Import episode screenplays
Each episode carries its own script and its own revisions. Import with the episode, extract the cast automatically, skip the pages you do not want — and on a returning season, match characters against last year.
On a season the script arrives one episode at a time, and each episode keeps its own. Uploading a new screenplay for 104 has nothing to do with 103, and a revision to one does not touch the other.
Import with the episode
The quickest route is to create the episode from the script: give it a number, choose the file, and SceneMatch builds the episode's scenes from it. PDF and Final Draft (FDX) both work.
Two options are worth understanding before you click:
Extract characters. On by default and usually what you want — the cast is read out of the script and added to the season. Turn it off when you are importing a script whose character names you do not want in the cast list yet.
Skip pages. Scripts often arrive with a title page, a cast list, and a couple of pages of front matter. Tell the import how many pages to skip and it starts from the actual first page of script, rather than producing scenes out of the preamble.
Large scripts import in the background — the episode shows the import running and then tells you when it is done, so you are not left wondering whether a long file worked.
Characters land at the season level
Extracted characters belong to the season, not the episode. Import a second episode with the same cast and it does not duplicate them — the existing characters simply gain another episode.
That is what makes a season's cast list stay the size of the cast rather than the size of the cast times the number of episodes.
Revisions, per episode
Each episode's screenplay has its own revision history. Upload a revision on the episode's screenplay page and you get the same mapping you would on a feature — what is new, what is updated, what would be deleted — and the same review-before-merge behaviour.
The full behaviour is on handling screenplay revisions; it works identically here, scoped to the one episode.
Reading the script from a scene
Any scene shows its own script in a preview, so you can check the text behind a scene without opening the whole screenplay. On an episodic production, where you may be working across several scripts in a session, this is usually faster than navigating back to the screenplay page.
Returning seasons: match against last year
When a season belongs to the same series as a previous one, an episode import can match its characters against that previous season instead of creating them fresh.
Matched characters are linked to their predecessor, which is what lets you carry work forward — most usefully, importing a character's wardrobe from last season in one step rather than rebuilding it. You can also link or unlink a character by hand afterwards if a match was wrong.
See the character profile for the link itself, and tracking wardrobe for the import.
The thing that is not obvious
Extracting characters is not the same as having the right cast. The parser reads names as they appear in the script, so an episode where someone is called MOTHER in one scene and MRS. HOLLIS in another will produce two characters.
On a season this compounds — every episode is another chance to create a duplicate of a recurring character. It is worth reading the cast list after each import and merging what needs merging, because the cost of a duplicate grows with every episode of continuity attached to the wrong half.