDyne SilverBack and the panel offers what the same fiber carries: Power (a Juice 60 over SMPTE hybrid fiber), Timecode, Tally and Camera audio — only the ones still empty. Fill all writes them in one go; Not now stops asking for that transport. A system camera (Sony HDC, Grass Valley LDX…) on SMPTE gets its CCU’s jobs the same way. Tactical fiber carries no power, so Power isn’t offered there.

On the plot (Signal & power) lists the cables drawn to the camera and the mics riding it — tap one to select it. ＋ SMPTE fiber from CAM 1 starts a cable at the camera with the type its Video transport names (fiber, tactical, triax or an RF link).

Agito: an Agito camera has a Base dial under Camera Type. Until you move it the base turns with the camera, as before; move it and the base stays parked while the camera turns on it (turning the base carries the camera with it, like a Chapman’s cart). Turn it with the camera again undoes that.

Build sets the camera type while it’s still Standard: Steadicam, Ped, Jib, PTZ, Gimbal, Drone, POV, and Hand held / RF (Wireless). A type you picked yourself, the roster’s type for that letter or the model’s own type always wins, and the Build words are never changed. Undo takes it back.

Record time (after Media) works out how long the media lasts from the camera’s Record specs — pick one of its own formats — and Media (“4× CFexpress B 1TB”): “≈ 9h 29m a card · ≈ 37h 56m on the camera”, with the Media Calculator’s numbers. No frame rate in Record specs counts as 24. Media’s list offers the cards that camera takes.

Recorded on (after Record specs) says where the camera is recorded: In camera, KiPro in the truck, EVS in the truck, KiPro in engineering, Not recorded… Anything but in camera (or internal, onboard, cards) means the camera isn’t recording itself, so Record time says so instead of asking for Media. It’s on the Camera & lens and Video engineering sheets.

Vendors picks the camera’s rental house (with sources on): tap one of the project’s houses, or ＋ to add one. The camera’s rented gear goes on that house’s rental order, so one show can rent from more than one house; a name typed there before that isn’t a house shows dashed, with Make it a rental house. In the report’s sheet, Vendors’ list offers the houses, and a new name you type there becomes one. Platform / seat kill: the number before “seats” adds up per setup — in the Totals tab, the Breakdown’s totals line and full screen’s footer.

Lens 2 on the cone. A camera with a Lens 2 gets a switch in Field of View — The cone and Match Lens use: Lens | Lens 2. Pick Lens 2 and the cone, Match Lens’s range, the extender, the squeeze and the Viewfinder all use it: a prime snaps the cone to its millimetres, a zoom keeps the cone inside its range. Lens 2 then reads “on the cone” in the panel. Both lenses count in the inventory either way.

Select a camera and use the color swatches in the properties panel — the standard palette plus a rainbow custom swatch that opens a full color picker (your recent custom colors are remembered). Colors are also available from the right-click menu.

To color cameras automatically by letter, open the Operator Roster and turn on Color cameras by letter — assign a color to each letter and every camera adopts it the moment you tag it.

First, set a scale reference — tap the ruler icon and draw a line across something whose real-world length you know (a stage edge, a marked distance on your ground plan), then type in the real measurement. After that, all distances on your plot read in feet and inches.

Once scale is set, FOV readouts also show real coverage distance.

Tap the light icon in the left toolbar (it looks like a Fresnel lens). A menu opens with every light type and a search box. The last type you picked is lit (Fresnel at first), so a tap on the canvas places one; pick another tile first if you need a different light.

Each light has its own throw, spread, color temperature (CCT) and tint — or an RGB color. Tweak them from the properties panel. Drag the rotation handle to aim the light.

Under the lights, the menu's Frames row places a diffusion frame — 4×4, 6×6, 8×8, 12×12 or 20×20.

Yes. Select the light and, at the top of Light color in the properties panel, switch White to RGB. Tap one of the 12 quick colors, or set Hue (0–359°) and Saturation (0–100%) — the two numbers an RGB fixture's HSI mode uses, on an ARRI SkyPanel or an Aputure light in Sidus Link. Strength is the intensity.

The beam, the lens and the details box take the color. The details box reads, for example, ● Blue · H225° S90%, and the Lighting report says Color instead of WB. Switch back to White and the light's color temperature is just as you left it.

Select the light. Under Diffusion in the properties panel there are twelve tiles, light to heavy: None, ⅛ White, Hampshire Frost, ¼ White, Opal, Brushed Silk, ½ White, ¼ Grid Cloth, 216 Full White, Light Grid Cloth, Heavy Frost and Full Grid Cloth. Tap one.

The beam gets wider and softer at the edge, and a little dimmer, the heavier the gel. A plate shows in front of the lens. Under the tiles a card gives the LEE number, the stops it costs, the Rosco gel that matches it and how wide the beam is now — for example LEE 216 · Full White −1½ stops · Rosco 3026 · Beam 40° → 92°.

The details box adds a short label such as 216 −1½, and the Lighting report gives the gel a Diffusion line of its own. Fresnel, Leko, PAR, Panel, Tube, COB, Open Face and Cyc lights take diffusion. On a Tube the gel shows on the light, in its box and in the report, but its sheet of light stays the same. A light that had Silk or Opal before keeps it, and now draws it wider and softer.

Open the light menu and tap a size in the Frames row, then tap the plot. The frame is drawn at its real width, using the setup's scale when it has one. It is tagged F1, F2 and so on. If you drop it inside a light's beam it turns to face that light.

A light aimed at the frame stops there, and the light leaves from the whole width of the frame on the far side, soft and wide. The frame becomes the source. Select the frame to choose what it is Skinned with: ¼ Silk, China Silk, 250, ¼ Grid, 216, Half Soft Frost, ½ Grid, Magic Cloth, Full Grid or Muslin. Each one shows its stop loss, and the next frame you place uses the one you picked last. You can also set the Size, Mount (Standing, or Overhead to make a soft top light over what's under it), the Stands and the Details. Light through it lists the lights that reach the frame.

For a book light, aim a light at a sized bounce (an 8×8 Ultrabounce, say) and stand a frame in the bounce's light. The frame then lists the light as (bounced). The Lighting report lists frames after the lights, with their size in feet and metres, the rag, its stops, the mount and the stands.

Yes. Select a Bounce and pick a size under Frame size. It is then drawn at that width, and What it does switches it between Diffusion, Bounce and Flag. A sized bounce has six faces: White, Ultrabounce (white on one side, black on the other), Unbleached muslin, Silver, Gold and Mirror. It still reflects any light aimed at it.

A sized flag or bounce blocks the light behind it, so a 4×4 flag in a beam casts its real shadow. The panel lists the lights it stops. Tap Off under Size and it goes back to the plain bounce it was.

There can only be one Sun per setup — it represents directional sunlight at a specific time of day. Drag it to rotate the angle and reposition where the light source comes from.

Tap the Set icon in the toolbar (the chair icon). A menu opens with every set piece family — chairs, sofas, tables, beds, doors, windows, kitchen and bathroom fixtures, cars, trees, and more — grouped by category, with a search box that finds any piece or variation by name.

Pick one, then tap on the canvas to place it. Nothing is placed until you pick. Each item is sized to real-world inches based on your scale reference, so a queen bed actually takes up the right amount of space relative to your stage.

The Set menu has the pieces a village is built from, all drawn to their real size: Director's chair (18″ and tall 30″ seats, one with a side table, rows of four, a two-row block, a camp chair), Multiview & monitors (55″, 65″ and 75″ TVs on rolling stands, video walls, monitors and a laptop to set on tables), Production cart (monitor, DIT, sound and camera carts, Mag carts, a utility cart), Producer & logger table, Road case & rack and Floor & cable protection (layout board, Masonite, Ram Board, mats, cable ramps).

For a whole village in one go, open Video village: a cart with one or two rows of chairs facing it, or a 10×10 or 10×20 tent with its walls and everything inside. Tent & canopy has 10×15 and 10×20 pop-ups and black 10×10s with three sides or a zip front; Riser has audience risers with three or four rows of chairs.

Yes, with CamPlot Max. Tap the magnet next to Fit in the top bar (on an iPhone it is the first button on the floating Elements bar; it is also in Settings → Canvas). Subjects, cameras and mics then land where the grid lines cross, and set pieces line their edges up with the lines, so risers, decks and tables butt together. Drag something and it settles on the grid; the arrow keys move a selected piece one square, or five with ⇧.

The grid is real: 1 ft by default (25 cm with metric units), following your scale reference. Pick 6 in, 2 ft or 5 ft (or 10 cm, 50 cm, 1 m) for a setup under Settings → Canvas → Grid Size. Snap on or off follows you to every device.

With CamPlot Max, the set pieces you place most sit at the top of the Set menu, so the chairs, carts and risers you use on every show are one tap away. A piece joins once you have placed it twice, and the ones you stop using drift out over a couple of months. Switching a piece to another variation in its panel counts the one you ended up with.

To take one out, hold its tile (or right-click it) and choose Remove from Most used. The list is kept with your account, so it is the same on every device.

Yes, with CamPlot Enterprise. Measure a piece once — your camera cart, your EVS desk, your truck’s tool box — and everyone at your company finds it at the top of the Set menu, under your company’s name. It always goes down at its real size, whatever the plot’s scale.

Admins, and managers with the Objects permission, add them: put a picture of the piece on the plot (a top-down photo or a drawing), then open its panel, or right-click it and choose Make it a company set piece…. Give it a name and its real size — 4′ × 2′, 30″, 1.8 m all work — and choose Add to your company. You can also tap Add one in the Set menu. A company holds up to 100, apart from its shared objects.

To take one out of the menu, hold its tile (or right-click it) and choose Remove from your company. Plots that already have it keep it exactly as it was.

Yes. Select any set piece and use the rotation handle, or type exact dimensions into the W/H fields in the properties panel. Real-world units appear in the panel matching your scale reference.

Yes. Select the door (or most other set pieces) and tap Mirror in its properties panel. It flips left to right, in the plot and in 3D; tap it again to flip it back.

Yes. Right-click it: Show Label (or Show Tag, Show Name) turns that one label on or off, and Lock keeps it where it is. A set piece also has a Show label box in its properties panel, and Lock it in place sits at the bottom of the properties panel — with several selected, it locks them all.

A locked element can't be dragged, nudged with the arrow keys or moved with a group. To lock a whole layer instead, see What does locking a layer do? under Layers.

Tap the Cables button in the left toolbar. The menu has three sections: Cables, Hubs and Routes. Each shows its first two rows; tap +19 more (or +8 more for hubs) to see the rest. A fourth section, Crossings, holds the yellow jackets, ADA ramps and ratholes. Pick the cable type you want — SMPTE, HDMI, XLR and so on.

Then tap where the cable starts — a camera, a mic, a light, a hub, a desk or monitor, or an empty spot on the plot. Each tap on empty plot after that adds a bend; tap a route to have the cable ride it, and another route after that to ride that one next. Tap the thing it plugs into to finish, or double-tap an empty spot to end it right there. An end that isn’t plugged into anything can be dragged anywhere, and named in the cable’s panel (“Field panel 3”) — the name shows at that end and in the Cable Report. A dashed ring shows what the cable will plug into before you tap or let go. When it's done you're back to Select with the new cable selected.

Laying a lot of cables? Turn on Keep laying at the top of the Cables menu: the tool stays on after each cable, route or hub, so you can go straight to the next one. Press Esc to stop.

Select the cable and pick a type in its properties panel: camera fiber (SMPTE, triax), video (SDI, HDMI, BNC mults), network, audio (XLR, DT12, snakes, MADI), comms, power, RF, and control & sync — 29 in all. A new cable is the type you picked in the Cables menu.

BNC coax is a generic coax cable: pick what it carries in its Signal row (3G-SDI, 12G-SDI, MADI, reference or timecode) and CamPlot checks the length for that signal.

Tactical fiber has a Strands row: 2, 4, 6, 12, 24 or 48. The cable’s tag then reads “Tac 12”, and the Cable Report, the pull sheet and the inventory count each size on its own.

A BNC mult (a multi-coax snake with BNC fan-outs) has a Channels row: 5, 10 or 16. Each is drawn and counted on its own, and a crossing packs it by its real thickness (Clark’s published sizes). Like a snake, a mult’s loose end can take the cables it fans out to.

The Cables menu's search finds every type, hub and route too — type "hdmi" or "xlr" and tap the result (or press Enter) to draw that type straight away.

