To see this working, head to your live site.

Group/bulk scene relocation/rename for beats

Hi Per, Hope you are doing well.

Is there a fast way to relocate several beats? This is needed for two reasons:

1st:

I could have 8 beats that all happened in a particular location but then as development fixes then mean the beats change scene/location but when put into new chapters/scenes, they still retain their old location settings. This gets a bit confusing when the stack of beats all have different locations.

2nd:

Unless beats have the right location, any new beat created takes the location from the previous. So I'm spending a lot of time manually fixing the locations to prevent more beats with the wrong location. It is a little jarring for creativity as i'm programming myself to make these fixes before getting into the beat content.

It would be great to be able to select multiple beats and then have an option to change their location from something like a dropdown of all the locations? To prevent entering the location incorecly or a variation of the exact wording from another location title.

As a side note:

I presumed the down arrow dropdown would access the list of all the scene locations in development, but it doesn't function in this way.

Is there a place to see all the locations in a list or edit them?

Thanks

Daniel

4 comments

4 Comments

Daniel Jaems

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Yes, this would work perfectly, in both scenarios. Both merhods would be very useful for me and I hope for everyone else too.

In addition, an important part of a blank location field on a new beat could have the auto complete/drop down of existing matching scenes based on typing the start of the word (like how excel auto completes). Or using the drop down button thst is currently there. On my version, this drop down arrow is ineffective. This way it would avoid several variations of the same scene location when manually typing it in.

Thanks

Daniel.

Per Holmes

Replying to

Hi,

Yes, it's commonly requested for a blank field to show all options. I don't know why it doesn't. In general, I think that our auto-complete dropdowns are clunky. There's just something odd with how select and cursor/tab/enter keys work in them, and they need an overhaul.

Is there a use-case for also setting time of day when remapping locations? I initially thought that it's just int/ext and the location. Does it make sense to remap INT. OFFICE - DAY to EXT. PARK - NIGHT? I guess it does.

Daniel Jaems

Replying to

Definitely. Yes. It would be useful to be able to remap/bulk change selected on the three fields. An additional function could clear all three fields. As sometimes I just need it to be blank for a while whilst I'm sorting out a research beats. Maybe a keyboard shortcut could clear the three fields in one swoop for that purpose?

Per Holmes

I think all of these ideas are good. This is the kind of stuff where we just have to use Causality and discover what the actual needs are.

Let's spitball a bit. It seems to me that this is something that should go through some dialogs, since it can be extremely destructive, and much of the destruction would happen outside of your view.

I'd like to imagine two separate dialogs:

"Remap Locations", where you simply select before and after locations, maybe more than one to do them in bulk. So if before is "INT. OFFICE" and after is "EXT. PARK", you'd set up these before/afters, press OK, and they'll be changed everywhere they're used in the script. This function would simply be in the Script menu.
"Bulk Set Locations", where you multiple-select a number of beats, right-click and select Bulk Set Locations (needs a better name), and in the dialog you select Int/Ext and Location from a drop-down. When you press OK, these specific beats get changed.

Does that cover the use-cases?

Also, one hidden feature is that Bulk Set Locations could be done on a filtered result, so you could filter on INT. OFFICE, then decide that half of them should happen in a park, and do Bulk Set Locations just on half of them.