Episodes

Episodes are the primary unit of output -- a single installment in your series. The Episodes page lists all episodes in a project.

Click New episode and supply a display name; a short ID (lowercase, digits, hyphens) is suggested from it and you can edit it before confirming. The list's one column is Title.

Action	Notes
Select	Opens the episode, on its Properties view
Rename	On the row's "..." menu -- opens a dialog for the display name
Delete	On the same menu, with a confirmation
Star / Unstar	The star icon at the left of each row

Properties

Selecting an episode opens its Properties view. Episode properties are grouped into cards, in the order the pipeline asks for them: Core properties, Story drivers, Story structure lock, Script review, Music & sound, and Final review. Each card header can approve its whole set at once, and offers a Review with AI pass.

Core properties -- Episode name, Description, and Notes. The description is what identifies the episode in lists; notes are yours alone and are never read by the AI.

Story drivers -- the properties relevant to the writing and production of this specific episode:

Property	Purpose
Episode objective	What this episode accomplishes in the arc
Core conflict	The central dramatic tension
Relationship dynamics	How character relationships evolve
Arc integration	How this episode fits into ongoing story arcs
Continuity notes	What carries over from the previous episode
Setup for next episode	Seeds planted for upcoming episodes
Premise	The episode's core premise

The later cards are review gates rather than authoring: Story structure lock records what is still blocking the structure; Script review holds your own notes on the first draft (beat coverage, clarity, motivation, dialogue, pacing, and the revision plan); Music & sound and Final review hold the equivalent notes for the audio and the finished cut.

These fields are used by the AI Assistant for context and by the Episode Plan's acceptance criteria.

Outline

The Outline view provides a high-level structural view of the episode -- scenes, beats, and the overall shape of the story. Use it to get an overview before diving into the script or individual scenes. It is also where the Story Consistency Check runs.

Script

The Script view is the main writing surface for the episode -- the screenplay, written in Fountain format. See Script for the full reference.

Analysis

The Analysis view runs an AI pass over the script and breaks it into the characters, locations, and props it mentions, so you can resolve each against your entity library. See Script for how analysis fits into the writing flow.

Dialogue

The Dialogue view lists every line of dialogue in the episode and turns it into voice -- generate the whole episode's spoken track in one press, then work line by line through takes, recordings, and voice changers. See Dialogue Audio for the full reference.

Storyboard

The Storyboard view shows the episode's shots as a grid of 16:9 frames, in order, grouped under their scene headings -- the "see all the shots in order" overview. Each cell shows the shot's clip if it has one, otherwise its storyboard still, otherwise a "no media" placeholder, so the holes are obvious at a glance. Double-click a card to open the shot; click a scene heading to open the scene. Shots can be dragged into a different order within their scene, and a round + appears in the gap between cards to insert a new shot there.

Brief

The Brief view answers one question across the whole episode: are the inputs complete and correct before you generate? Each shot is listed with a thumbnail, its number, name and type, and then its inputs -- location, cast (with mood), and props, each badged from scene when it is inherited or override when the shot sets its own -- plus the backdrop details inherited from the scene (lighting, palette, atmosphere, music, ambient) and the shot's dialogue lines. Nothing is edited in place: clicking a field opens that shot. Shots can be reordered and inserted here too.

Shot List

The Shot List view shows every scene and its shots for the episode in one place -- a quick way to see the shape of the episode's coverage and jump to any shot.

Sequencer

The Episode Sequencer is where the episode is cut. It shows the whole episode in one view -- the scenes as a strip, the shots as a strip inside them, and below those the tracks holding dialogue, music and effects -- and you can both watch it and change it here.

Watching it

Play, pause and step a frame at a time from the transport in the middle of the toolbar. Zoom to jumps the view to a whole episode, a scene or a single shot, and Set Range limits what plays and what exports.

The speaker button opens the sound panel, holding mute and the volume slider together. The button itself keeps showing the state after you close the panel -- crossed out when muted, and otherwise roughly how loud it is.

A shot you have not picked an image for yet still shows you something. If the project already has a starred picture of a character who speaks in the shot, or of its location, that stands in for the missing frame. If there is nothing to borrow -- which is normal on a new project -- the shot plays as a hatched panel naming the shot and saying it has no image yet, so you can hear the cut and read where you are instead of watching black. That panel is a note to you, not a frame -- it is never included in an exported video, where the shot stays blank.

Choosing what a click does

Next to the volume is a row of four tools. They change what a plain click means; everything you drag behaves the same whichever tool is chosen.