Yes. Select a tactical fiber with a strand count, a BNC mult with a channel count, or a DT12: its panel has a Strand map (a Channel map on a mult, a Pair map on a DT12) — one row per strand, in the standard fiber colours (blue, orange, green, brown…; 13 to 24 add a black stripe; past 24 each strand is named by its tube).

On each row type what it carries (CAM 4 video), tap the arrow to say which way it goes (toward either end, or both ways) and type the device at the far end. ＋ pair fills the next strand with the return, the other way. A 24- or 48-strand cable shows the strands in use plus two spare; Show all opens the rest.

Start a signal with the camera's number (“CAM 4 …”) and camera 4's panel and its Camera Report line say what it rides — “F7 · 1–2 → HDX 1”. The Cable Report gains a Fiber summary page: every mapped cable with each strand's colour, signal, way and device, and the spare ones listed.

A route is a path your cables share — a cable tray, a trench, a run along the ceiling. Pick one under Routes in the Cables menu — Floor, Flown (overhead), Under (under the floor or a deck) or House (the venue's own lines) — then tap its turns and double-tap (or press Enter) to finish. Cables that follow it ride side by side in lanes instead of piling up on one line. You can change how a route lies in its properties panel.

A hub is where cables start or end: a truck, a generator, a headend, a junction box, a JBT, a stage box, wall or stage power, a distro, an RF rack and more (20 kinds). Pick one under Hubs in the Cables menu; you can change its kind later in the hub's properties panel. With a scale set, the truck and the generator are drawn at their real size.

On a hub you put down, each cable plugs in on the hub's edge, on the side it comes from. The cables on one side spread out evenly along it and run side by side, so they never pile up on one line or cross where they leave. Cables riding a route stay in their lanes and only step over into the hub at the end. Hubs from older plots keep their cables running to the middle. To switch one, use Cable ends in its panel: On the edge or In the middle. Either way the cable lengths stay the same.

To size a hub exactly, type the number in the box above its Size slider. Same size on then gives every hub of that kind — or every hub on the setup — the same size in one step; locked hubs stay as they are, and a truck or generator drawn at its real size is never changed.

A hub's tag sits on its bottom side and turns with it. To change that, select the hub and use Tag on the plot in its panel: Size makes the tag bigger or smaller (drag it, or type the %), and Position is Locked or Free. Locked: Auto bottom and Auto top keep the tag on that side of the hub as it turns; Always bottom, top, right and left keep it level on that side of the plot, whichever way the hub faces. Free: drag the tag anywhere on the plot, and set its angle in the panel. Same tag on every… copies it to the other hubs of that kind on the setup.

A headend is where the production trucks plug into the building (the truck dock I/O); a JBT is the box installed at a camera position that the house fiber runs to. Both are under Hubs in the Cables menu — search “truck dock”, “headend” or “JBT”.

Put a JBT at each camera position, then select the headend: under House fiber, pick SMPTE, Fiber or Triax and tap Home-run every JBT. CamPlot draws a House cable from the headend to every JBT not joined to it yet. House cables are in the building already, so the Cable Report lists them as “In the venue” and never adds them to the pull list. One undo takes the whole home-run back.

Place a Generator from Hubs in the Cables menu (or search “power truck”, “generator trailer”, “UPS”, “Saunders”, “Aggreko”), then pick its size in the panel: a Power truck (generators on the bed with a liftgate), a 53′ gen trailer, a UPS trailer (a UPS paired with a generator) or a Towable. With a scale set it is drawn at its real size.

Feeds Main or Backup and Output in kW go on its roof (“350 kW · BACKUP”). Space it takes keeps 4 ft clear all round by default — the venue recommendation for generator trailers — and the box turns orange or red when a truck or another generator crowds it, like the trucks. A power truck's length isn't published, so type your own under Body length.

Right-click a cable (or press and hold it on a touch screen). Add Bend Here puts a bend where you clicked, Remove This Bend takes the nearest one out, and Straighten removes them all. Drag a bend to move it; it lines up with its neighbours as you get close — hold Shift to move it freely.

Ride a Route lists the routes on the setup: pick one and the cable follows it. Take Off the Route lets the cable run on its own again.

Yes. While you lay the cable, tap the routes in the order it rides them, then tap what it plugs into. It rides each route in its own lane, crosses over where the routes meet (or come closest), and goes on to the next. Pressed the wrong route? Backspace takes the last one off.

For a cable that is already on a route, open its properties panel and pick a route under Then to add it. Rides shows the order (Route 1 → Route 2); tap the × to take the last route off. The length, the pull and the Cable Report follow the whole path.

Yes. Select the route: a + sits just past each end. Tap one and carry on drawing from that end — tap the new turns and double-tap (or press Enter) to finish. You can also right-click the route and choose Continue Route. The cables already riding it ride the longer route.

Yes. Cables snap to 90° and 45° so a plot stays tidy, but a room isn't always square to the page. While you lay a cable, tap Free in the Angles switch at the top of the plot (or tick Free angles in the Cables menu): the cable goes straight to what it plugs into, at any angle, and every bend lands exactly where you tap. Routes work the same way while you draw them.

To change a cable later, select it and pick Tidy or Free under Angles in its properties panel, or right-click it and choose Free Angles. Switching a cable back to Tidy snaps its bends to 90° and 45°.

Desks, tables, monitors, racks and most set pieces take cables; floors, walls, doors, rugs, tents and the like don't, so a tap there adds a bend instead. To change it for one piece, select it and switch Takes cables in its properties panel. Pictures don't take cables unless you turn it on.

Yes. Pick Custom cable under My cables in the Cables menu (or tap + Custom in a cable's Type row), then give it a name, a short tag, a colour, its family, its stock lengths and, if it has one, its length limit. Tick Keep in My cables to keep it in the menu for your other projects.

Think everyone should have it? Tap Suggest it for the CamPlot library and it comes to us to look at. Your cable works straight away either way.

Every hub's panel has a Note. A hub with a note gets a small i on its name tag; select it and a card shows the note and the cables plugged in. Anyone you share the plot with view-only can tap a hub to see the same card.

For a hub CamPlot doesn't have, pick Custom (behind more hubs): name it, give it up to four letters for its box (or leave that blank to use the name's initials), and pick the cable family it belongs to — its stripe and tag take that colour.

Select the antenna hub and pick its pattern in the panel: Omni (all the way round), Sector 120°, Paddle 90°, Panel 75°, Helical 60°, Yagi 30° or Narrow 15° — or type the beamwidth from your antenna's spec sheet. It draws a beam like a camera's cone; turn the hub to aim it.

Antenna sheets don't print a range, so the reach is yours: type it, or drag the dot at the end of the beam to where your link holds. Hide every beam with the Antenna beams eye under the Cables layer.

Place a Truck from Hubs in the Cables menu (or search the menu for "uplink", "B unit", "trailer"…), then pick its size in the truck's properties panel: a 53′ A unit or B unit, a 40′ or 30′ truck, a production van, an uplink truck, or a European 16.5 m trailer or 12 m rigid. The panel sets how many expandos it has and whether they're out (Parked: Open / Closed), its stairs (none, along the truck, or straight out), whether the tractor is on, which side the door is on, a B unit's liftgate and an uplink's dish aim.

Space it takes shows the working area — the truck plus the room you want around it — and the truck's size open and closed. With the truck picked, a dashed box shows that area on the plot; it turns orange when it overlaps another truck's working area and red when the trucks (or a generator) actually touch. Set Show to Always to keep it on screen. If your truck's spec sheet differs, type its body length and width open; leave them blank for a typical truck of that size.

The name is written along the roof, so it turns with the truck. When a stadium-sized plot draws the truck too thin for that to read, the name rides beside the truck instead (on the side away from its door) and moves back onto the roof as you zoom in.

Yes. Pick a truck that has a size, and under Inside in its panel choose a Layout: a typical A unit (replay, video, production and audio, 15 seats) on a 53′ A unit, or a typical B unit on a B unit. The roof comes off and the inside is drawn at its real size — desks, seats, monitor walls and racks, the walls between the rooms, the door and the room names. Roof: On puts the roof back; the plot prints the way it shows.

The inside rides the truck: move it, turn it, open or close its expandos, or flip its door side, and the inside follows. Pieces standing in an expando are hidden while it is closed and come back when it opens.

Edit the inside makes the rest of the plot step back so only the truck answers: drag seats and desks (they stay inside the walls), turn them, delete them, or add more from the Set menu, which leads with the pieces a truck holds. Tap a seat twice to open its panel and give it a name (TD, A1, EVS 2…); the name sits on the seat, upright. Press Done or Esc when you're finished.

Save this layout… keeps your truck's inside with your account; every truck of the same size then offers it next to the typical ones.

Once the plot has a scale, the cable's panel shows its length: the run, plus 10% slack and a 6 ft tail at each end. You can change the slack and the tail in the panel; they apply to the whole project. It also shows which stock lengths to pull.

CamPlot checks the length against the cable type's published limit: it turns amber when you're close and red when you're past it. RF coax is checked by signal loss instead.

Yes. In the cable's panel, switch Cable from Auto to Set length and type the length you have (a premade 300′ RG6, say). That one piece is what it pulls, and the cable turns red if the run needs more than it is. The Cable Report marks it Short.

Open the Cables menu and pick a size under Crossings: 5-ch, 5-ch ADA (with the blue wheelchair ramps) or 4-ch, and behind +4 more the 3-channel, the 2-channel and the two 1-channel jackets for feeder and big multicore. Press on one side of the walkway and let go on the other: CamPlot lays enough whole sections to cover it, lined up with your drag. A tap drops a single section.

If cables already cross that walkway, a bar offers to run them through it. Each one is then re-routed to the crossing, through a channel and back out, and its length grows by the detour — the cable's panel says how much (“+21′ of that is going through Y1”). While you lay a new cable, tap a crossing to send it through. A route on the floor takes its cables through any crossing it passes over by itself.

Drag either end of a selected crossing to stretch it: it grows or shrinks a whole section at a time and the other end stays put. The crossing's panel changes its size, switches ADA ramps on or off, adds or takes away sections, and shows each channel: what is in it and how full it is. It turns red when a cable is too fat for a channel or a channel is too full, and a feeder counts as five wires, one per channel. Tap a cable there, then a channel, to put it in that channel. The sections and their weight are in This setup pulls and in the Cable Report.

A crossing is drawn at its real size at every zoom, like a truck or a set piece. Zoomed far out on a big plot it is a thin yellow strip where it really sits; its channels and its tag appear as you zoom in, or when you select it.

Open the Cables menu and pick Rathole under Crossings, then tap the wall where the hole is — or drag the way the cables go through it. It's tagged RH1, RH2… If cables already cross that wall, a bar offers to run them through it; while you lay a new cable, tap the rathole to send it through. A floor, flown or under route goes through a rathole it passes by itself.

Its panel picks the size (2″, 3″, 4″, 6″, 8″ or 12″) and shows how full it is: the cables' cross-sections added up against the hole. It turns amber over 40% and red over 60% (the electrical code's limits for a conduit run and a short sleeve), or when a cable is wider than the hole. A feeder counts as its five wires.

Yes. At the top of a cable's Colour section, switch Type to Target: each cable then takes the colour of the camera, subject, mic or light it feeds. Use the eyes under the Cables layer to hide a family of cables, their tags or their names.

Yes — open Reports and pick the Cables tab. It lists every cable on the setup: what to pull (each type in stock lengths), the run sheet (from → to, route, run, pull and the length check), and anything past or close to its limit. Tap a cable in the list to find it on the plot. Print gives a PDF that starts with a cable map: the plot with everything but the cables faded and every cable tagged.

At the foot of the tab, .csv gives the run sheet as a spreadsheet, and Cable labels prints two labels per cable, one for each end — each says where the other end goes. Pick your sheet (Avery 5160, Avery 5167, or Avery L7160 on A4), say which label to start at if the sheet is half used, and tap Labels PDF.

Tap the image icon in the toolbar and pick a photo from your device. The picture lands on the canvas — drag to position, drag the corners to resize.

On a computer you can also drag pictures or a PDF straight onto the canvas — from Finder or your desktop. Each one lands where you drop it, and several land side by side. A PDF with more than one page asks which pages you want; each page becomes its own picture. Meant it as the ground plan? Tap Use as ground plan instead on the message that appears after the drop.

The Constrain proportions checkbox in the properties panel keeps width and height locked together while you resize. It's on by default.

