Handle screenplay revisions without losing your work

A revision is the moment a production finds out how much of its prep was really filing. New pages arrive, and somewhere a coordinator starts re-entering scene numbers.

SceneMatch treats a revision as a merge, not a re-import. The new draft is matched against the production you already have, you are shown exactly what will change, and only then is anything applied.

Upload, review, then merge

Uploading a revision does not change your production. It produces a mapping — a summary of what the new draft means for what you already have:

• Screenplay characters / scenes — what the new draft contains
• New characters / new scenes — what does not exist in your production yet
• Updated scenes — scenes that exist and will take the new draft's content
• Kept scenes — scenes with no counterpart in the new draft that will be left alone
• Deleted scenes — scenes the new draft no longer has

Read that summary before you commit. It is the only point at which the change is still free, and the numbers are usually more informative than the coloured pages themselves: a draft that looks like a handful of edits can report 111 new scenes.

Cancelling leaves everything exactly as it was. Upload a revision, read the mapping, decide it is not the draft you meant, cancel — your production is untouched, right down to the scene count.

Deletions ask twice

When a revision would remove scenes, SceneMatch does not just apply it. The merge pauses and asks you to confirm, because a deleted scene takes its work with it.

If the scenes due for deletion have things attached — continuity, script days, characters — the mapping says so rather than showing a count. That is your signal to look before confirming, not a bug.

A revision that adds and updates but removes nothing merges in one step, with no second prompt.

What survives a merge

This is the part worth trusting, because it is where the re-typing usually happens:

• Filming states. Scenes you have marked fully or partially filmed keep those marks. A scene marked filmed before a revision is still marked filmed after it, under its new content.
• Script days. An auto-generated timeline survives the merge with its days intact, and new scenes are absorbed into the days they belong to. Twenty-eight script days before a revision are twenty-eight after it.
• Characters. Existing characters are matched, not duplicated. Only genuinely new names are created, and the mapping tells you how many.

Screenplay annotations follow their own rules — see what happens to annotations in a revision.

The revision colour is read from the script

SceneMatch reads the revision colour out of the screenplay itself, so a blue draft comes in as blue and a pink one as pink. You do not set it by hand, and you do not have to name the file in any particular way. Non-English colour names are recognised too.

This means the revision history reads the way the production talks — "the pink pages" — rather than as upload timestamps.

The thing that is not obvious

Scene numbers are how the merge matches. A scene that keeps its number is updated in place and keeps everything attached to it. A scene whose number changes is, as far as the merge is concerned, a deletion and an addition — the old one goes, a new one arrives empty.

So a renumbering pass between drafts is far more expensive than it looks: it is the one kind of change that costs you attached work. If a scene is being renumbered in the script, expect to redo its continuity rather than assuming the merge will carry it across.

Before you merge a heavy revision

Read the deleted count first. Everything else in the mapping is additive and cheap to correct; deletions are the only line that removes work. If the number is large or reads as attached, it is worth opening a couple of those scenes before confirming, so you know what you are agreeing to lose.