August release roundup — Batch Ops, Multi-Currency Budgets, Calendar PDF

Pre-production is full of work that is not hard, just repetitive. Moving twelve strips to a different shooting day. Setting the same location on nine of them. Merging the same duplicate character tag for the fourth time. Retyping a vendor quote from euros into dollars. None of it takes thought. All of it takes clicks.

The August release goes after exactly that. Batch Operations on the stripboard act on a whole selection at once, budgets got a new design and now hold more than one currency, group operations on tags sit in the tag list where you can see them, the shooting calendar leaves Filmustage as a formatted PDF, and AI Dude hands you a ready-made command instead of a blank message box.

Very little of this is a new capability. It is mostly the same work in one pass instead of twenty clicks.

Move a day, set a location, in one pass

Dragging a selection of strips around always worked. What is new is what the selection unlocks. Tick the strips or shooting days you want and a row of actions appears above the board: Move under scene, Move to day, Set location, Set unit, Set script day, Lock in place. Every one of them applies to the whole selection, in one pass.

Two of those answer the requests we heard most often: move a whole block of scenes to another shooting day, and set one location across all of them at once. The rest existed before, strip by strip; what changed is that they now take a selection.

Batch Operations matter most on the second and third pass of a schedule, when the shape of the shoot is roughly right and you are consolidating: one location block that moved a week later, a unit split across two days, a night block that needs to sit after a company move. Those are group edits by nature. Doing them one strip at a time is where an afternoon disappears.

Locked days stay locked

Locking is the other half of reshuffling. Once a shooting day is dialed in — the location is booked, the cast is confirmed — you can lock the day, or individual scenes inside it. A lock icon sits on the day break row and on any locked scene, and locked items stay where they are while sorting and dragging move everything around them.

That turns rescheduling from a careful operation into a fast one. You are no longer protecting settled days by being gentle with the board; the board protects them for you.

Jump to a shooting day without scrolling

A color-segmented navigation bar now sits above the schedule, with one segment per shooting day. Hover a segment and it tells you which day it covers — End of Day 3 of 10 — and selecting it scrolls the board straight to that day.

On a ten-day shoot this is a convenience. On an eighty-day shoot it is the difference between reading a schedule and hunting through one. The segment widths carry information too: you can see the shape of the shoot in the bar itself before you scroll anywhere.

Two ways to read the same board

The stripboard switches between two display modes from the view icons in the toolbar. List view puts one schedule item per row with columns for set, Cast ID, pages, unit, estimation, script day, and shooting location — the mode for data entry and for scanning cast and location coverage across the shoot. Stripboard view puts one vertical strip per scene, color-coded by interior or exterior and day or night, with a legend above the board — the mode for reading the shape of the schedule: night blocks, location runs, how long each day runs.

Switching modes changes the layout only. Scene order, day breaks, banners, and every value you have entered stay exactly as they were.

Budgeting: a new design, and several currencies at once

The Budgeting tab comes with a new design in this release. Line items read as a proper table — code, name, the breakdown tag types feeding the line, fringes, deductions, and the estimate — with category subtotals in the flow of the sheet. The totals panel stays in view below the sheet: total, original, variance, fringes, deductions, credits, charges, and the grand total with deductions. You can watch a number move while you edit the line that moves it, which is the whole job of a budgeting screen.

One budget, several currencies

Productions rarely pay in one currency. Open Currencies and you set a base currency that every line total rolls up into, then add the other currencies your production actually pays in from a searchable list and assign them to the lines that use them.

Each additional currency carries an exchange rate against the base — shown in the form 1 EUR = 0.00 USD — filled in from a live rate service. If the service is unavailable the rate stays at 1, so check it before you rely on the totals. You can override any rate by hand, and Filmustage recalculates every line that uses that currency. Because the rates are stored against the base, the base currency locks while additional currencies exist; remove them first if you need to change it.

On a line, the Curr column sets which currency that line is priced in. It stays hidden until a budget uses more than one currency — turn it on the first time from Columns → Currency, and after the first assignment it appears on its own. Totals are always reported in the base currency only, so the Grand Total stays one number no matter how many currencies feed it. Removing a currency returns its lines to the base and leaves the entered amounts intact.

This is the difference between a budget you can hand to a financier and a spreadsheet of manual conversions that goes stale the day the rate moves.