Select the picture and tap Crop at the top of its properties panel — or right-click it (long-press on iPad) and choose Crop. A crop rectangle appears in place over the image with rule-of-thirds guides and 8 handles. Drag the handles inward to crop, or drag the inside of the rectangle to reposition.

Press Enter or tap Done to commit. Press Esc or Cancel to abort.

Yes. Select the picture and open its properties panel — the tools are in four sections you can fold away, and the plot changes as you drag:

• Adjust — brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, warmth and tint.
• Remove colour — tap Pick a colour on the picture, then tap the colour you want gone (a green screen, the white behind a logo) and drag away from where you tapped to take more of it. Only the area joined to where you tapped goes, so the white inside a logo stays; switch that colour to Everywhere to take it from the whole picture (on a Mac, hold ⌥ while you tap). Up to six colours, with Softness, Shrink edge and Remove spill (the green fringe a green screen leaves) to tidy the edge.
• Edges & shadow — rounded corners or a circle, feathered edges, a border in any colour and a drop shadow.
• Skew & distort — lean the picture with the two skew sliders, or tap Distort and drag any of its four corners — to lay a photo of an LED wall or a rug on the plot at an angle. Straighten puts it square again.

Flip ↔ and Flip ↕ sit next to Crop and Distort at the top of the panel.

Yes. Right-click (or long-press on iPad) the picture and choose Add to My Objects. It joins your Objects — up to 20, in every project — and you can place it again from the Objects tool whenever you need it. A logo keeps its transparency, an SVG stays sharp, and a cropped or edited picture goes in as you left it — colours removed, corners, border and all. Objects are part of CamPlot Max.

Tap the T icon in the toolbar and tap on the canvas. A text box appears — double-tap or use the properties panel to type your label.

Eight box shapes are available — rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, hexagon, diamond, star, plus more. A new text box grows as you type.

Paragraphs wrap to the box. Drag a corner of a text box (or type a width under Size & Rotation) and the words reflow to fit it — narrower means more lines, and the box grows down with them. It can't be made narrower than the longest word. Switch Wrap off in the same section to fit the box back to the text.

Alignment offers left, center, right and justify, which lines the words up with both edges of the box (the last line of each paragraph stays on the left).

Yes. The font picker shows the system fonts (Avenir, Arial, Georgia, etc.) plus any custom fonts you've added. To add custom fonts, drop the .woff2 files into the /fonts/ folder on your CamPlot deploy and add an entry to /fonts/manifest.json.

Each font name in the picker renders in its own typeface, so you can see what it looks like before picking.

The pen icon in the toolbar lets you draw freehand strokes — call out a path, mark a hot zone, sketch in a quick blocking note. Tap the pen again to open its config (color, weight, stylus-only).

Use the eraser icon next to the pen to remove individual strokes. Click the eraser icon a second time to deactivate it.

Use the measure tool (ruler icon). Tap two points on the canvas and you'll get a line with the real distance read out alongside it, in your scale reference units. Measurements live on the Annotations layer — hide that layer in your final export if you don't want them in the deliverable.

CamPlot has seven built-in layers, from bottom to top:

1. Ground Plan — the venue background
2. Set — set pieces, shapes, text labels
3. Pictures — inserted photos
4. Subjects — talent positions
5. Lights — lighting fixtures
6. Cameras — every camera
7. Annotations — pen strokes and measurements

The Layers panel sits at the bottom of the Setups sidebar (there's also a Layers button in the top bar — on phones it opens as a bottom sheet). Each row has an eye icon (visibility) on the right and a lock icon next to it.

You can also create your own custom layers (add/rename/delete rows at the top of the stack) and assign any element to them from its properties panel.

Yes — expand the Cameras layer row (chevron after the name) for two extra eyes: Details Boxes and FOV Cones. Handy for a clean plot view without hiding the cameras themselves. Other layers can be made expandable per element type in Settings → Layers.

To turn the cone off for one camera, use the Cone switch in its Field of View heading. To turn them all off or on, use FOV cones in Setup Options (tap an empty spot on the plot). Or tap the Cameras layer's name: its panel has FOV cones on/off and FOV cones opacity. These switches are saved with the plot and print the way they show; the eyes are just your view.

Settings → Layers lets you reorder the render stacking (↑↓ per layer), choose which layers appear in the list, and change which element types belong to which layer. This config is per device.

Tap the eye icon on that layer's row. The eye becomes a slashed eye and the layer name dims. Anything on that layer becomes invisible AND uninteractable — you can't accidentally select or drag-select hidden elements.

A locked layer stays visible on screen but its elements can't be selected, moved, or edited. Useful when you want to keep the ground plan visible while you arrange cameras without ever bumping it. Tap the lock icon to toggle.

Yes. Expand the layer (the chevron after its name): each kind of element listed there has its own lock beside its eye. Under Cables, All cables locks every cable at once and each family (video, audio, power…) has its own lock. Lock the cables and you can drag a box round the hubs without picking up a single cable.

Yes. Tap a layer's name in the Layers list and its panel opens: opacity and rotation, then a block for each kind of thing on it — cameras, subjects, lights, mics.

Size moves them all together and keeps their differences: a big camera stays bigger than a small one. All the same size makes them one size; turn it off and the differences come back, at whatever size you have dragged them to since. Below that: tag size (Auto puts it back on automatic), B for bold, white or black tag text, keep tag text upright, the details boxes (text size, show / hide) and anchor details boxes (each box stays exactly where it is now). Lights get Lights on; mics get Listening cones. A switch that is half on means some are and some aren't — a tap turns them all on.

Locked items always stay as they are — a locked camera, a locked row inside the layer, or the whole layer locked. Each change is one undo. The same blocks are in Setup Options (everything on the setup) and when several things are selected (what you picked).

Yes. Expand the layer and tap a row's name — All cables, one cable family like Power, FOV Cones, Details Boxes, Listening Cones… The row is highlighted, a dashed box shows what it holds, and its own panel has an Opacity slider, its eye and lock, and Select them.

Like a layer's opacity, a row's is for this setup and travels with the project; the layer's own opacity still applies on top. The percentage shows beside the row in the list, and back at 100% it is gone. A double tap on a row still selects everything it holds.

No. Layer visibility and locks are per setup, per device. Hide Lights in Setup 1 and they're still visible in Setup 2. Your hide/lock state never travels with the saved data, so people you share with always see everything regardless of what you've hidden locally — and their own eyes are theirs: a viewer or collaborator hiding a layer changes nothing on your screen.

Yes — exports respect current layer visibility. If you hide Annotations and then export to PDF, your pen strokes and measurements won't be in the file. This is useful for delivering a clean final version while keeping your working notes intact.

Use the eye and lock buttons on the Layers header row — they toggle visibility / locks for all layers at once.

Select any camera or subject, then in the right-side panel find the Movement section. Tap + Add position to place the next stop, then tap where you want it to go on the canvas. Repeat for multi-stop paths.

When you have at least one movement position, the play button in the top bar becomes active. Tap it and your blocking animates in real time.

The Movement Path tool (the arrow in the left toolbar, P) adds a position to a camera or subject: tap the camera or subject, then tap where it goes next. Add more stops with + Add position in its Movement section, and drag the blue dot on a segment to bend it.

A path is drawn in its camera's or subject's colour — change the colour in its panel and the path follows. To make every path thicker, use Settings → Workspace → Movement Paths.

Yes. In the Movement section for any element, you can pick from three playback modes:

• One-way — runs through the path once and stops at the end
• Loop — at the end, jumps instantly back to the start and runs again
• Bounce — at the end, reverses along the same arcs back to the start, then forward again — useful for walk-and-talk blocking

Yes. Step to any position along a path and rotate the camera or change its lens/FOV distance — the rotation and framing are saved to that position. On playback the camera eases between them, so it can pan, push in, and zoom while it travels.

To aim a camera at a subject at every position — a 360° track around someone — tap the camera's magnet (next to Shot Type), tap the subject, then step through the path once with the ›› button on the play bar. Each position is saved facing the subject, and during playback the camera keeps turning to face them.

Positions can also linger for extra beats (set per position in the Movement list), and whole paths can be copied to another camera via right-click → Copy Path / Paste Path.

Right-click any setup (or long-press on touch) and choose Add to group ▸. You can pick an existing group or create a new one — useful for organizing by episode, day, or scene.

Setups in the same group cluster together under a bold header in the sidebar. Drag the small handle next to the group name to move the whole group at once. Drag a single setup between groups to reassign it. Setups with no group sit at the bottom.

Double-click a group header to rename it. Right-click a header to rename or delete (deleting a group puts its setups back into the ungrouped section).

If two or more setups happen at the same moment in time (think picture-in-picture, or a multi-stage simultaneous broadcast), mark them as simultaneous. Right-click a setup → Simultaneous with ▸ → pick or create a group.

Setups in the same simultaneous group get a small color dot on the right edge of their row in the sidebar. This affects how the Camera Report calculates totals for the whole show — simultaneous setups have their gear summed (because you need it all at once), while non-simultaneous setups share gear (because they don't run at the same time).

Tap the Roster icon in the top bar (between the toolbar and ground plans). Assign each camera letter a name and camera type — once per project.

From then on, tagging any camera with a letter fills in the right operator and rig (changing the tag re-fills them too). Update the roster and every plot in your project updates instantly.

Each letter can also have a color — tap the color dot on its row. Turn on Color cameras by letter at the top of the roster and every camera takes its letter's color automatically; the letter box in the roster tints to match.

The button beside the color dot is the letter's camera type (Standard, Ped, Jib, PTZ, Drone…). Pick one and every camera with that letter, on every setup, changes to it at once — Undo puts them back. A dimmed button shows the type the letter's camera model brings.

Right-click any setup → Hide. Hidden setups stay in your sidebar (greyed out) but don't appear when others view your shared link. Use this for drafts or alternates you're not ready to share. Hide doesn't affect Totals math — hidden setups are excluded from per-show calculations.

Inventory is a per-project list of the cameras, lenses, support and other accessories (monitors, transmitters, batteries — anything you track) you have available. It powers the search as you type camera details, the Totals in your Camera Report, and the Inventory panel's warnings when a plan needs more gear than you have.

Each item has an optional quantity. Leave the quantity blank to mark something as unlimited (handy for things like "Sticks" where you have plenty).

Tap the Inventory icon in the top bar (between Roster and Ground Plans). Four sections — Cameras, Lenses, Support, Other Accessories — each with a + button: search the catalogue or type any name. Tap an item to set how many you have.

You can also add gear by typing it directly into the camera properties panel. As you type, the list shows what's already in this project, names from your other projects, and matches from CamPlot's gear catalogue. Pick one, or keep exactly what you typed — anything brand new is added to the inventory automatically (with a quick confirmation toast).

The first time you open Inventory on an existing project, CamPlot pre-fills it with everything already on your plots — no manual setup required.

CamPlot canonicalizes spellings to keep your inventory clean. If you've already added "FX6" to inventory and you type "fx6" or "FX 6" on a camera, it auto-corrects to the canonical "FX6" — so the Totals math doesn't double-count the same item under different spellings. Case and whitespace are normalized; the canonical spelling is whatever you used the first time. If duplicate rows ever sneak in, the inventory detects and merges them automatically the next time it opens.

Each item shows in use / in stock. In use is the peak number of that item in play at one time across your setups (simultaneous setups add together); stock is how many you have — ∞ means you haven't counted it. The small blocks (a bar once you have more than 16) fill as the item is used: red means you're short, and the card says by how many. The tiles at the top total each list, and the Short filter shows only what you need more of.

Tap an item to see where its peak happens and which cameras use it, change the count with − and +, rename it everywhere, or remove it.

Italic items were added automatically because something on a plot references them — they disappear on their own when nothing uses them anymore (great for typos). Items you add by hand, or give a stock number, stay put.

The Model, Lens and Support fields search as you type: this project's inventory first, then names from your other projects, then CamPlot's catalogue — hundreds of cameras (cinema, broadcast systems, PTZ, POV, action cams, drones), every lens in the lens catalogue, and tripods, heads, pedestals, dollies, jibs, cranes, gimbals, Steadicams, handheld rigs, saddles and mounts. Short codes work: fx9, fr7, 4300, 2575, sticks.

Use the arrow keys and Enter, or tap. Enter only picks a catalogue item when what you typed is exactly its name or code; otherwise it keeps what you typed — a note like "sticks on platform" is fine.