Tool	A click does this
Select	Selects what you click. Double-click opens its properties. This is the everyday tool.
Split	Cuts the shot you click, at the point you click. The two halves add up to the original length, so nothing after them moves.
Insert	Press and drag to the right to open a gap. The green line follows your cursor, and the sequencer moves as you drag so you can see the result before you let go.
Remove	Drag out a span of time you want gone. It stays marked in red until you press Delete, which takes it out and closes the gap.

The cursor changes with the tool and a line under the sequencer reminds you what the click will do, so you can always tell which one is active.

Insert and Remove are the pair you will reach for most once the music is in: music usually runs across many shots, and these are how you bring the shot lengths into line with it.

Inserting time holds the shot you pressed in for longer, and the scene grows to match. The sound moves with it: anything in that scene placed at or after where you pressed slides along by the same amount, and anything before it stays exactly where it is -- so nothing you have already lined up drifts out of sync. No cut moves, so nothing you have already cut gets re-cut.

Removing time is deliberately two steps. Dragging only marks the span; nothing changes until you press Delete or the wastebasket button. While the span is marked, anything that will be taken away is outlined in red, so you can see the cost before you pay it. Press Escape to let it go.

When you do commit, the span stops existing and everything after it closes up:

• Shots that reach into the span from either side are shortened. A shot lying right across it keeps playing and simply loses that much time. A shot wholly inside the span is hidden, not deleted -- it keeps its length and its place, and you can bring it back from the Shot List.
• Sound that reaches into the span is trimmed at that edge. A music bed lying right across the span is shortened from its end and never cut in the middle, so it keeps playing without a hole in it -- and you can drag its end back out if you took too much. Anything wholly inside the span is unplaced; the file itself stays in the project.

A span has to sit inside a single scene. To take time out of two scenes, do them one at a time.

Changing the cut

• Move a cut by dragging the diamond that sits on it. The shot before grows, the shot after shrinks, and the scene stays the same length -- so every sound in the scene keeps the position you gave it.
• Remove a cut by clicking the diamond and pressing Delete, or the wastebasket button in the toolbar. The two shots merge into one. Nothing is thrown away: the shot that was absorbed keeps its record and anything you rendered for it.
• Lengthen the last shot in a scene by dragging the grip on the right-hand end of the scene. That one grows the scene.

Bringing the script's dialogue in

Every line of the episode's dialogue is laid onto a dialogue track in script order for you, as soon as you open the Sequencer. There is nothing to press. You do not need shots for this: a scene that has nothing but a script and rendered takes can be played straight through, which is how you judge pacing and delivery by ear before any picture exists.

It says what it did -- "3 lines to add, 1 no longer in the script" -- rather than changing the sequencer silently. Dialogue you have already placed keeps the timing you gave it: a clip already playing a line's audio is recognised and left where it is, never duplicated. After a script change, only what is new is brought across.

What it does, line by line:

• A line that has a take and is not on the sequencer yet is added. On an empty scene the lines are spaced out in script order. On a scene you have already worked on, a new line lands after the line before it, and everything later in that scene slides along to make room -- so the pacing you settled stays settled.
• A line you have re-rendered takes its new take's length. A longer take pushes what follows along; a shorter one leaves a gap.
• A line the script has moved is laid down again in its new place, and the clip it used to have is left where it was, marked.
• A line that has left the script has its clip marked, not removed.

Nothing is ever deleted and nothing is ever pulled backwards -- time is only made. Clearing the gap a marked clip leaves is an edit only you should make, because sometimes the silence is the point; use the Remove tool when you want it gone.

Lines with no take yet stay off the sequencer, and the dialog says how many there are. Generate them on the Dialogue view first.

If the episode has no tracks yet, the button creates a Dialogue, Music and SFX track to place on.

The track column

Down the left of the sequencer is a fixed column naming every row -- the scenes, the shots, the picture, and each sound track under them. It stays put as you zoom and scroll, because a track's name is a fact about the track and not about any moment in it.

Double-click a track's name to open it. That is where you rename it, set its level, mute or solo it, and choose whether it ducks under dialogue. The "..." at the right of the name opens the same thing.

A track's name decides what lands on it. A track whose name starts with "Dialogue" is where generated lines go, and it is what other tracks duck under; one starting with "Music" is where generated music cues go; "SFX" marks effects. Rename a track and you change what is placed there automatically, so the dialog tells you what the name you have typed currently declares.

