Table of Contents Show
For those who don’t know the tool: Gizmify Studios develops Maya-focused animation, rigging, pipeline and media-processing tools. Media Plane sits inside Autodesk Maya, replacing the common conversion of filmed reference, storyboards and review material into image sequences with direct video playback.
An edit timeline moves into Maya
Gizmify Studios has expanded Media Plane from a video-reference playback tool into a small nonlinear editing system embedded in Maya. The significant addition is Media Plane Editor, an artist-facing interface for assembling and manipulating multiple media clips while the resulting sequence remains attached to a Media Plane node in the Maya scene.
Media Plane did not suddenly turn Maya into a replacement for a NLE. Its editing system targets a much narrower production problem: reference footage, layout material, animatics and other moving-image sources that an animator or layout artist wants synchronized with work in Maya.
Previously, Media Plane’s central proposition was direct playback of video on a Maya plane, avoiding the preparatory conversion of reference footage into hundreds of individual images. The editor now extends that workflow from viewing a single source to constructing an edit from several sources.
Gizmify introduced the editing system with Media Plane 2.0. The current 2.01 build adds post-processing multithreading and fixes affecting frame-count accuracy, opacity with colour-space processing, Maya cached playback and editor DPI handling. For deployment, that maintenance build is consequently more relevant than treating 2.0 as a frozen launch artifact.
The node still does the work
The architecture is more interesting than simply putting a timeline panel inside Maya. According to Gizmify’s Media Plane documentation, editing data lives inside the mediaPlane node. The Media Plane Editor is the interactive frontend, while custom Maya commands form the interface used to manipulate the underlying edit sequence.
That separation gives studios two routes into the same system. Artists can operate the graphical editor. Pipeline developers can manipulate edit sequences using Maya commands without having to automate the editor UI.
The command set introduced for editing covers the edit itself, clips, media files, clip animation, file information and rendering. Gizmify documents commands named mediaPlaneEdit, mediaPlaneClip, mediaPlaneFile, mediaPlaneAnim, mediaPlaneInfo and mediaPlaneRender.
This is not merely an API advertised somewhere in the vicinity of an artist feature. The editor actually uses that command layer itself. Gizmify describes the commands as the interface between the editor frontend and the node backend, which makes the scripting system directly relevant to how the feature is implemented.
For a pipeline TD, that creates possibilities around automated reference preparation, shot-specific edit construction or integrating Media Plane edit descriptions with internal asset-management systems. Those possibilities are architectural rather than promises of ready-made integrations. Gizmify provides the commands; studios still have to build their own surrounding pipeline logic.
Clips, tracks and actual editing tools
Media Plane Editor provides a conventional layered timeline built from tracks and clips. Tracks act as editing layers. Clips placed on higher tracks can be composited with those below them, while tracks can be enabled, disabled or temporarily locked. Clips carry both a global edit-time range and a local source-file range, giving the system the information needed for operations including trimming, cutting and retiming.
The current interactive toolset includes moving clips, trimming clip boundaries, cutting clips and retiming them by altering the edit duration while retaining their source range. Copy and paste operations can move groups of clips while maintaining their relative track spacing.
Clip snapping can use other clips, the playhead and the beginning of the edit as alignment targets. The editor timeline also has its own transport controls and time display.
That last detail is worth understanding in daily use. While Media Plane Editor is open, it takes control of the Media Plane node’s frame attribute, so scrubbing Maya’s ordinary timeline does not drive the edit image. Once the editor closes, control returns to Maya’s timeline and the completed edit can be scrubbed there.
In other words, there are two timeline contexts rather than two competing masters simultaneously fighting over frame evaluation. Maya has enough ways to make time philosophically complicated already.
Animation sits on the clips
Media Plane Editor also includes a dedicated Animation Graph for clip properties. Gizmify documents 12 animatable clip properties: X and Y translation, rotation, X and Y scale, opacity, four crop controls, horizontal flip and vertical flip. Keys are stored as part of the mediaPlane node’s internal editing data rather than as ordinary Maya animation nodes, which is why Gizmify provides its own graph interface.
The graph uses clip-local timing. Animation therefore remains associated with the clip’s own time even when that clip is subsequently trimmed or retimed. This makes the editor more than a sequence assembler. A reference take can, for example, be repositioned, resized, cropped or faded within the edit rather than requiring preparation in another application before Maya sees it.
Frame-rate mismatches are handled in the edit
Reference footage and animation scenes routinely arrive with different frame rates. Media Plane Editor tracks Maya’s scene frame rate and retimes media so that source duration remains synchronized with the Maya edit time. Gizmify gives the example of 30 fps reference footage used in a 24 fps Maya scene: the editor adjusts playback so that one second of source remains one second in the animation timeline.
For a character animator using phone footage, mocap reference or director annotations, that removes one small but repetitive preparation step. For layout, it makes mixed-source storyboard and reference assemblies easier to keep aligned with the shot’s actual Maya timing.
