What happens to screenplay annotations when a revision arrives

You have spent a week marking up a script. Then the blue revision lands. The question every department asks at that moment is the same: do I have to do all that again?

Mostly, no. SceneMatch attaches each mark to the words you selected, not to a position on the page. When a revision comes in, marks move with their words. But some of them will go quiet, and it is worth understanding which — because a mark that disappears is itself telling you something.

What a mark is actually attached to

When you highlight a line, leave a note or reference a prop, SceneMatch stores the exact text you selected along with a little of the text either side of it. That is the anchor. It does not store "line 14, characters 2 to 10", because a revision would invalidate that immediately.

This is why marks survive edits that would otherwise break them.

Which marks carry over

A revision is matched to the existing script scene by scene. When a scene keeps its number, its annotations come across onto the new version of that scene — whole, with the notes written on them and the warehouse items they reference — and the viewer then re-finds each one:

• The line is untouched. The mark reappears exactly where it was.
• The line was edited around your words. A sentence added at the front pushes your words to the right; the mark follows them.
• The line moved. New action inserted above pushes your line further down the scene; the mark still finds its words and repaints there.

In all three cases you do nothing. Open the script and the marks are where they should be.

Which marks go quiet, and why

A mark can only survive if the words it was placed on are still there. Three things break that:

• The words were rewritten. You highlighted zephyr and the revision says breeze. The quote no longer exists, so the mark has nothing to hold.
• The line was cut. Same result, more obviously.
• The line changed kind. This is the one that surprises people. If a line was action and the revision turns it into a different kind of paragraph, the words can still be on screen, spelled identically — but the mark will not reattach to it.

In the script itself this is an absence: the mark stops appearing, and nothing is drawn in its place. A highlight that has gone quiet is not somewhere else in the scene — it is nowhere.

Where a quiet mark turns up

A highlight that goes quiet is simply gone, and there is nothing to recover: the colour was the whole of it. A note and a reference are different, because each left something behind — words somebody wrote, or an item somebody is prepping. Neither is thrown away with the line, and each still surfaces somewhere, marked Not in script.

• A note shows on the scene. Open the breakdown page you reach from any of the scene's characters, and the script notes panel lists every note on it, including the ones whose line no longer exists.
• A reference shows on the item. Open the prop, costume, vehicle, animal or set dress it points at, and its Script References panel still lists the quote — which matters more than it sounds, because that item is on somebody's prep list because of a line that is no longer in the script.

The badge is doing two jobs in both places. It tells you the quote underneath is a record of what the script used to say rather than what it says now. And it gives you somewhere to read the thing — the note, or the item it was pointing at — before deciding what to do about it.

Clicking a badged entry deletes it, after a confirmation, rather than opening the script the way the other entries do. There is nothing to open: the mark paints nowhere. So these two panels are where a revision's loose ends get read and cleared, one at a time, deliberately.

The thing that is not obvious

Going quiet is not the same as being deleted. The mark is still there, still attached to the words you chose — it simply cannot find them at the moment. SceneMatch looks again every time the script is opened, so if a later draft puts zephyr back, the highlight that was on it comes back too, in the right place, without anyone doing anything. Nothing was lost in between.

This is worth knowing mainly because of what it means for your own habits: do not re-mark a line just because the mark went quiet. If the words return, you would end up with two marks on them. And it is why the panels ask you to confirm before deleting a badged note or reference — deleting is the one action here that does not undo itself.

And a mark that goes quiet is a signal, not a fault. Every one of the three cases above means the same thing: this line is not the line you marked. It was rewritten, cut, or restructured.

So when you open a revised script and a highlight is missing, do not just put it back. Read the line first. Something changed there, and finding out what is exactly the work a revision is asking you to do. The marks that vanish are a shortlist of what to re-read — and for notes and references, the two panels give you that shortlist literally, badged, with what your department wrote or prepped still attached to each one.

What this means scene by scene

If a scene is renumbered or removed in a revision, its annotations do not migrate — there is no scene for them to migrate to. Marks survive on scenes that keep their number. That is worth knowing before a heavy renumbering pass: the more scene numbers change, the more marking-up you will be redoing.