Yes. Build (called Support until October 2026) on a camera takes up to three items — legs, a head, a spreader — and each counts in the inventory on its own. Other accessories (just below Build) takes up to eight: a monitor, a wireless transmitter, a focus kit. Tap × to remove one. The details box and the Camera Report show them joined with "+".

At the top of the Inventory panel tap Report or Export, or use Export → Inventory. Report opens a preview of the pages first — zoom in, switch the by-setup page on or off — with Print, Save PDF and Send (your phone or computer’s share sheet, with the PDF attached). In the iPhone and iPad apps, Print opens the share sheet, where Print is. The PDF report is laid out like the Camera Report, with your project title and the CamPlot stamp: totals, a red box of anything short and where it peaks, every item with need, have and the cameras using it, and a by-setup page you can switch off. The spreadsheet (.csv) opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.

Yes. Tap ⤢ at the top of the Inventory panel: the whole inventory opens full screen as a sheet — every item a row, grouped by list (cables too), with what you have, spares, how many each setup uses (the busiest is lit), who supplies it and the cameras using it. Filter it (Short, In use, Rented, Not used), pick lists, or search for an item or a camera.

Tap Edit to type in it. Return moves down, Tab across, Delete clears a count, ⌘D fills down, and a column copied from Excel or Google Sheets pastes straight in. Renaming an item renames it on every camera, on every setup. Add or remove items at the bottom of each list; the sheet has its own Undo and Redo. Export has the spreadsheet (.csv), the inventory file and the report. On an iPhone the item names stay on the left as you scroll, and a tap on a count opens it to type.

Yes, on a project with camera details turned on. The gear you type in a camera's details gets its own lists after the four: Optics (matte box, filters), Lens control, Monitors, Signal, Power, Media and Audio & comms. A list only shows when a camera uses it or your report shows that detail.

A count at the front or the end is read as a quantity: 4× CFexpress B 1TB or CFexpress A 960GB x2. “N/A”, “None”, “Vendor provides” and “Via the fiber” aren't gear and aren't counted. Lens 2 counts in Lenses; Key support and Additional support, when a camera has them, count in Support instead of its Build.

With sources on (Settings → Details & Reports), each item is split into ours, rented and crew — only ours is checked against your stock, so rented or crew gear is never “short”. Anything with no source yet is counted as ours. Open an item and tap Ours, Rented or Crew to set who supplies it on every camera that uses it (Undo takes it back), or add spares (they go on the pull sheet). In the full-screen inventory, Edit makes the Who supplies it column a cell you can set the same way — tap it, or type the code’s letter.

In the Inventory panel tap By vendor (with sources on). The gear is grouped by who supplies it, at the busiest setup: Rented — the rental order, one per rental house when your cameras rent from more than one (each camera picks its house in Vendors; add houses there or in Settings → Details & Reports); Ours — the pull sheet, what leaves the shop, spares included; Crew brings it — the crew list; and No source yet, with buttons to set them all at once (Undo takes it back). Each list exports as a PDF or a CSV.

Yes — the cables you draw on the plot. The Cables section has a card for each kind of cable with the stock lengths it takes to pull every run, the same pull lengths as the Cable Report, at the busiest setup (setups in one simultaneous group add up). Type what you own of each length under Ours (leave it blank for no count) and anything you're short of says so in red. Add Spares of one length; “on the truck” is the footage that leaves the shop.

Wireless links are counted as RF links, with the cameras they come from. Hubs & crossings counts the junction boxes, stage boxes, switches, RF racks, antennas, distros, generators and crossing sections; the truck, the village and the venue's own boxes and power are where runs end, so they are listed but not counted as gear. Runs set to In the venue aren't pulled. The pull sheet and the inventory report include them.

On a project with camera details, the inventory compares each camera's Video transport with the cables drawn to it: a camera that says fiber (SMPTE, SilverBack, tactical, FIDO…) with no fiber run, says triax with no triax run, or says RF with a fiber run gets a line. Draw it from CAM n starts the Cables tool at that camera with the right cable; Ignore hides the line until the camera's Video transport changes. Setups without cables aren't checked.

Yes — tap Import… in the Inventory panel. Choose one of your other projects, or a file: an inventory file someone exported for you (Export… → Inventory file), any CamPlot project file, or a spreadsheet (.csv, .tsv or a plain list) such as a rental house's order. CamPlot finds the count and item columns and the section headings, matches names to the catalogue, and sorts each line into Cameras, Lenses, Support or Other Accessories.

Nothing changes until you've reviewed it: untick anything you don't want, tap a list label to move an item, and choose what happens to items you already have — Add counts, Use theirs or Keep mine. Totals and page headers are left out and listed. Undo takes the whole import back.

Some models are a camera type of their own, so picking one also sets the camera's type on the plot: drones become Drone, PTZ cameras PTZ, GoPros, Osmo Actions, Insta360s and POV minicams POV, and the DJI Ronin 4D and Osmo Pocket 3 Gimbal. It only happens to a camera that is still Standard, and only when you pick or finish typing the model. A toast says so, and Undo takes it back.

A type you choose yourself always wins — the model never changes it — and so does a type set for that camera's letter in the Roster.

If you place more cameras of a certain type (or use more of a certain lens / support item) than you've set as the quantity in your inventory, the Camera Report's Totals section flags it in red italics. Example:

5 × FX6 short 2 from inventory

This catches accidental over-allocation before you find out on set.

Open the Camera Report from the top bar. At the bottom of the report, the Totals section shows counts of each camera type, lens, and support item.

The Setup/Project toggle switches between two views:

• Setup — gear used in the currently active setup only.
• Project — peak concurrent gear needed across the entire project. CamPlot looks at all non-hidden setups, sums up the gear within each simultaneity group, and reports the maximum at any single moment. This is the number to give your rental house.

Toggle "Show breakdown" to see exactly which setups (or simultaneity groups) drive the peak count.

Ground plans are the underlying drawings of your venue — stage layouts, furniture, seating, markings — that you draw (or import) once and reuse across all setups in a project.

Tap the Ground Plans icon in the top bar to manage them: draw one in edit mode, or import a PDF or image of the production designer's plan. Assign a ground plan to any setup, then position, scale, rotate, and flip it per plot, and set its opacity so it sits quietly under your cameras.

The Ground Plan layer is locked by default. Unlock it in Layers and you can drag, scale, and rotate it — or edit its elements — right on the plot; changes to the ground plan itself show up on every setup that uses it. Double-click a ground-plan element to open the full editor.

Yes. A Scale Area is a framed part of the setup with its own scale — say your truck compound at 4× while the stadium stays at the plot's scale, so the trucks are big enough to read. Everything drawn at true size inside it (sized trucks and generators, set pieces, booms, cable crossings, measurements, cable lengths) draws and measures at that scale; cameras, subjects, hubs, text and shapes keep their size, and nothing moves.

Make one with the Scale Area button under Measure (drag a box), or select what should be in it, right-click and choose Make a Scale Area Around These. It starts at 2×; pick 1×–8× in its panel, type any scale up to 20×, or tap Set from a known distance, drag between two points you know and type the real length. The setup needs a scale first (Measure → Set Scale, or a scaled ground plan).

The area is labelled on the page and in every export: a title strip with its letter, name, scale and its own scale bar, and a Plot scale bar in the far corner. Under Show → Label you can swap the strip for a small badge (just the letter and the scale) or take the label off altogether — with None, nothing on the page says that part is drawn bigger, so measure it with care. Drag the strip (or the frame's edge) to move the area with everything in it; the handles change the frame. A cable from inside to outside has no length until you type it (Cable → Set length), and a measurement across the edge reads “across a scale area”. Remove the area and everything inside goes back to the plot's scale.

The snip tool captures a rectangle of your canvas as an image element — grab a corner of a setup and drop it anywhere, or send it to the Ground Plan layer to reuse across setups. Great for building composite overviews.

Yes — the table tool drops a real grid on the canvas: add/remove rows and columns, merge cells, size row/column ranges, per-cell text and bold, border and background colors, an optional title, plus copy/paste of cell blocks between tables. Perfect for shot lists or schedules living right on the plot.

Tap the Share icon in the top bar. Toggle sharing on and you'll get a link you can copy and send via text, email, or Slack. Anyone with the link can view your plots (view-only mode — they can't edit).

Viewers see real-time updates as you change the plot. They don't need an account to view.

Tap the Export icon in the top bar. Choose a single setup or the whole project. You can export as:

• PDF — properly formatted for landscape or portrait, single or multi-page.
• JPEG — a single image of the current setup, good for quick sharing.

Under each export, switches choose what goes on the page — CamPlot remembers them on this device:

• Project name and Setup title — a heading above the plot. In a project PDF the heading also reads “Setup 2 of 4”.
• Off-canvas elements — anything placed past the canvas edges (movement paths, notes in the margin) is included, and the page grows to fit it.
• Report — each setup's Camera, Lighting and Audio report pages follow its plot (PDF only). In the app the PDF button builds first and then reads Save PDF — tap it again to share.

The stamp along the bottom of every export — and of the Camera, Lighting, Audio and Inventory reports — ends with a version: the date and time it was made. By default it reads v2610081430 (8 Oct 2026, 14:30). If your team writes it as an “as of” date, choose A/O 10-08-26 14:30 in Settings → Exports; the file name follows (…_AO_10-08-26_1430.pdf). The choice is saved to your account.

Enterprise accounts can also change the branding on everything they export in Settings → Exports → Branding: CamPlot (as above), None (no CamPlot mark, no web address, and no “CamPlot” in file names) or Our logo — upload a PNG and it takes the CamPlot mark’s place, scaled to fit. A PNG with a transparent background looks best.

To bring projects back in, use Import: Project takes one project, Multiple Projects takes every project in an All Projects file.

Yes — the round button below the top-right corner hides every panel and bar so the plot fills the screen (viewers get it too). While full screen: the ☰ button next to the setup title opens a setups list, the ‹ › buttons step through setups, and creators get a floating dockable toolbar (pick its tools in Settings → Workspace). Tap the button again to exit.

Tap the Camera Report icon in the top bar — a formatted summary of every camera in the current setup: letter, operator, camera type, lens, support, and shot notes, ready to print or share with your DIT.

The report auto-refreshes when you switch setups, and the Cameras tab highlights lens/support changes versus the previous setup in the same group — spot re-rigs at a glance. Printing uses whichever tab you're on.

The Cameras tab opens on Essentials — two lines a camera: the model, where it is, the lens and the build. Tap a camera to see all its lines, or switch to All details (the switch is remembered). Export holds the PDFs and the spreadsheet; on Lights, Audio, Cables and Totals, Export PDF prints that tab. The panel is for reading — Edit and Import open the report full screen.

Tap the lock icon in the top bar to freeze the plot. Elements can't be moved or edited while locked. Use it when you're presenting your plot, or when you want to zoom and pan around without accidentally nudging things.

A scouting viewfinder built into CamPlot: point your iPhone or iPad at the set and see the frame through any real camera body (Alexa, FX6, Komodo, and two dozen more) or a film gauge (8mm, 16mm, 35mm, 65mm, each in its standard and super gates) at any focal length, in that camera's own sensor modes (4.6K Open Gate, 4.5K LF 2.39, Full Frame Crop 5K, Super 16 — whatever that body actually scans), with 1.33, 1.66, 16:9, 1.85, 2.35 or 2.39 frame lines and a massive LUT library — more than 230 cinema looks in nine packs, applied as true 3D LUTs on the GPU, alongside CamPlot's own Pop, Stylistic and Cinematic and as many of your own .cube files as the phone will hold. Any library look can be exported for the camera you're shooting, already converted to its log.

The full finder comes with CamPlot Plus and CamPlot Max (CamPlot Crew — Free opens it in preview mode), and capture runs in an installed app on iPhone / iPad — either CamPlot Creator or the standalone CamPlot Viewfinder. It works in landscape with the camera on the left; open it any other way and it'll ask you to rotate.

Two ways:

• The viewfinder button in the top bar opens a panel with Capture and your Library.
• From a camera on your plot: open its Field of View section and tap Director's Viewfinder. The finder becomes that camera — its Camera Type matches to the real sensor, the lens from Shot Details sets the zoom range, and your sensor mode and frame lines carry over.