+ New track, under the last one, adds a track at the bottom. It arrives with a sequential name that means nothing -- rename it to give it a purpose.

Working with sound

Drag a clip along its track to change when it plays, or up and down to move it to another track. Drag the lower part of either end to trim it. What snaps as you drag is the moment inside the sound you are lining up -- a door slam, a first syllable -- not the start of the file.

Dragging an end inwards trims material off; dragging it back outwards puts that material back, and stops once there is none left. So a clip can never be stretched past the end of its own file. Stills are the exception -- a single frame holds for as long as you ask it to -- as are clips set to loop, which simply repeat to fill whatever length you give them.

Fades live along the top edge. Each end of a clip has a small triangular handle there: with no fade set it shows as a cut-off corner, and dragging it inwards fades the clip in or out. The sloped wedge that appears is the fade itself -- the slope is the volume ramp. Once a fade is set the handle sits at the point where the fade ends, so you can always see how long it is and take hold of it again to change it. Double-click the clip to read both fades as numbers.

The anchor is the small triangle standing on a clip's bottom edge. It marks the moment inside the sound that you are lining up with the picture -- the gunshot, not the second of room tone before it. That moment is what holds the clip in place and what snaps when you drag, which is why a clip with a long run-up sits further left than you might expect. A clip whose anchor is right at its start shows no triangle, because its left edge already marks it.

Double-click empty space on a track to add something there; the track's name decides what it offers you. Double-clicking past the end of the episode works too: the last shot is lengthened until that moment exists, and the sound is placed there. Nothing before it moves, so nothing you have already lined up drifts.

A sound placed this way arrives at its own full length, wherever in the scene you drop it -- a short sound dropped a moment before the scene ends is not cut down to fit, the scene grows to hold it. Two things can still shorten it on arrival: the next clip on the same track, because a track plays one clip at a time; and a file long enough to resize the episode on its own, which arrives as its first ten seconds rather than dragging everything after it out of shape. This only ever shortens the clip, never the file -- drag its end outwards to get the rest back. The line under the sequencer says when it has been shortened and what stopped it.

Delete removes a selected clip straight away. Only the placement goes -- the file stays in the project, so putting it back is a double-click rather than a re-render.

Seeing what something is

The wastebasket button in the toolbar lights up as soon as something is selected, and Delete on the keyboard does the same thing.

With the Select tool, double-click a shot or a clip to see what it is: which scene it belongs to, when it starts and ends, how long it is, and for a clip its track, level, fades and where its sync point sits. It also explains the two things that surprise people most -- that a shot's length is set by you rather than by its footage, and that a clip is anchored to its scene, which is why editing shots never drags it out of place.

Rendering happens at the shot and scene level -- see Shots for render controls.

Media

The episode's own Media Gallery -- the home for anything that belongs to the whole episode rather than to one scene or shot, such as a music bed or a score that runs across scenes. It behaves like every other gallery: the episode is a destination in the Organize action's tree, so media can be copied or moved in and out of it, and clicking the episode in the Browse Media Files dialog shows the episode's own media (expanding it to reach its scenes and shots is the same click).

As with the project gallery, Link is the one transfer Organize cannot make out of an episode gallery -- a link has to name the entity it points back at. Use Copy or Move instead.

Progress

The Progress view is the episode's heat map: the nine production phases as columns, everything the episode is made of as rows, and a green / white / grey cell for each pairing. It is the fastest way to see which phase is nearly done and which has barely started, and every cell is a link to the work it stands for. See Progress for the full reference.

Guide

The Guide view is the guided, step-by-step way to work through the episode's production plan -- one step and one group of fields at a time, with AI assistance close at hand. It is the primary place to build an episode out. See Guide for the full reference.

Exporting the episode

When the episode is assembled, the Sequencer can turn it into a single video file. Open the Render menu at the top right and choose Export Episode Video (set the resolution first): every shot -- the chosen clip or storyboard still, in scene order, with the dialogue and music mixed in -- is rendered and combined into one video, which downloads to your computer to watch and share. If some shots have changed since they were last rendered, you are asked to re-render them first. Shots that have no chosen image or clip yet appear as blank frames, so you can still export a rough cut and fill the gaps later.

The exported file runs from the first cut to the last one, and its sound is exactly as long as its picture. Anything placed past the end of the final shot -- a line that overruns, a music tail -- is not in the export, because there is no picture out there to play it over. If something needs longer, give the last shot the time and it comes with it.