Video decoding, caching and compositing
Media Plane uses FFmpeg for its documented video-format handling. Gizmify lists MP4, MOV, 3GP, MKV, WebM, AVI, MPEG and FLV containers, with documented codec support including H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP8 and VP9. The tool also accepts image formats through Maya’s native image support, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, SGI, HDR, OpenEXR and TGA among the formats listed by Gizmify.
The edit can live with the scene
One useful pipeline detail is where the editorial information goes. Media Plane stores an edit within the mediaPlane node, so saving the Maya scene preserves the edit data with it. That avoids requiring a separate editorial project merely to maintain an animator’s reference assembly. Edits can also be exported as .mpedit files. Gizmify describes .mpedit as a JSON-based format containing a Media Plane edit description, and the same specification can be imported through the command interface.
This creates a distinction between the edit description and rendered video output. .mpedit is Media Plane’s editable interchange representation for its own sequence data. It should not be confused with a conventional editorial interchange standard or with rendered picture. The product can also render an edit to a new MP4 file. Media Plane 2.0 introduced the mediaPlaneRender Maya command for rendering an edit sequence, and Gizmify’s product page exposes MP4 rendering as a sharing workflow.
That gives teams three practical levels of persistence: the edit stored in the Maya scene, an external .mpedit description for exchanging or managing that edit, and an MP4 render for ordinary viewing.
Host and platform boundaries
Gizmify currently documents the main Media Plane node features for Maya 2018 through Maya 2027 on Windows, macOS and Linux. The new Media Plane Editor has a narrower boundary: it requires Maya 2022 or later and is available with the Professionals tier and above.
On macOS, Gizmify documents support for Maya 2018 through 2027 on Intel Macs and Maya 2024 through 2027 on Apple Silicon. Installers are available in web and offline forms. The web installer downloads components during installation, whereas the offline package contains the required base components. Linux installations can use Gizmify’s installation script or be integrated manually into a studio’s Maya package structure.
That offline option is particularly relevant to facilities where artist workstations cannot freely fetch runtime dependencies during software deployment.
Permanent licences, but tiered features
Gizmify explicitly sells Media Plane without subscriptions. Its current licences are permanent, but functionality and intended deployment differ by tier. The free evaluation mode is restricted to non-commercial personal use. Video playback is limited to 24 frames, edit sequences to 48 frames, only one Media Plane node can be created in a Maya scene, and only basic node functionality is enabled.
The $14 Individuals licence permits commercial use by an individual artist, removes the single-video length and node-count restrictions and enables the documented single-file playback, post-processing and colour controls. However, its video editing remains limited to 48 frames.
The $99 Professionals licence is described for commercial teams of 20 artists or fewer and enables unlimited video editing as well as the Media Plane Editor. The $499 Studios licence is described for commercial studios with more than 20 artists and includes the Professionals functionality with higher-tier feature access, request priority and support arrangements.
Those prices are licence prices rather than recurring monthly charges. Gizmify states that purchased licences remain valid permanently. The company also lists education pricing by contact rather than publishing a numerical education price.
Beta means beta
The Media Plane Editor remains explicitly labelled beta in Gizmify’s current documentation. That matters more than the presence of a polished timeline. The developer warns that users may encounter bugs or unexpected behaviour, and the current 2.01 maintenance release already includes fixes specifically touching editing, cached playback and the editor interface.
For pipeline departments, the command architecture is arguably the more consequential part. An interactive editor removes manual context switching for artists, while a scriptable edit representation gives facilities a point from which to automate reference handling without having to drive a GUI.
Media Plane is not trying to make Maya the next Baselight, Resolve or Media Composer. It is bringing just enough editorial machinery into the DCC to keep reference preparation close to the work that depends on it. That is a much narrower ambition, and probably a more useful one.
| Product | Media Plane |
| Developer | Gizmify Studios |
| Current version | 2.01 |
| Editor status | Media Plane Editor is beta |
| Host compatibility | Maya 2018-2027 for node features; Media Plane Editor requires Maya 2022+ |
| Operating systems | Windows, macOS and Linux; macOS Intel supports Maya 2018-2027, Apple Silicon Maya 2024-2027 |
| Video formats | MP4, MOV, 3GP, MKV, WebM, AVI, MPEG, FLV |
| Documented codecs | H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP8, VP9 and others supported by the bundled implementation |
| Edit storage | Maya scene mediaPlane node; external .mpedit JSON edit files |
| Video output | MP4 rendering of Media Plane edits |
| Processing | Multithreaded media-frame reading; GPU compositing documented for edit frames |
| Free evaluation | $0; non-commercial personal use; 24-frame playback, 48-frame edit sequence, one node per scene, basic features |
| Individuals | $14 permanent licence; commercial individual use; video editing limited to 48 frames |
| Professionals | $99 permanent licence; commercial team of 20 artists or fewer; unlimited video editing and Media Plane Editor |
| Studios | $499 permanent licence; commercial studio of more than 20 artists; includes Professionals functionality |
| Licensing | No subscription; purchased licences remain valid permanently |
| Documentation | Media Plane Help |
| Download | Media Plane |
