Dear all,
I have a technical question on Final Draft 9.
We create an episodic drama and produce about 24 episodes per year. We use Final Draft for all of drafts of our scripting, as well as gathering all of the notes from various team members on each draft of those scripts.
Each team member sends their notes included as ScriptNotes in a Final Draft document itself. This makes sense because most of the notes are very specific to the lines. So, the notes might say things like, “This line doesn’t make sense for this character.” or “This contradicts what we learned about this location in a previous episode.” or “This line is weak. Suggest that we rephrase it this way.” And so on.
This is all well and good. However, here’s the technical question / problem. There is no way for our script editor to easily merge these notes. FinalDraft doesn’t provide a built-in way to merge these ScriptNotes into one document. You can open an individual document to see one person’s notes. And you can open several documents containing ScriptNotes and manually copy and paste them into one master document. But this becomes very cumbersome (and time-consuming) when merging ten or more documents that can contain upwards of 100 or more notes a piece.
Considering how much time it takes to merge these notes and that Final Draft files are essentially glorified XML files, we’ve even looked at third-party tools to merge these documents. So far, we haven’t found a clean solution.
So, here’s the question: Have any other screenwriters or teams run into this issue? If so, how did you solve it? Is there a technical work-around that I don’t know about? Or is there another way that you give notes on scripts in Final Draft.
Thank you in advance!
Nathan
I have a technical question on Final Draft 9.
We create an episodic drama and produce about 24 episodes per year. We use Final Draft for all of drafts of our scripting, as well as gathering all of the notes from various team members on each draft of those scripts.
Each team member sends their notes included as ScriptNotes in a Final Draft document itself. This makes sense because most of the notes are very specific to the lines. So, the notes might say things like, “This line doesn’t make sense for this character.” or “This contradicts what we learned about this location in a previous episode.” or “This line is weak. Suggest that we rephrase it this way.” And so on.
This is all well and good. However, here’s the technical question / problem. There is no way for our script editor to easily merge these notes. FinalDraft doesn’t provide a built-in way to merge these ScriptNotes into one document. You can open an individual document to see one person’s notes. And you can open several documents containing ScriptNotes and manually copy and paste them into one master document. But this becomes very cumbersome (and time-consuming) when merging ten or more documents that can contain upwards of 100 or more notes a piece.
Considering how much time it takes to merge these notes and that Final Draft files are essentially glorified XML files, we’ve even looked at third-party tools to merge these documents. So far, we haven’t found a clean solution.
So, here’s the question: Have any other screenwriters or teams run into this issue? If so, how did you solve it? Is there a technical work-around that I don’t know about? Or is there another way that you give notes on scripts in Final Draft.
Thank you in advance!
Nathan