Roles, departments and who can see what

Access rests on two things: a role and a department. They look like one decision made twice, and they are not. They are two independent gates, and a member has to pass both.

Getting this wrong is the usual cause of the two complaints productions have about access: "she can't edit anything" and, more awkwardly, "everyone can see everything".

Gate one: the role

The role applies to the whole production. It says what kind of thing this person may do, everywhere.

The ladder is cumulative: a Manager can do everything an Editor can, an Editor everything a Contributor can, and so on down.

Contributor is the one people miss. It is the right role for most of a working crew — the people who photograph continuity and mark off scenes on the day, but who should not be renumbering scenes or rebuilding the schedule. If you have handed out Editor because Subscriber was too restrictive, Contributor is probably what you wanted.

Gate two: the departments

The department — hair, makeup, costume, props, script, art, AD and the rest — decides which parts of the production that role applies to.

Nobody is limited to one. A member can be in hair and makeup, or run props and set dressing together, which is how a small crew actually works. The gate asks whether something belongs to any of a person's departments, not whether it belongs to the one, so adding a department only ever widens what someone reaches. It never dilutes what they already had.

By itself a department is just a label. What turns it into a boundary is a single production-level setting.

The setting that changes everything: cross-department access

This lives on the production itself, and it has three values:

• All — departments are not a boundary. Everyone can view and edit every department's work, whatever they are in themselves. This is what a new production starts with.
• View — everyone can see every department, but can only edit their own.
• Denied — everyone can only see and edit their own.

This is the setting people do not know exists, and it is the reason "everyone can see everything" is the default answer. If you want hair and costume kept apart, changing the role will not do it — no role creates a department boundary. Only this setting does.

Putting the two together

Both gates apply, so the narrower one wins:

• An Editor in costume, with cross-department access set to Denied, can edit costume and nothing else.
• A Subscriber in costume, with access set to All, can see the whole production and edit none of it.
• A Contributor in hair, with access set to View, can see every department, and can add photos and notes to hair only.
• A Contributor in hair and makeup, with access set to Denied, can work in both and see neither costume nor anything else.

If someone cannot do something you expected, work out which gate stopped them. Role problems affect that person everywhere; department problems affect everyone the same way in one area.

Which department a photo or note lands in

Access is only half of it. Everything a member adds is filed under a department too — a scene photo, a continuity note — so someone in several is always filing under one of them at a time. That one is their default department.

Until they choose otherwise it is whichever sits at the front of their own order, and that order is theirs to arrange: the departments on a member's card can be dragged into place, and whichever ends up in front is the one they fall back to. They can also switch as they work, which is the quicker way — on any photos or notes panel the Add button carries the current department beside it, and picking another from that menu files the new item there and makes it the default from then on. Someone in a single department never sees the menu.

The default is per production, like everything else on a membership — hair and makeup on one show and costume on another means a separate default on each. And taking a department away resets a default that depended on it, so nobody is left filing into a department they are no longer in.

The thing that is not obvious

The owner is outside both gates. The production owner always passes every check, regardless of department or cross-department setting. The same is true for the owner of the series a production belongs to. There is no configuration that limits an owner — if you need someone restricted, they must not be the owner.

Two more rules worth knowing

A frozen or suspended production overrides every role, and the two are not the same thing:

• Frozen — the production becomes read-only for everyone. Every section is still there to browse and every export still works; nothing can be changed.
• Suspended — the production closes. Every section returns you to the dashboard except Billing, whatever your role, including the owner's. Settling the plan restores everything.

Neither deletes anything, and both are reversible. So "my Manager suddenly cannot edit anything" is usually one of these rather than a permissions mistake — check the production's state before rearranging anyone's role.

Vehicles and animals are governed by the props department. They are prop-like warehouse items and deliberately share the props department's access rather than having departments of their own. Someone in props can manage vehicles and animals; someone in another department is governed for those items exactly as they are for props.

Changing any of this

Roles and departments are changed per member from their card on the production's team page — the same place you invite from. A member has to keep at least one department. The page groups people by the department they file under, so someone in several appears once, under that one, with a badge for each of the others.

Cross-department access is part of the production's own settings, not the team page, which is why it is easy to miss when you are looking at a member who cannot see something.