Causality is great! It took some time to become productive, but it’s been worth it.
So, for TV scripts spanning multiple episodes, is there some way to zero the timeline (at top of whiteboard) for each episode?
What it shows is the total runtime from the start of the first episode, but what I need is the timing relative to the current episode. This is common in TV for commercial breaks.
There isn’t right now, but it’s something we should obviously do. We already do it partially, since scene numbers already count from the beginning of each episode.
I agree, this should be very high on the list. We’re trying to get 3.5 out of the gate (with massive rewrites and the new Emotion Tracking), so I’d rather not pile more on top of that. But making this change is probably not very difficult.
Best,
Per Holmes
You’re not going to believe the workflow required to get around this. I copy the cau file, rename it to the new episode, then delete all the prior episode beats.
This sounds easy, but I’ve not found a way to delete multiple beats (all at once), so it ends up being tedious to delete them one at a time. (Yeah, I could drag them all into a single group, then delete the group, but that’s an equivalent amount of work.)
And, I hope this method isn’t accumulating a pile of beats in the boneyard. Is there any way to empty that trash or is it getting carried along behind the scenes with every new (copy-based) episode?
What other way is there to do this? I want to keep all the same lanes, characters, and locations between episodes, I just need to remove the old beats and create new beats for the next episode. Your design seems so object-oriented, I really hoped it could solve this issue.
Hi Carlo,
Thanks for posting!
It’s extremely bad to split episodes into separate project files. You lose one of the core points of using Causality at all, which is long storylines. If you have a storyline that spans 5 episodes, you’ve now put this into 5 completely disconnected worlds, with no ability to reason about the storyline, or move a beat from episode 3 into episode 2.
The app is designed for you to have a whole season in the app, and even multiple seasons. Many people have requested a Season level above Episode, so that you can design storylines that even go across season boundaries, and this is coming.
You’re then supposed to use the Episode Filter to work on one episode at a time. In 4.0, each episode will also show the local page/time within the episode, whereas now, pages just count up, so page 249 might be in episode 6, which isn’t exactly intuitive.
About deleting things, there shouldn’t be any problem selecting multiple things and deleting them. If you’re unable to do that, it would be great to understand what exact path you’re taking, because we haven’t otherwise seen it, and it hasn’t been reported by others.
In the current version, beats are simply “pulled out” when you remove them from the script, and they’re only truly deleted when you delete them from the Boneyard.
But this will all change with collaboration, which has infinite history because it works with a distributed commit stack. This leaves an audit trail, and it’s used for revision management, but mostly, it’s how the entire sync mechanism works. With collaboration, it won’t be possible to fully delete things, only delete them enough that you don’t have to look at them. Fully deleting things and forking into a new document will need a dedicated “fork” feature, which purges history while making a new document with the current contents. But in return, you get a real-time document across your devices and with collaborators.