Inside: a stack of widgets on the left. Camera, Sensor, Aspect, LUT, Textures and Display all open the same reel — tap one, or touch and hold it, and the reel comes out under your finger: drag up and down through the list, left and right through the shelves. Camera is every body grouped by brand; Sensor is that camera's real scan windows under their full names (the widget plate carries the short form, e.g. 4.6KOG; bodies with only one window, like the FX6, stay dimmed); Aspect is the shapes you have turned on in Settings → General → Aspect Ratios; Display holds the five overlay menus — markers, mask, crosshair, grid and false colour; LUT is the whole look library. Sensor and Aspect have one shelf each, so on those there is no left and right. Then Light (in the app: tap for on/off, hold and slide left/right for brightness) and Sun & Moon Path. Which widgets appear depends on the capture mode you're in. Settings is the gear in the top-right corner, next to the close button, and the ? button beside it opens this manual. Settings is organized into sections — General, Photo Mode, Video Mode, Exposure Meter, Monitor Calibrator, Groundplan Scanner, Sun Path — tap one and its panel slides in beside the list. Tapping outside the panels closes them. The lens gear rides the frame's top-right corner (drag it left or right like the gear ring on a lens; each lens clicks into place under the pointer) and the zoom wheel wraps around the shutter — drag it like the iOS camera dial. Double-tap the image for full screen: the frame maximizes, the readouts move inside it and the widget rail parks off the left edge — swipe in from outside the left edge to bring the widgets over the image, swipe them back out to the left when you're done. At 1.85 and wider the lens gear parks off the right edge the same way: swipe in from the right edge where it sat, pick your lens, then swipe the image to the right to put it away. Double-tap again to come back; that is the only way out, so nothing sits on the picture. Full screen keeps two corner chips: Settings in the corner and the Library beside it.

In the app, tap the image to focus there — a one-shot autofocus at that exact point — and hold for half a second to lock focus (the FOCUS control shows it held; tap that control to hand focus back). Hold the FOCUS control itself and slide to pull focus, like pulling to a mark. A lens you haven't calibrated shows a small close↔far gauge instead of distances.

Lens coverage and extenders. If the lens on the gear covers less than the camera's frame — Super 35 glass on a full-frame body, a B4 zoom on Super 35 — the finder darkens everything outside its image circle, the way the real camera would vignette, and says above the frame how much CROP clears it (Super 35 glass on full frame 16:9: about 1.32×, which the control reaches at 1.35×). Glass made for a much smaller sensor is past what CROP can reach — a B4 zoom on full frame needs about 3.75× — so the tag asks for a smaller sensor window instead. A lens with a built-in extender shows a small 1.5× or 2× button on the left of the lens gear: tap it to throw the extender in (the focal and the image circle grow by that factor), tap again to take it out.

Broadcast lenses. The lens Catalogue carries Canon and Fujinon broadcast zooms — 2/3″ B4 box and portable lenses, and 1/2″ and 1/3″ ones — under their model names (UJ122x8.2B, UA46x9.5BERD…); search a model, “b4” or “2/3”. On the lens rail they read the way crews write them: Canon 122x8.2. To type your own, add a lens under My Lenses and pick Broadcast: enter the zoom ratio and the wide end as the barrel says it (22 × 7.6), and the row shows how it reads. Every lens you type has COVERS — the format its image circle covers, which is what the vignette uses (Auto reads it from the name) — and zooms have EXT for a built-in extender (None, 1.2×, 1.4×, 1.5× or 2×).

Readings sit in two rows, and the row tells you what you can touch. Below the frame are the ones you read — level, compass, white balance, lens. Above the frame are the ones you set. As each of those arrives you'll hold and drag it up or down to change it, and hold it still to switch what it's showing.

Yes. Pick an anamorphic lens and the finder shows the unsqueezed picture: the same focal length, across a frame as much wider as the squeeze makes it — what you see on a monitor with de-squeeze on. A 2× 50mm on a 4:3 Super 35 window at 2.39 frames about as wide as a 28mm spherical lens, with the 50's height.

Anamorphics from the lens Catalogue carry their squeeze already (the violet badge: 2×, 1.8×, 1.5×, 1.3×). For your own glass, add it under My Lenses and set its squeeze beside the millimetres (SPH is spherical). A lens from a project's inventory is read from its name, so write the squeeze into it: "Hawk V-Lite 50mm 2x". The lens rail shows it, and so does the info line on your photos (50mm 2× ANA).

The frame follows the sensor window and aspect you pick, as it would on the camera: a 2× on a 16:9 window delivering 16:9 crops the extra width away. For the classic scope look, pick a 4:3 or anamorphic window and 2.39.

To see the whole desqueezed picture — no frame lines, what the camera's own monitor shows — pick SENSOR on the Aspect reel. It is the window itself, as wide as the squeeze makes it (a 1.8× on a 3:2 open gate is 2.59:1), and with a spherical lens it is simply the window's own shape.

Capture modes. Swipe the capture button up or down to spin through them, or tap one of the neighbours to jump straight to it. Photo is always home — the finder opens there every time.

Below Photo: Exposure Meter and Monitor Calibrator. Above it: Video and Groundplan Scan. Each mode brings its own widgets in the left rail and its own readings around the frame.

Video, Groundplan Scan, the Exposure Meter and the Monitor Calibrator all work now (see below). They all need an installed app — CamPlot Creator or the standalone CamPlot Viewfinder — because they use camera controls a web browser doesn't expose.

Swipe the capture button up once from Photo to the red stop. Video is Photo plus recording — the same lenses, sensor windows, frame lines, LUTs and zoom wheel — and the graded look on screen is baked into the file: what you see is what records. The take is the frame: it is cut to exactly the lens, aspect and crop you see, the way a photo is — a 2.35 take in 4K comes out 3840 × 1634. (Older versions of the app recorded the camera's whole picture; update if yours still does.) On iPhones that support it (15 Pro and newer), Apple Log — and Apple Log 2 on the newest Pros — sits at the top of the LUT list: pick it and the take records as a true 10-bit log file for grading later, with the monitor showing the flat log image — a log take keeps the camera's whole picture rather than the frame; pick any LUT to go back to the graded pipeline.

Tap the red button to start; a timer appears at the top of the frame; tap again to stop. The finished take saves straight to your camera roll in a "CamPlot Videos" album (never the CamPlot library). The first recording asks for microphone access — takes record with sound. You can't record while you're on a call: the call holds the microphone, so recording is refused until it ends, and a call arriving mid-take stops the take rather than quietly losing its sound.

Stabilize is a rail widget (it takes Sun Path's slot in this mode) — tap to cycle Off → On → Cine → Sport. The monitor always stays live: with Cine or Sport picked, the screen shows steady On-level stabilization while the heavier future-frame smoothing runs in the background on the recording itself — so the file comes out smoothed and the view never lags or jolts when you hit record. The shutter reads as an angle and steps through the cinema stops — 45°, 90°, 120°, 180°, 240° and the rest of the wheel, including 172.8°. Frame rate (default 23.98), resolution (1080p / 4K) and codec (HEVC / H.264) live in the viewfinder's Settings under Video Recording — the preview runs at the chosen frame rate, like a real camera.

Needs the CamPlot iPhone app and a CamPlot Plus or CamPlot Max account.

Swipe the capture button down once from Photo to the yellow stop. The phone's own auto-exposure becomes a light meter: its live ISO, shutter and aperture collapse into one scene EV, and four dials — ISO, T-stop, Shutter and ND — describe the camera you're metering for. The lens picker and zoom work here just like Photo, and a tap on the image focuses.

Unlocked dials chase the light by themselves, in priority order. Drag a dial up or down to set it yourself — that locks it, and the others redistribute. Tap a dial to lock or unlock it. The toggles next to EV switch what each dial speaks: T-stops ↔ f-stops, shutter angle ↔ speed, ND hard glass ↔ variable. The READING at the bottom right always shows the gap — ±0.0 when you're there, or how many stops over or under. Lock all four and it behaves like a classic meter: you turn the knobs, it shows the error.

Each dial wears a small green number in its corner — its place in that order, 1 being the first dial the meter moves. The METERING widget in the left rail sets it: hold and drag (or tap to park the list) across three shelves, PRIORITY 1ST, 2ND and 3RD, each offering only the dials not already placed — the fourth place is whatever is left. You can also reorder them in Settings → Exposure Meter.

Tap the yellow button to HOLD a reading while you walk it over to camera; tap again to go live. While it's holding, the button turns amber and breathes, the zoom wheel and the other modes' buttons give way, and a green circle appears underneath it — wearing Photo mode's own iris, because taking a picture of a held reading is a capture, and breathing the same way. Nothing can be swiped away by accident while a reading is up. Press it and you get a photo of the moment with the four dials burned into it, drawn exactly as they stand on the capture frame — the reading is why you took the frame, so it is what the file carries. The hold then lets go by itself: the meter goes live and the button is back to HOLD, ready for the next reading. The METERING widget's last shelf, METER MODE, switches between Average and Spot — in Spot, tap anywhere on the image to meter that point (the tap focuses there too). Scrub the EV readout to bias the reference up to ±3 stops; tap it to zero. Needs the CamPlot iPhone app and a CamPlot Plus or CamPlot Max account.

Swipe the capture button down twice from Photo to the colour-bar stop. Put a monitor in front of the phone showing a grayscale or colour-bar pattern from its own source (a deck, a camera, a test-pattern generator — CamPlot doesn't generate the pattern). Drag the LO box onto a near-black patch and the HI box onto a near-white one. Then tap the capture button to lock the camera: exposure, white balance (to daylight), focus and colour space are all pinned so nothing adapts under the reading. The LIVE tag on each card turns into readings.

Each card is a two-point grayscale readout the way a pro monitor's menu thinks: LOW · BIAS for the dark patch, HIGH · GAIN for the bright one, and a needle for R, G and B on each. Centred is on target; a needle to the right with a + number means the monitor shows too much of that colour at that level — turn that channel's trim down until the needle centres. The three always balance around zero because trims move colour, not brightness; set brightness with the EV pill before you lock. Set EV so the HI patch doesn't read CLIPPING and the LO patch doesn't read TOO DARK; ON AN EDGE means a box is straddling two patches.

This is guitar-tuner guidance, not a colorimeter. A phone camera can't measure absolute colour, but it is repeatable and it reads the relationship between channels well, which is what a trim needs. To cancel the phone's own colour bias, lock on a monitor you already trust and tap Zero now in Settings → Monitor Calibrator — from then on readings are relative to that monitor, per phone and lens. The TARGET widget cycles your reference white points (D65 · Rec.709 is built in; add others in Settings), and SHOW switches between both cards, Low only or High only. Gamma is stored with a target but not measured yet.

Needs an installed app (CamPlot Creator or CamPlot Viewfinder, on the current build) and a CamPlot Plus or CamPlot Max account.

Swipe the capture button up twice from Photo to reach Groundplan Scan (the blue stop), then tap it. Apple's room scanner takes over the screen and walks you around the room; tap Done when you've covered it.

The finished plan comes back inside the capture frame, with its real dimensions along the bottom. The left rail turns into scan tools:

• Furniture — taps through Pieces (every table, chair, sofa, cabinet and appliance it recognised, drawn as the closest CamPlot set piece at the size it measured), Boxes (Apple's plain outlines) and None.
• Rulers — show or hide the dimension lines along the edges of the plan.
• Rotate — tap it once to arm it, then drag left and right across the plan to turn it. It moves gently on purpose, so you can land on the exact angle you want rather than jumping in steps. Tap again when you're done.

The rulers stay square to the screen while the plan turns under them — they're a scale reference, so they always read the true width and depth of what's drawn, whatever angle you've set.

A room that has just come back is named for you — Scan 001, Scan 002 — in the panel where the lens picker sits, and you can rename it right there: that name is what its Library row, its exports and its ground plan all use. SAVE keeps it in Past Scans and goes back to scanning; DISCARD throws it away. Neither of those appears on a scan you have reopened — that decision was made the first time. To Project drops it straight into the ground plan library, already correctly scaled — no measuring needed — and Camera Roll saves it as a picture.

Every scan you keep gets a row on the Library's Scans shelf, drawn in the look you last left it in, where it can be renamed, exported as a 2D plan or a 3D file, deleted, or reopened with these same tools.

Needs a LiDAR iPhone or iPad (the Pro models), iOS 16 or newer, an installed app (CamPlot Creator or CamPlot Viewfinder), and a CamPlot Plus or CamPlot Max account. On a phone without LiDAR the mode explains itself rather than failing.

