Find anything in a production

Productions get big. A feature has a hundred scenes, thirty characters, and a warehouse full of items; a season multiplies that by the episode count. Navigating to something is slower than asking for it.

The search in the production bar covers everything in the production at once.

What it searches

Sixteen kinds of thing, in one query:

• Characters and actors
• Scenes and episodes
• Looks — hair, makeup and costume, each listed separately
• Script days
• Sets, locations and set dress
• Props, vehicles, animals and wardrobe
• Documents — files and folders, matched on their name and their tags

You do not choose a category first. Type a word and every category that has a match reports back; categories with nothing to show are hidden entirely, so the results are only ever things that exist.

Results are grouped, and capped

Matches are grouped by category, with up to ten shown per group and an indicator when there are more. So searching a common word gives you a readable summary — ten scenes, three characters, two props — rather than a wall of hits.

Click any result to go straight to it.

Keyboard shortcuts

Search is reachable and usable without the mouse, which is most of what makes it faster than navigating:

• / — open search, from anywhere in a production.
• Ctrl+K, or ⌘K on a Mac — the same, and unlike / it works while you are typing in a field.
• ↑ and ↓ — move through the results, running on through the category groups in the order they read.
• Enter — open the highlighted result. Esc — close search and stay where you are.

/ is deliberately the quieter of the two. It opens search only when you are not typing into something, so it never eats a character out of a note or a description you were halfway through. The ⌘K chord is unambiguous — nothing types a ⌘K — which is why that one works from inside a field.

One limit worth knowing: Enter follows a result you have arrowed onto, and nothing otherwise. Results settle a moment behind your typing, so an Enter pressed at the end of a query would open whatever the keystroke before it matched rather than the thing you are looking at.

It knows where you are

Results are ranked, and the section you are currently in is promoted to the top. Search from the warehouse and warehouse matches lead; search from the characters page and characters lead.

This is worth knowing because it makes the same query behave differently in a useful way. If you are looking for a prop called "Steel" while standing in the props list, you get the prop first — not the character of the same name.

Documents are the one category with a fixed place in that order. They come last from everywhere else in the production, and first while you are in Documents. Paperwork is worth finding, but a search run from the scene list is almost never after a PDF — and when you are standing in the document shelf, it always is.

Why it is instant

Search runs against a local copy of the production held in your browser, not against the server. Two consequences worth relying on:

• It is immediate. There is no round trip, so results appear as you type even on a large production.
• It works offline. On set, in a basement, on a location with no signal, search still finds things — because the data is already on the device.

Practical uses beyond finding

Because it spans everything, search doubles as a quick audit:

• Is this a duplicate? Search a character name before creating one, and you will see if a similar entry already exists — cheaper than merging later.
• Where is this item used? Searching a prop or wardrobe name shows the item; opening it shows the scenes it is attached to.
• What is this called? When someone refers to a set or look by a name you do not recognise, search is faster than opening lists.

The thing that is not obvious

Search covers the production you are in, not your account. It does not find things in your other productions, and on a season it searches that season — including its episodes — rather than the series.

If you are hunting for something you are sure exists and search cannot see it, check which production you are in before concluding it is missing. Productions are deliberately sealed from each other, which is what makes the results trustworthy in the first place.