Overview and FAQ

URSA (User Refined Studio Automation) is a desktop application for visual effects and film work. It is not a shot tracker. It manages the technical layer under your shots: metadata, ACES color and file naming. Your time goes into the work and not into folders.

Independent VFX artists and small studios. If you are a compositor working from home, a supervisor running a small team or a studio owner without a pipeline department, URSA gives you the structure a large facility has without the engineering staff to maintain it.

It automates the repetitive parts. File names and color settings follow conventions you set once, which removes the most common mistakes. Artists, supervisors and producers spend their time on shots instead of on administration.

Yes. The same foundation for assets, ACES color and file naming serves one artist or a full production, and it does not need an engineering team to keep it running.

URSA works alongside standard industry tools, and its plugins are installed from inside the application. Ingest and delivery are the bookends of your pipeline: they replace the manual work at the start and the end of a job and leave the middle to you.

Not today. URSA manages ingestion, metadata, ACES color and files under your shots, and it hooks into trackers such as ShotGrid, ftrack and Kitsu, so shot data is entered once and never duplicated.

Consistency. URSA applies studio-standard naming conventions and ACES color management automatically. With project templates, your machine produces files that drop straight into a larger studio pipeline, which removes the rework phase at delivery.

Yes. Footage from different cameras, such as ARRI and Blackmagic, is a common source of error. URSA identifies the input color science and applies the correct transforms so every shot lines up under one ACES project workflow.

URSA reads file metadata and uses the production notes supplied by your post house, DIT or data manager. You can override any of it by hand. It then handles the conversions each shot needs, based on the input and output requirements of the departments the shot passes through.

Yes. If a sequence was shot on a different camera from the rest of the project, mark that sequence with its own settings, such as REDWideGamutRGB / Log3G10 or S-Gamut / S-Log2. The pipeline respects them for that sequence and leaves the rest of the project as it was.

ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) is the industry standard for color management, and it keeps color identical from early dailies to final delivery. That removes the shifts and mismatches that appear when footage moves between different parts of a pipeline.

Stop naming files v01_final_final.nk. URSA versions automatically as part of its directory management. Every render and project save is tracked and older versions are archived, so the current version is never a guess.

Yes. Plates, renders, caches and project files all get a location the moment a project starts. URSA builds the whole directory structure for you, so assets are always where your project's conventions say they should be.

By standardizing where files are written and read. Because the pipeline defines where every file lives, broken paths stop happening, and backups and handoffs become predictable.

Yes. Files are named and organized by your studio rules automatically. Everything is easy to find, nothing gets lost, and everyone on the team works in the same system.

Settings cascade from parent to child. You set rules at the project level and they flow down to sequences and shots. You only touch the shots that break the standard, which saves most of the setup time.

URSA uses the lineup sheets from the post house to know what each incoming asset is, which shot or sequence it belongs to, and which color science, LUT or CDL it needs. Files are converted into your naming system, set globally or per project. At delivery, URSA exports and converts everything back to the color space the client asked for.

Yes. Burn-ins and slates are generated automatically, so project information is always visible and consistent. You can add your branding and choose which metadata appears on per-frame burn-ins and frame 0 slates.

Not yet. A ShotGrid plugin is planned to arrive with the Configurator. It would let a freelancer inherit the configuration of the studio they work with, including naming conventions, DCC setup and color workflows, and link the shots assigned to you. It would hook into the tracker you already run, so nothing is entered twice.

Planned. Uploading shots for review from URSA or from inside the DCC, with the shot's metadata attached, comes alongside the ShotGrid plugin.

The Launcher starts any DCC executable with its project environment, working folder and launch arguments set. Nuke and Maya are the first targets.

URSA connects directly to Nuke. It maps your file paths and applies the right ACES transforms from your project rules, so a compositor can open a shot and start working.

Yes. URSA sets up folder structures and naming conventions for assets and caches in Maya, and makes sure renders match your project color settings. The move from 3D into compositing gets much smoother.

Yes, today. A free account, the base application and the Launcher plugin cost nothing. Further plugins are planned as subscriptions; none is live and no price is set.

The Windows 11 installer is not public yet. Create a free account now and the first builds reach you as they are ready, starting with the free Launcher plugin.

Windows 11 first. macOS is planned after the Windows release, and Linux after that.

Beta access starts with an account. During the closed beta, a sign-up from an address that is not yet approved becomes a request, and the Beta Tester Agreement follows by email from beta@bluerainlabs.com. Testers get builds as they are ready, use them on real work and report what breaks straight to the developer, because URSA is built by the person who ran the pipeline in production.

No. URSA (User Refined Studio Automation) is pipeline software for visual effects work and has no connection to Blackmagic Design or its URSA camera line. Where the name could be confused, it is called The URSA toolset.