Yes. A scan turns each thing it recognised into the closest CamPlot set piece — a three-seat sofa, a dining table with its chairs facing it, a counter run with the sink and dishwasher in it, a washer by the wall — at the size it measured. Tap any piece on the plan and a panel opens:

• the other versions of that piece (Loveseat, 3-seat, Sectional…), and Change to for the things it could also be — a sofa can become an armchair or an ottoman;
• a search over every set piece in CamPlot;
• All 6 like it — change every matching piece at once, like a table's six chairs;
• As scanned box to show that one as Apple's plain outline again, and Remove to take it off the plan (Bring back returns it).

Color decides the look: White draws each piece in CamPlot's own look, Tinted fills it with the colour the camera saw. Your changes stay with the scan, go with it into a project, and in CamPlot Creator every piece is an ordinary set piece with its own panel.

Hold the capture button in Photo mode and it counts down before taking the frame. The number runs in the middle of the frame — green, then red for the last three seconds, with the capture button's own pulse following it — and the button turns to CANCEL: tap it, or hold it again, to stop. A plain tap still shoots straight away, so nothing about the ordinary shutter changes.

Settings → Photo Mode sets the length — 3, 5, 10 or 20 seconds — and turns the sounds on or off. With sound on you get a beep for each of the last three seconds and a shutter click as the shot is taken, which is what tells you it has gone when you're the one standing in the frame. The sounds play on a timed capture only, never on an ordinary tap, and like any sound from a web page they follow the phone's ring/silent switch.

Yes, up to 90 seconds. In Photo mode, hold the SHUTTER readout in the top row and slide it past one second: the ladder keeps going — 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, 60 and 90 seconds. Pick one and press the capture button.

The iPhone sensor cannot physically hold an exposure longer than a second, so CamPlot does what the dedicated night apps do: it takes that many one-second frames and adds them together in linear light on the GPU. The result is a real long exposure — stars trail, water goes to silk, a car's tail lights draw a line.

Put the phone on something. There is no stabilisation that survives thirty seconds handheld, let alone ninety.

Past about forty seconds the stars trail. That is the sky moving, not a fault — the long rungs are for trails, moving water, cloud and light painting. For pinpoint stars, stay at 30 or below. And on the longer rungs, set ISO by hand: left on auto, the stack aims at the brightness already on the screen, and over a minute that lands on the lowest ISO the sensor has.

While it runs, the screen shows the exposure building — the picture is the sum so far, so you can watch it arrive. Over the frame: the seconds counted up, and an amber bar filling along an engraved scale so you can see how much of the exposure is in the can without reading the number. The capture button reads CANCEL — press it again to stand the stack down. Between shots the preview stays at a normal, usable exposure so you can still frame; the long exposure is made when you press the button, like a bulb setting with exposure simulation off. Lock ISO before you start if you want the brightness of the stack pinned.

It needs an installed app — CamPlot Creator or the standalone CamPlot Viewfinder — because the stacking happens natively, and the rungs are hidden on Apple Log, where adding frames this way is not meaningful.

Tap the shutter, review, then Save:

• The full-quality picture goes to your Photos, into a CamPlot album in the installed app or through the share sheet on the web.
• The app keeps the readings — camera, sensor window, aspect, lens, ISO, shutter, aperture, white balance, LUT, bearing, horizon, LiDAR distance, sun position, coordinates — on the device, alongside a thumbnail and a pointer back to the original. That is what the Library shows. Nothing is uploaded, it works with no signal, and it costs you no storage beyond the thumbnail.
• The picture itself carries those readings too, in its own metadata, so it stays self-describing anywhere it travels — Photos, Bridge, Lightroom, a folder on a drive. By default that includes where you were standing, so Photos can put the shot on its map; Settings → Shot Info → Save location in photos turns it off, and it is a separate question from whether the coordinates are printed on the picture, which is off unless you ask for it.
• Opened from a camera on a plot? That one frame attaches to the camera as its reference (a thumbnail in its FOV section), syncs with the project like any other project data, and the camera's FOV cone updates to the exact lens you framed.

Don't want the review step? In the installed app, Settings → Photo → Capture Review turns it off — the shutter just blinks and the frame goes straight into your CamPlot album, with the finder still live for the next one.

The chip in the top-right corner with the stacked frames — the number on it counts what has arrived since you last looked, like unread mail, and it clears once you close the Library. It opens full screen over the finder.

Everything the app has made is there, newest first and grouped by day, on three shelves — Photos, Videos and Scans. It opens on Photos. A capture made in the Exposure Meter lives on the Photos shelf, because that is what the file is, but it wears the meter's needle instead of a camera and carries the four dials burned into the picture.

Tap a tile — and the shot takes over the whole screen with its readings riding on top of it: the settings down the left, the exposure across the top, where and when along the bottom. One tap on the picture clears all of that away and one brings it back, so there is no separate full-screen mode to step through — this is it, with and without its instruments. Swipe sideways for the next shot and the one before; swipe up or down, or pinch together, to come back to the grid. A take plays where it sits, straight from your camera roll — nothing is duplicated.

Pinch open to zoom in. The picture grows about the point between your fingers, one finger then moves it around, and a double tap goes in and back out again. Zoomed in, pinching together zooms out first and only leaves for the grid once you are back at full frame. A take zooms the same way.

Scans are rows, not tiles. A room has a name, a size and things you do to it, which five-to-a-screen thumbnails said none of — so each one gets a line: its plan drawn in the look you last left it in (tinted or white, furniture or not, turned the way you turned it), its name, its dimensions and what is in it, and Rename, Export 2D, Export 3D and Delete without opening it at all. Tap the row and it opens in the Film Bin with its own tools live down the left — view, colour, furniture, rulers, rotate — and a tap on the plan, with nothing armed, clears them so you can look at the room properly, zoom into it, and move around it in 3D.

The Library follows the phone. Turn the phone and it turns with it — the grid goes to three columns held upright, and a vertical capture then fills the height. The viewfinder itself does not: it is held one way on purpose, because a camera body that re-laid-out every time you tipped it would be unusable. So the orientation lock lifts while the Library is open and comes back when you close it.

Pinch to resize the thumbnails. Pinch the grid and it goes five, four, three, two, one across, the way Photos does — the shot between your fingers holds its place on screen while the rest move and grow around it. A tap still opens a shot; from a single column, pinching out opens the one under your fingers.

Select lets you pick several at once to export as pictures, add to a shot list, or delete. Tap the tiles you want, or press and drag sideways across a row to take a run of them in one gesture — dragging up or down still scrolls the shelf. Deleting removes them from the Library and asks iOS whether to delete the pictures from your camera roll too; answer no and the pictures stay put.

Press and hold a tile — or right-click it with a mouse or trackpad — for a menu with Share, Add to shot list and Delete. The tile lifts and the menu opens beside it; tap anywhere else to put it away. In Select mode, right-clicking a picked tile does it to the whole selection.

Share hands the shot to the share sheet — AirDrop, Messages, Mail, Save to Files. A photo goes as its original file — the same one in your camera roll — and a take as its movie file (on an app older than 1.7.7, a photo goes as a full-size copy and a take is shared from Photos); on the web it is the Library's own preview. Add to shot list slides your shot lists out beside the menu: tap one to add the shot to it, or + New shot list to start one with it (shot lists come with CamPlot Plus). Delete takes the shot out of the Library, and iOS asks whether to take it out of your camera roll too (say no and nothing is deleted). The line under Delete says which it will be: Library + camera roll, or Library only when the app never had a pointer to the picture — then the app asks you itself first.

Shot lists is the second tab at the top of the Library. A list is a plan you fill in, not only a record of what you already took: it has a name, and every shot in it has a name of its own.

+ Row adds a line with no frame yet — “INT. KITCHEN — wide, morning” — that you name on the scout and shoot later. There are two ways to give it a picture: press + ADD SHOT on the empty row and the Library opens to choose from, and what you pick lands on that row; or go the other way with Add to list from an open shot or a multi-pick, which adds to the end. To reorder, drag a shot by the grip on its left — or press and hold anywhere on the row until it lifts, then move it. Taking a row out never touches the Library. A room scan cannot go in a list (the export is a document); a video contributes its frame.

Export PDF builds a contact sheet — four or five shots a page, each with its frame, its name, the rig it was shot on and its readings in four columns, plus a QR code that opens where it was shot in Apple or Google Maps (your choice, on the toggle beside the button). The type is real text, not a picture of text, so it stays sharp at any size, prints properly and can be searched and copied. In the app it comes in two taps: the button builds the document, then reads Save PDF — tap again and the share sheet opens. (iOS only opens one on a fresh tap, and rendering the pages spends the tap that started it.) On the web it just downloads. Export and Delete also sit on each list in the index, so you can send one on without opening it.

Looking at your own shots is free. Building lists and exporting the document is CamPlot Plus.

Open Settings (the gear, top-right of the finder) and pick your phone model (Settings → General → About → Model Name if unsure) — each model's real lens data drives the math, and CamPlot automatically switches to your phone's 0.5× or telephoto lens when the simulated focal calls for it.

Settings → General also chooses which mode the finder opens in (always the same one, or wherever you left it), which aspect ratios the Aspect widget taps through — 1.33, 1.66, 16:9, 1.85, 2.35, 2.39 and 2.67, with 1.33 and 2.67 off to start, so you can drop the shapes you never shoot and keep the tap short — and holds camera diagnostics. Photo Mode and Video Mode each have a Save current as default button — the camera, sensor window, aspect, LUT and lens you have up right now become what that mode opens with — plus a switch to reopen at last-used instead, and a list of the readouts with an on/off switch for each, separately for the standard and full-screen views. Video Mode can keep its own lens list (turn off Use Photo Mode's lens list). Exposure Meter holds the cascade priority order (drag the rows), Monitor Calibrator keeps your reference targets and the zero, and Groundplan Scanner sets whether furniture and rulers start shown when a scan comes back.

Android isn't supported yet. Android browsers don't tell apps which camera lens is which, so the finder can end up measuring focal lengths against the wrong lens — and a viewfinder that reports the wrong focal length is worse than none. We'd rather withhold it than ship one you can't trust. Frames captured on your other devices still show up in the viewfinder library on Android.

When you dial wider than your phone's widest lens, the center of the frame stays accurate and the outer band is stretched and grey-washed — that band is approximation, and the readout says so.

In the CamPlot iOS app your phone model is detected automatically, and Safari names the lenses itself — no picking needed (a manual pick always wins if you make one).

CamPlot ships a massive LUT library — more than 230 cinema looks — and they're all true 3D LUTs applied on the GPU, not a filter over the picture. They arrive in nine packs: Movie Inspired (looks built from well-known films), Filmic, Vintage, Contemporary, Expedition, Avant-Garde, Vibrant, Single-Tone and Influencers. CamPlot's own Pop, Stylistic and Cinematic come with it, and you can import as many of your own .cube files as the phone will hold.

All of it is on the LUT widget itself — you never have to open settings to reach a look, and there is no menu to tap through. There are two ways in, and both open the same reel. Touch the widget and hold: a reel comes out under your finger the moment it lands, and retracts the moment you let go — so keep holding it. Or tap the widget and the reel stays put: swipe through it at your leisure, and put it away by tapping the widget again or tapping anywhere outside it. While it is parked you can also just tap a look in the list to pick it, or tap a shelf name across the top to jump there — and the list stays up so you can compare. Either way, drag up and down through the looks on a shelf, left and right through the shelves — which move with your finger rather than snapping, so you can see where you are going before you get there, and lean onto the nearest shelf as you cross: pause anywhere between two and the tape settles onto one, so you never end up parked in the gap. The vertical accelerates the further you pull, so a short pull still steps look by look while a long one crosses a deep shelf like Movie Inspired in a single gesture; lift and grab again to fine-tune, and it picks up on the look you left it on. Each shelf is its own list and stops at its own ends: System is 709 and the Apple Log entries, and there is nothing above or below them. The shelves recycle — past the last one is System again — so neither direction ever dead-ends. Camera, Sensor, Aspect and Display use this same reel and the same two gestures, so learning it once covers the rail.

The reel has a ruler down each side of the corner: the vertical one is the looks, the horizontal one across the top carries the shelf names, with one pip per shelf underneath so you can see it is the fourth of thirteen. The shelves are System — Standard, the phone's own picture with nothing over it, and LOG, that same picture shown flat on the log curve for when you want to grade it yourself — then Favorites, Your LUTs, Main (CamPlot's three graded looks: Vibrant, Fashion and Cinema), then the nine packs — and Favorites and Your LUTs only appear once there is something on them, so a phone you have just installed on shows System, Main and the library. The picture regrades live at every stop, so you find a look by looking rather than by reading names — release to keep whatever is under the marker.