A calendar you can actually send

The calendar view now carries what your team needs to read, and it leaves the app as a document. Two changes, one result: Calendar display settings control what shows on each scene — length and time, cast and unit, location and script day — and Export → Calendar PDF turns that view into a document. The export follows whatever the calendar currently shows, so you set the level of detail before you export, not after.

What comes out is a real deliverable rather than a screen grab. The PDF opens with a cover page carrying the project name, the schedule version, the number of shooting days, the shoot period, and the export date, plus a confidentiality notice and a link back to the project. Then the calendar itself, as a Sunday-to-Saturday week grid: each shooting day shows its date, its day number out of the total, the scene count split into day and night, the page and time totals, and a block per scene. Dates inside the shoot period with nothing scheduled are marked NO SHOOT — the gaps are stated rather than implied.

One distinction worth keeping straight: the Calendar PDF is a document for people. Exporting the shooting order for other scheduling software is a different action, and still gives you MMSX, SEX, XLSX, or PDF.

Tags, handled as a set

Tags now behave like a set instead of a list of individual items. Select the ones you want and a row of group actions appears above the list with the selection count next to it: Change Category, Copy to Scene(s), Lock Cast IDs, Unlock Cast IDs, Clear Cast IDs, Merge Tags, Delete Tags. Every one of them applies to the whole selection.

Discoverability is the real change. Bulk editing that exists but is hidden behind a shortcut gets used by the two people who read the release notes. Bulk editing that appears above the list the moment you select something gets used by everyone.

Above the tag list sits the other half: AI-powered character deduplication. The Suggestions panel pairs up tags it believes are the same character — EMMA LIU next to EMMA — and shows a match score, a one-line reason, and the scenes each version appears in, so you can judge the pair without opening either tag. Nothing merges on its own: the suggestions sit behind a Review button and wait for you. It proposes; you approve.

Pick a command instead of writing one

You have always been able to ask AI Dude anything. Now you do not have to phrase it. Open the Run with AI Dude menu and pick a suggested command: it lands in the chat fully worded, and you can adjust it, add your own details, or send it as it is.

The list changes with where you are. On the Script tab it leans toward reading the material — find scenes with a tense confrontation, find dialogue that sounds like a confession, write a one-page synopsis with professional coverage. Open the same menu on the stripboard and it turns operational: build the whole shooting schedule, sort the schedule by location, estimate how long each scene takes, split the schedule into shooting days, add a lunch break to every shooting day, add a banner at every company move. Below those sit the questions you ask once the board exists — analyze the schedule, who has the most hold days, find scheduling conflicts, fix the cast and location conflicts — and an undo for the last change.

The gap this closes is not capability, it is the blank box. Most people underuse an assistant because they are not sure what to ask for or how much detail it needs. A worded example answers both questions at once, and editing someone else's sentence is easier than writing the first one. The last item in the menu, list everything AI Dude can do here, is there for the same reason.

Faster processing, cleaner character handling

Breakdowns run noticeably quicker in this release, including on long scripts. Alongside the speed work, extended and special characters are recognized more reliably, so scripts that used to come back with mangled names and broken accents now parse clean.

That is a parsing improvement, not a language feature list: what changed is character handling, which is what breaks first on scripts written outside plain ASCII.

Also new this month

• A script panel in the stripboard — open a read-only panel on the left and the scene you select loads its screenplay text, so you can check dialogue and action without leaving the board
• Duplicate a scene on the stripboard from the strip's gear menu, for scenes that shoot twice — the copy carries a COPY badge so the two never get confused
• Images in script annotations — place reference images anywhere on the script page, alongside the highlights, stamps, and text boxes from the previous update

New tutorial: a storyboard from your script

A new walkthrough covers AI Storyboards from the first scene to a finished board — camera, shot size, shot type, movement, equipment, and lighting on each frame. It runs short enough to watch once and board your own script the same afternoon.

Storyboards and shot lists work on the Free plan as manual boards; AI frame generation is part of Director's Cut.

AI is optional

Storyboards in Filmustage are previz: a quick way to see how a scene might play before you are on set. Generated images do not replace the craft, and they are not meant to — they get you to the idea faster.

Every AI step in Filmustage is one you choose to run. Use it at the point in your workflow where it earns its place and do the rest by hand; most people end up somewhere in between. Whatever the AI hands back is a draft: yours to check, yours to sign off on.

That is the whole policy.

The bottom line

Scheduling software is judged on the second week, not the first. The first schedule is a creative act; every schedule after it is maintenance — a location that moved, a cast member who dropped, a day that has to split, a quote that came back in the wrong currency. