Arc Studio makes it easy to manage drafts and revisions, track changes, recover deleted scenes from older drafts. It becomes so simple, because you don’t have to do anything – we organize everything for you in the background, and you just add some additional info when you remember to do so. And if you forget, you can always do it later.
This way, your drafts and revision don’t devolve into a mess.
Watch this video or keep reading below for a full walkthrough and tutorials on how to make your workflows as pleasant as possible:
Filing Drafts
When working on your script in Final Draft for a while, you usually end up with something like this:
You need these copies to look up older versions, either for backups and recovering earlier versions of a scene, or because you sent them to somebody and want to have them as reference. In Arc Studio, we organize your drafts like this:
To file a new draft, just hit Cmd+Shift+S (Ctrl+Shift+S) or use the button in the sidebar. Now you choose a name, and optionally a revision color (more on that later).
This will create a snapshot, a point of reference in the history of your script. If you add a revision color, we call it a revision. These snapshots have important metadata attached, such as when it was filed, who filed it, and who contributed changes. Together they form a cohesive history that you can browse conveniently (more on that later).
Auto-saves
If you forget to file a snapshot, you can still do that later: Whenever you stop writing for 10 minutes, we create a snapshot for you, called an auto-save. You can browse these auto-saves under full-history, and you can turn them into snapshots or revisions after the fact.
Change tracking
In Arc Studio, all your changes are tracked automatically – you can never forget to track something. To start tracking, click “Change marks off” in the top-bar and select “Start tracking from here”.
Auto-tracking
If you forgot to track earlier, you can also select to “Change where we are tracking from” and choose an earlier snapshot:
Again, it’s impossible to “forget” tracking: We always track in the background and you simply choose which changes are highlighted.
Highlight modes
Change marks are set up at the draft level, so all the collaborators on a script will have the same changes highlighted. E.g. as a script coordinator, you can set up the change marks for your showrunner and all the other writers involved.
That said, every writer can control how their changes are displayed. We offer the following options:
- Highlight by author: Who made the highlighted changes?
- Highlight by revision color: In which revision where the changes introduced?
- Simple highlights: All the changes are highlighted in blue.
- Hide change marks
Each collaborator can set this to their own preference individually.
Browsing your history
Opening up a snapshot, you will see your script as it looked at that time. Here you have full control over the changes you want to display: what to compare it to and how to highlight them. The highlighting options are the same as when you track changes, but the simple mode is called “By Type” and also display things that were deleted in red, and additions are highlighted green.
When choosing what to compare your snapshot to, you have 3 options:
- Not comparing it at all
- Comparing it to the previous snapshot
- Comparing it to the previous revision (e.g. the blue revision is compare to the white revision, even if there are snapshots between those two revisions)
- Comparing it to the current version of the document
Revert mode
Deleted a scene and want it back? Switch to revert mode to quickly undo changes that have happened since the current draft. (Revert mode is the same as highlighting changes “since this version” “by type”.)
Just click the undo bubble next to a change and confirm to revert it in the current version of your doc.