Favorites are a shelf of up to ten, right after System, for the looks you keep coming back to. It starts empty — there is no Favorites shelf at all until you put something on it. Fill them in Settings (the gear) → LUTs, which is favorites on the left and your own LUTs over the library on the right, with a search box across every pack. Nothing is locked behind them: the rest of the library is still one tap away on the widget. The whole thing is cached on the device, so it works with no signal.

Your own LUTs have no slot count any more — the last stop on the Your LUTs shelf is Import a .cube…: scrubbing past it does nothing, resting on it opens the file picker, so a LUT handed to you on set never means a trip into settings. Rename them, set which base each expects, favorite them, export them. When the phone genuinely runs out of room it says so rather than losing one quietly.

Yes — that's the point. Every library look has an Export button in Settings → LUTs (on the favorites rows, the library rows and any of your own LUTs), and the way you see it on the app is the way you get it on your cinema camera.

Here's the catch Export handles for you: a look is a Rec.709 LUT, and no cinema camera is feeding it Rec.709 — a Sony is putting out S-Log3, a Canon C-Log3, an ALEXA LogC4. Load a 709 look straight onto log footage and it falls apart. So when you tap Export, CamPlot asks which camera log you're shooting, then builds one LUT that does both jobs in the right order: the manufacturer's own log→709 conversion first, your look second (the same two-node chain a colourist would build in Resolve, never the reverse).

You can pick from 18 log formats across ten manufacturers: Apple Log and Apple Log 2 · ARRI LogC3 and LogC4 · Sony S-Log3 and S-Log2 · Canon C-Log3, C-Log2 and C-Log · Panasonic V-Log · Fujifilm F-Log, F-Log2 and F-Log2C · Nikon N-Log · RED Log3G10 · Blackmagic Film Gen 5 · DJI D-Log and D-Log M. The bases are the manufacturers' own published conversion LUTs, not approximations.

What you get is a single .cube — plain ASCII, 33³, with a short filename like Tron - S-Log3.cube, because in-camera LUT parsers are strict about both. On iPhone it comes out through the share sheet (AirDrop it, drop it in Files, put it on the card); on a computer it downloads. Load it as a monitoring LUT in the camera, on the monitor or at the DIT cart, and the image matches the frame you graded on the phone. Choose 709 as the base and you get the plain look instead — the original file, byte for byte.

Your own imported .cube files export the same way, which makes the finder a LUT converter too: bring in a 709 look you already own, export it for S-Log3 or V-Log, and it's ready for the camera. (An imported LUT's export is rebuilt from the stored preview texture, so it carries preview precision rather than the original file's — you already own that original.) CamPlot's own Pop, Stylistic and Cinematic are the exception: they stay in the app and have no Export button.

Tap the SUN / MOON button on the left rail — the one lettered on a plate, with a hairline rule for the horizon between the two words. Using your precise location and the compass, CamPlot draws the sky over your framed shot: a dashed arc with hour dots and time labels, a small "now" marker, and a soft glowing body riding the arc wherever you point and tilt the camera — labeled with the exact time the real one will be in that spot. Golden-hour planning while you're still framing the shot.

The moon has its own arc, and it is on by default — the finder opens showing Sun + Moon. Its pointer is the smaller, cooler, rayless one, so the two never read as a single object, and both slide along their own arcs as you pan. That is the shot you actually want on a night exterior: whether the moon clears the ridge behind camera, and at what hour.

Hold the button and a small reel opens with two columns — tap a column name to switch between them. SHOW is Sun · Moon · Sun + Moon. DATE is Today · Tomorrow · Next week · Next month · Pick a date…. Tap the option you want; the date always resets to today when the finder reopens.

It asks for location and motion permission on first use (the compass and level readings below the frame need the same motion permission — if you dismissed a prompt, tap the button or anywhere in the finder to bring it back). The rest lives in Settings → General → Sun Path: the date, a switch to bake the overlay into captured images, a switch to turn it on automatically whenever the finder opens, and Accuracy → Align to the sun / moon…

Alignment is the fix for a phone compass reading a few degrees off. Pick it, and the finder clears down with a banner: tap the real sun or moon in the frame and the drawn one moves onto it, absorbing the bias for the session. A row then shows the correction it is holding, with a Reset beside it. You only need it if the drawn body sits visibly beside the real one.

None of it needs a signal — the positions are computed on the phone, not fetched — so the whole thing works on a scout with no bars, as long as the phone has a location fix.

Display is one plate carrying five separate menus, and it opens like the LUT widget: touch and hold it and the reel comes out under your finger, or tap it and the reel parks so you can swipe it at your leisure. Left and right crosses the five menus; up and down picks inside the one you are on. Each menu keeps its own setting, so a marker, a grid and false colour can all be on at once — the widget's value line says Off, or names the one thing that is on, or counts them (3 on).

Aspect Markers draws a framing box inside your frame — Off, 1:1, 4:3, 1.66, 16:9, 2.35, 2.39, 2.67, 9:16 — so you can see what a cutdown gets while you compose in the wide frame.

Aspect Mask is how hard the area outside that box is shaded: Off, 25%, 50%, 75% or Black. It only ever shades a marker, so with Markers off it has nothing to do. It starts at 50%.

Crosshair puts a centre cross on the frame — Off, Small, Medium, Large. It is sized against the frame's short side, so it looks the same on a 2.39 frame and a 9:16 one.

Grid is Off, Full, Vertical, Horizontal or Thirds. Full is a dense 6×6 lattice, Thirds is the classic 3×3, and Vertical and Horizontal are the thirds lines of one axis alone — the two you actually use for a horizon and for centring a standing figure.

False Color is Off, ARRI or Spectrum. ARRI is the scale you already know from a monitor — purple and blue mark near-black clipping, green marks 18% grey, pink marks typical skin tone, yellow and red mark near-white and clipped highlights; everything else stays grayscale so the flagged zones read clearly. Spectrum is the continuous rainbow version, dark to bright with no grey gaps.

Whichever you pick, a key appears along the bottom of the capture frame so you never have to remember what a colour means — the ARRI one names its landmarks (BLACK, 18% GREY, SKIN, CLIP), the Spectrum one is an IRE ruler from 0 to 100. The strip is painted from the same numbers as the picture, so a colour on the key is exactly the colour on the image at that exposure.

To hide the key once you know the scale and want the frame clear: open the reel, and while it is resting on a False Color stop, hold — hold again to bring it straight back. (Hold on any of the other four menus and the hint band tells you where the gesture lives.) Turning False Color on always brings the key back too, so you never have to remember you hid it; switching between ARRI and Spectrum leaves it as you set it.

By default it's a live monitoring aid only — a capture saves the true, graded image. If you want the map itself in what you save, Settings → Shot Info → Burn in False Color has a switch for each: photos, video recordings and Exposure Meter saves, all off to begin with. The key along the bottom is never included either way.

Every one of the five opens Off each time the finder does — these are aids you reach for on a shot, and finding yesterday's 2.39 mask over today's frame is not a good surprise. Display is on the rail in Photo, Video and the Exposure Meter.

Textures puts film on the picture, and it sits directly under LUT because that is the order the two run in: the stock is the negative, your LUT is the grade over it. It opens the same reel as LUT and Display — touch and hold it and the reel comes out under your finger, or tap and it stays parked. Left and right crosses the shelves, up and down picks on the one you are on.

There is one shelf and one decision: the look. Each one carries its own grain, halation, diffusion, dust and vignette at the strength it was built with, so picking it is the whole job.

Film Grain adds the texture and leaves your LUT's colour exactly where it was. Old Grain is the same idea turned up, with dust and a worn edge. Mist is a black mist filter — the highlights bloom and the blacks hold. Fog is the heavier one, where the blacks lift and the contrast drops. Glow is halation, the warm bleed film gets around a hot highlight and a phone never does. Faded is a print left in the sun. Super 8 is the home-movie gauge, grain, gate and all. Then the two films people ask for by name, Portra 400 and 500T, and B&W on a reversal curve. Flare puts the sun in the lens — a warm four-point star off whatever is blowing out in frame, and the wash of light across the whole picture that comes with it. Anamorphic Flare is the other signature: one long blue horizontal streak, the way those lenses throw it. Both follow the light, so they travel with a practical panning through shot and go away when nothing is blowing out. Gradient and Sunset Grad are graduated filters — the top of the frame comes down, neutral or warm, and the bottom stays where it is; Vertical Grad and Vertical Sunset Grad are the same two turned on their side, dark down the left when you hold the phone sideways, which is the top of the picture once you turn it upright to shoot vertical.

Hold the Textures plate to put the look down, and hold it again to bring the same one straight back. Settings → Textures names the real film behind each one.

Format is the gauge it was shot on — 65mm, 35mm, Super 16, 16mm or Super 8 — and it is what makes grain look like grain: the size is measured against the real camera apertures, so Super 16 grain is twice the size of 35mm and Super 8 four times. On Sensor, the default, it follows whichever window the Camera widget is on, so a full-frame body grains like VistaVision. It never changes the field of view — that stays the Sensor widget's job.

Process is what the lab did: Push 1, Push 2, Pull 1, Bleach Bypass or Cross. Pushing adds contrast and grows the grain, bleach bypass drains the colour and lifts the contrast, cross swaps the chemistry.

Then the four that fine-tune it. Grain and Halation each start on As stock and can go Off, Light or Strong — halation being the warm glow around a bright light, which is light bouncing back off the film base into the red layer, and 800T is the stock that does it hard. Mist is a black-mist diffusion filter at ⅛, ¼, ½ or 1 — highlights bloom, blacks stay put. Dust is specks on the print. In Video there is one more: Weave, the frame drifting in the gate, with Projector adding exposure flicker. It starts off, because this is a framing tool and weave moves the picture.

What you see is what the file gets, the same rule the LUT follows — and Settings → Textures is where you turn that off per surface, keep textures as a monitor-only preview, and let a grainy recording use a higher bitrate (grain is noise, and noise is the first thing a codec throws away).

Textures is off under Apple Log and under LOG on the LUT widget — a flat picture is the deliverable and nothing is baked over it — and stands down while False Color is up, because an exposure tool has to see the real signal.

Yes. Seven plates fit beside the frame, and Settings → Photo Mode → Widgets and Settings → Video Mode → Widgets are where you pick which seven. Each row is a switch, the count sits in the heading, and the order never changes — so Textures always sits under LUT wherever you put it.

Photo has exactly seven to choose from, so that list is really for hiding what you never reach for. Video has eight — it carries Stabilize as well — so Textures starts off there, and turning it on asks you to turn something else off first. At least one widget always stays on.

Tap the calculator button at the bottom-left of the canvas and the Calculators open full screen. They are free with any CamPlot account, at every level — five tools in one place on a single milled rail at the top: Depth of Field, Media, Exposure, Sensor Sizes and Sun & Moon. Tap the rail or swipe left and right to move between them; the lit brass segment shows which one you're in. The ? beside the close button opens the built-in manual, and the × closes the hub.

Pick a camera (ARRI, Sony, Canon, RED, DJI, GoPro and more), a recording format (resolution · codec), a frame rate, and a card size — CamPlot shows the media that camera actually shoots on and how many hours and minutes fit, with the data rate underneath. Rates come from manufacturers' published numbers — treat them as planning figures, not lab measurements.

Choose Full Frame, Super 35 or 2/3″ broadcast, then drag the focal length, aperture, and subject distance rollers (to 1500mm, 2000mm on 2/3″, and 1,000 ft) — or tap the amber focal length or distance and type an exact one (73mm, 237 ft, 12'6", 72.5 m) — near limit, far limit, total depth, and hyperfocal update live, and a photographic preview shows the actual look: the subject sharpens or melts against a real scene whose foreground, midground, and background each blur by their true distance. The Stage scene — LED wall, lighting truss and audience — is drawn at true size, so it holds up on a long broadcast zoom. The badge on the picture names the shot (EW, W, CB, M, MCU, CU, ECU) and gives the frame's width × height at the subject: how tight that lens gets from that far away.

Sensor Sizes overlays up to three cameras' sensors to scale — see exactly how much bigger an Alexa 65 is than an FX6, with widths, heights, and diagonals read out.

