Drafts, revisions and the editing lock

There are two different kinds of saving here, and the difference matters.

Drafts save themselves

While you have a script open, your work is written to a draft every thirty seconds. You do not have to do anything, and the bar at the bottom shows when it last saved.

A draft is a private working copy. Nobody else sees it, and it does not change what anyone downstream reads.

A revision is a decision

When you are ready for the version to *count*, save a revision. That is the deliberate act: it becomes the current version of the script, everything downstream re-reads it, and the draft is cleared.

Saving a revision re-runs the parser, so the scene list, the page count and the character statistics all update to match what you just committed.

The colour system

Revisions follow the standard production colour order, and ScenePaper advances it for you:

white → blue → pink → yellow → green → goldenrod → buff → salmon → cherry → tan, then back to white.

That order is not decorative. On a set, "we're on the pink pages" is how a crew knows whether the sheet in their hand is current, and it works because everybody uses the same sequence. Each revision can also carry a change description — what moved, and why — which is what the colour alone cannot tell you.

One writer at a time

Opening a script for editing takes an editing lock. While you hold it, nobody else can type in that script; they can still read it.

The lock is refreshed every minute while you are there, and it goes stale after two minutes of no contact — so if your laptop closes or your connection drops, the script is not stuck. Somebody else can pick it up shortly after.

It is released as soon as you leave the editor.

This is deliberately pessimistic rather than collaborative. Two people typing into the same screenplay at once produces a document neither of them wrote, and the cost of that on a script — where a single misplaced line changes a scene — is worse than the inconvenience of waiting your turn.

Next: sides and distribution.