Docs

Versions, stacks & Compare

A render is hundreds of files pretending to be one. Plaza lets them.

Flip on Stack and the listing collapses: an image sequence becomes one tile with its frame range (and a warning when frames are missing); a family of …_v001 … _v014 becomes one stack showing the latest, with a ×N badge. Double-click opens the latest; the stack expands when you want the history.

Renderer AOV naming — channel written after the frame number, the Redshift/V-Ray/Arnold way (SHOT_LIT_010.RS_MAIN.0000.diffuse.exr) — stacks correctly too: each channel collapses into its own named sequence.

Promote a version

Right-click a versioned file → Promote to new version copies it to the next free number — v014 becomes v015 — without opening a DCC. Handy for forking a look or restarting from a known-good state.

Compare

Select two images (or two videos — playback stays synced) and Compare opens with five modes:

• Side-by-side — the classic.
• Wipe — one image under a draggable split.
• Onion — blended, for alignment checks.
• Flip — A/B toggle, the way supervisors actually review.
• Difference — per-pixel subtraction: identical areas go black, changes glow. A Boost slider (1–8×) amplifies changes too subtle to see at 1×.

Renders know their source

With the optional C4D and Houdini trackers installed, every render remembers the exact scene file, take and frame range that produced it — written as small sidecars in .plaza/provenance/. The Viewer shows a clickable Source row on any tracked output, and the link survives renames and moves on both ends. Local EXRs without a sidecar fall back to the metadata their renderer embedded.

Everything on this page is metadata-driven and works without downloading online-only cloud files — except opening Compare itself, which reads the two files you chose (Cloud files).