Roles, departments and who can see what
Access in SceneMatch is decided by two separate things — a member's role and their department — plus one production-level setting that decides whether departments are a boundary at all.
When you invite someone you pick 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.
| Role | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including billing and transferring the production. Never restricted. |
| Manager | Can change anything about the production, including the team. |
| Editor | Can create and change characters, looks, scenes, script days and the shooting schedule. |
| Contributor | Can add photos and notes, and mark scenes as filmed. Cannot create or restructure. |
| Subscriber | Can view everything they are allowed to see, and change nothing. |
| Denied | No access at all. The production disappears for them. |
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 department
The department — hair, makeup, costume, props, script, art, AD and the rest — decides which parts of the production that role applies to.
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 department they are in. 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 department.
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.
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.
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. 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.