backlot

You own more than you think. Index it.

Every editor's machine is a warehouse: After Effects presets, Resolve title packs, LUT folders, audio plugins, fonts — thousands of assets bought, bundled, and forgotten. backlot walks the warehouse and hands you the manifest. The machine above turned out to be holding 7,895 assets. The .drfx deep-scan alone surfaced ~5,200 Resolve templates that never appear in any file browser, because they live inside zip archives.

One Python file. Standard library only. Nothing to install.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vcspr/backlot/main/backlot.py
python3 backlot.py scan
python3 backlot.py find "glitch"
python3 backlot.py stats
python3 backlot.py dupes            # the same asset in more than one pack

What it scans

type	where it looks
ae-preset	After Effects .ffx — app Presets and User Presets, every installed version
resolve-*	Resolve Fusion Templates, user and system — including inside .drfx archives (titles, transitions, generators, effects)
lut	Resolve LUT dirs — .cube .3dl .dat
audio-plugin	/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins — VST, VST3, AU, AAX
font	User and system font folders

Anything else — Motion Bro packs, sample libraries, a stock folder — goes in backlot.config.json:

{ "extra_dirs": { "sample": ["~/Music/Samples"], "mogrt": ["~/Motion Templates"] } }

Built for agents too

Every command takes --json. The index itself is flat JSON with stable keys (type, name, category, path, source), so an AI agent, an MCP server, or a 5-line script can answer "what glitch transitions do I own?" without opening a single app. Paths are stored home-relative, so the index is safe to share and diff.

python3 backlot.py find "film grain" --type lut --json

And it IS an MCP server. serve speaks JSON-RPC over stdio with two tools (find_assets, asset_stats), no dependencies, so Claude or any MCP client can ask "what glitch transitions do I own?" mid-conversation:

{ "mcpServers": { "backlot": { "command": "python3", "args": ["/path/to/backlot.py", "serve"] } } }

Why

Asset hoarding is universal; asset recall is rare. The difference between owning 3,000 titles and using them is a search box. This started as the index layer of a larger creative-automation system, where an AI agent picks the title template; it stands alone because the manifest is useful even without the agent.

Roadmap

• Windows paths
• Premiere / Final Cut template scanners
• Duplicate finder (same LUT in four packs) — shipped: backlot.py dupes (+ find_dupes MCP tool)

License

MIT © 2026 Victor Uwakwe