Exposure is four camera gears — ISO, aperture (f or T), shutter (angle or speed), and ND (variable, hard, or stops). Lock all but one and roll any locked dial: the free one visibly rolls to the value that holds your exposure, in exact 1/3-stop steps. A frame-rate row handles the 24 → 48fps kind of question in one tap.

It is a location scout you can do from a desk. Search an address, tap the target to use where you are, or drag the satellite map — the crosshair in the middle is the spot everything is worked out for, and you can zoom in past the imagery's own limit rather than hitting a blank tile.

Over the map, the day is drawn as one swept dark field: every patch of ground your subject shades between first light and last. Ground outside it never sits in that shadow, whatever the hour. Around it a brass hour ring — and each bead sits where the sun is at that hour, not where its shadow lands. The hour you're scrubbed to lights up, with its beam running in to the crosshair and the shadow spear pointing the other way.

Underneath, the same day side on: left to right is the local clock, up is true altitude, the warm band is golden hour and the blue one civil twilight. Drag it to scrub and the map follows. A shadow ruler along the bottom reads how long a shadow is as a multiple of whatever throws it — 5× means a six-foot stand lays down thirty feet.

Switch to Moon and the whole tool re-reads for the moon: its own arc, moonrise, moonset and the phase drawn at its real terminator. Both overlays them, which is what you want when you're planning a night exterior and need to know whether the moon is behind camera. A moon shadow only appears once the moon is above 15° and more than half lit.

Times belong to the spot, not to your phone — drop the pin in Morocco and you get Moroccan time, daylight saving included, with no connection needed. Save scout card bakes the map, the section and every number into one picture and sends it to Photos, ready to text to the gaffer.

Playback, annotation (view-only), the floating toolbars, and the viewfinder capture button are round floating buttons that dock to the four screen corners. Drag one anywhere and it snaps to the nearest corner; tap to expand it into its full bar, anchored to the button's spot. Expanding one collapses the others, and they all automatically slide out of the way when panels and bars open — and glide back when they close.

Yes — grab the grip at the bottom of the left toolbar and drag outward: the bar melts into a floating tools button under your finger; release to dock it at any corner. Drag the button back against the left edge (a faded ghost toolbar previews the docking) and it becomes the fixed bar again. On phone-width screens the toolbar always floats. A second tools button with up to 7 more tools can be enabled in Settings → Workspace. Collapsing a floating toolbar always returns you to the Select tool.

Touching the canvas slides the top bar away so your plot fills the screen — the canvas stays perfectly still while it happens. A thin line at the top edge with a small drawer pull marks where it's hiding; tap the pull (or anywhere on the line) to bring it back.

The Director's Viewfinder capture button — tap it to jump straight into capture mode. It only appears on devices that can capture (the installed iPhone/iPad app), and you can turn it off in Settings → Workspace or from the viewfinder drawer.

Tap the gear icon in the top bar. The Settings panel slides in from the right, organized into sections.

Yes. In Settings → Font, pick a font, color, weight, and size for each of:

• Subject Tags — the letter or initials that float over each subject
• Camera Tags — the camera letter (also applies to lights)
• Camera Detail Labels — operator/lens/support text under each camera
• Setup Labels — the name of each setup as shown on tabs and exports

Changes apply live to every element of that type in your project.

In Settings → Canvas: landscape/portrait presets, Canvas Size — separate Width and Height sliders that each grow the document up to 4× (per setup); tap the link beside them to move both together and keep the shape, a Rotate 90° button that turns the whole plot with everything on it, grid modes, and per-setup canvas and background colors.

Deselect everything and open the properties panel (chevron on the right edge) — instead of an empty panel you get Setup Options: universal controls for the current setup only.

Change every camera, subject, light and mic on the setup at once — their sizes (together, keeping their differences, or All the same size), tag size / bold / colour, details boxes (size, show, anchor), lights on and listening cones — plus the canvas color, background color, canvas size, rotation, and ground plan opacity. Locked ones stay as they are, and other setups are untouched. A layer's panel has the same controls for just that layer.

Yes — Settings → Workspace → Interface Size, up to 150%. On iPhone and iPad it makes everything bigger: text, buttons, panels and the plot.

In the Mac app and in a web browser it makes the tool bar and the top bar bigger (in the Mac app ⌘+ and ⌘− change it too). In a browser, the browser's own zoom — ⌘+ / ⌘−, or Ctrl on Windows — makes everything bigger.

Yes — Settings → Hot Keys. Every tool and action (including single-key toggles like X for subject lock, D for FOV distance lock, , / . to resize the selection) can be rebound: click the key, press a new one. System shortcuts like Cmd Z stay fixed.

With nothing selected, ↑/↓ step through setups and ←/→ jump between groups.

Most settings are per-show. Layer visibility/locks and the Layers/Hot Keys/Workspace configs are per device. Default units (feet vs. meters) are global.

No. Share links are view-only and work in any browser — on a phone, tablet, or desktop. Viewers get the Layers list too, eyes only: a camera op can hide Cables or Annotations on their own screen without changing anything for anyone else, and their PDF export follows those eyes.

Yes. Anyone looking at a shared plot they can't edit can tap a camera — or its details box — to see that camera's report: model, operator, lens (and the zoom it's set to), build, shot, and every camera detail the project reports. On a Mac or iPad it opens beside the camera; on an iPhone it slides up from the bottom — swipe up for every detail, sideways for the next camera, down to close.

‹ › (or the arrow keys) step through the cameras in number order, and Open in Reports opens the full Camera Report on that camera. Saving that camera's page as a PDF comes with CamPlot Plus and Max.

Currently share links give access to the whole project — viewers can flip through all setups. You can hide specific setups from sharing in the setup tabs (tap the eye icon on any tab to toggle its visibility to viewers).

Yes. Tap the Share icon and toggle sharing off. The link is instantly invalidated. Turn it back on and you'll get a fresh link.

Yes. In the Share list, flip a person from View to Collab (they need a CamPlot Max account). Collaborators edit the project live, just like you — everyone stays in sync in real time.

You stay in control: the top bar's collaboration button shows a log of each editing session with a summary of what changed, and a one-tap Undo this session if something needs rolling back.

Some things stay yours whoever you share with: the order of setups, hiding a setup, setup groups, the layer order, custom layers, the project's name and deleting the project. A collaborator sees those greyed out. Adding, duplicating, renaming and deleting setups are yours too unless you hand them over — tap the person's Collab chip and tick what they may do under Setups (each one on its own: Add, Duplicate, Rename, Delete). The buttons appear on their side the moment you save; a setup a collaborator deletes is still in your Version History.

Yes. Tap a person's Collab chip in the Share list and choose Only these: tick the layers they may edit (Cameras, Audio, Lights, Cables, your custom layers…) and the parts of the project they may edit (Inventory, Roster, Ground plans). A new collaborator starts on Everything. The Setups box underneath works in both modes — an audio supervisor on the Audio layer alone can still be allowed to rename or add setups.

On their screen, every other layer wears your padlock — it won't open — and the tools for those layers are dimmed. Whatever they try, the server keeps your layers exactly as you left them. On your own screen the layers you handed over lock themselves once, so you don't nudge their mics by accident; tap the lock to open it any time.

Yes. With sharing on, type a name or email in Add people. The search only offers people you've worked with before and, if you're in a CamPlot Enterprise, your colleagues — never the whole CamPlot user list. Anyone else, type their full email address. The project appears in their project list straight away (no link to tap); if they don't have an account yet, it's waiting the first time they sign in with that address.

The share arrow next to Copy opens your device's share sheet with a ready-made message and the link, and on a Mac or iPad a QR code sits under the link for a phone to scan on set.

If you're in a CamPlot Enterprise, Everyone at … can view shares the project with every member at once — people who join later get it, people who leave lose it — and you can still raise individuals to Collab.

View-only users get a floating pencil button that expands into a private markup toolbar: freehand strokes in four colors, an eraser, and a notes pad. Annotations are private to each viewer — they never change your plot and other people never see them — and they sync to that viewer's other devices.

The toolbar and notes pad are draggable and dock to any screen edge. Viewers also get their own light/dark toggle in the top bar.

Tap the Notify button in the top bar. CamPlot auto-composes a message summarizing what changed since your last notify (per setup) — edit it if you like, then send. Everyone you've shared the project with gets a push notification on devices where they've enabled them, and a banner in the app.

Crew members enable notifications from the one-time prompt (or their Account panel) — tapping a notification opens the project directly.

Tap an element to select it. Once selected, you can immediately drag it, grab a corner to resize, or grab the rotation handle above it to rotate — no waiting, no long-press needed.

If your finger lands on empty canvas (or anywhere outside the selected element's body or handles), the gesture pans the canvas instead. So selection is the "pre-arming" gesture: select the thing you want to manipulate, then drag freely.

To keep the canvas visible while you're working. Tap once to select an element — the panel stays closed. Tap the same element again (or tap the chevron on the right edge of the screen) to expand the properties panel.

Once you've opened the panel, it stays open as you select different elements. Deselect (tap empty canvas) and the panel closes again.

Long-press anywhere on empty canvas to start a selection box, then drag across the elements you want. Or long-press a single element to add it to a multi-selection. Tap empty canvas to clear the selection.

Long-press (about half a second) on any element to bring up its context menu — same options as right-click on desktop: rename, duplicate, delete, group, simultaneous, etc.

Three ways: the ‹ › buttons next to the setup title in the canvas corner, a fast horizontal swipe across the canvas (a quick toss, so normal drags and pans aren't affected), or the setups sidebar/tabs. All of these work in full screen too.

On phone-width screens the properties panel opens as a translucent bottom sheet and the setups sidebar tucks into a bottom bar, so the canvas stays visible between them. The Layers button opens a compact bottom sheet as well.

Yes. The Pencil is treated as a precision input — you can tap, drag, rotate, and resize with it, and CamPlot automatically rejects palm touches while you're using it. No special setup needed; just start using the Pencil.

CamPlot Creator is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad (your Account panel's Install on this device opens it too). Sign in with the same account and your projects and plan come with you. It opens fullscreen, fast, and works offline.

Yes — CamPlot Creator is on the Mac App Store, the same listing as the iPhone and iPad app. On a Mac you can also open your Account panel and click Get CamPlot for Mac. It needs macOS 12 or later, and your plan comes with you — it belongs to your account, wherever you bought it.

You get a native window with a real menu bar, a Dock icon, sign-in in an attached sheet, exports through the standard save panel — and full offline support: after its first online launch, the app opens with no internet and your shows are there. The App Store keeps it up to date. If you were using the web version from your Dock before, the Mac app replaces it — just sign in and everything's where you left it.

Downloaded CamPlot for Mac from our website before? That copy won’t get new Mac features — the App Store one updates itself. Quit it and move it to the Trash, then install CamPlot from the Mac App Store and sign in — your projects come back from your account. Settings that were kept only on that Mac start fresh.

Yes — CamPlot Creator installs straight from the browser, no store needed. On camplot.studio/creator, press Get it for PC or Get it for Android: in Chrome and Microsoft Edge that installs it in one tap. Or do it from the browser yourself:

• Chrome on a PC or Chromebook: the Install icon at the right end of the address bar, or ⋮ → Cast, save, and share → Install CamPlot…
• Microsoft Edge: ··· → Apps → Install CamPlot
• Chrome on Android: ⋮ → Install app (or Add to home screen → Install)
• Samsung Internet: ☰ → Add page to → Home screen

On a PC, use Chrome or Microsoft Edge (Edge comes with Windows). Instagram’s and Facebook’s own browsers can’t install apps — open the page in Chrome first.

It opens in its own window (full screen on a phone) with its own icon, and it is always the latest version — there is nothing to update. It needs an internet connection to open. Sign in with the same account you use everywhere: your plan and your projects are the same.

CamPlot Max accounts can create, edit, and share plots. Full access to all tools. Starts with a free trial.

CamPlot Crew accounts are free forever and can view shared plots from creators. Perfect for crew members who just need to see the plot, not build it.

No. You can continue with Google or use email & password — create an account with any email (password at least 8 characters with a letter and a number), and use Forgot password any time to reset by email.

Already signed up with Google? You can add a password to the same account via Forgot password — after that, both sign-in methods work.

Open your Account panel. Under Account Type, you'll see a Cancel Subscription button. You'll keep CamPlot Max access through the end of your billing period.