Scene timings

A Scene Timings document is another type of spreadsheet designed for tabulating page counts and correlating estimated and actual scene durations. It can help a script supervisor to prepare estimates in pre-production, or an assistant editor to report dailies assembly timings during production.

Choose File → New Scene Timings to create a new document.

Add a new scene entry to the document by clicking (or Edit → New Note from the menu). To delete existing scenes, select them and then click (or use Edit → Delete).

The scene timings table, in the main part of the window, displays several columns:

Scene

The name of the scene(s).

Count

The number of scenes accounted for in this entry.

Pages

Number of script pages, in eighths.

Est. Time

Script supervisor's estimated screen time.

Actual Time

Production time, as shot.

Asm. Time

Assembly time, as cut by the editor.

Difference

Relative difference of assembly time over actual production time.

Day

Shooting day.

Notes

Arbitrary notes.

The Time columns are displayed in minutes and seconds, and the Pages count is shown in eighths of a page. When entering times you can omit the colon, and when entering a page count you don't need to type the "/8".

Filtering and sorting

To search for a particular scene or restrict the display to a certain production day, enter a search string in the Search field or select a day from the Shoot Day: pop-up menu. The scene list will be filtered accordingly.

Cumulative totals pertaining to the scenes currently shown (or selected), including the number of scenes, total pages, net timings and assembly difference, are displayed at the bottom of the window.

Exporting for use with Excel

It is easy to export your scene timings as a tab-delimited plain-text file for use with other programs, such as Microsoft Excel, for further processing or formatting. Simply select File → Export as Text… and choose a filename.

If you will be pulling the data into Microsoft Excel, make sure that Excel-compatible text formatting is selected. (This will enclose each field in quotation marks to ensure that everything will import correctly; you can then open the text file from Excel.)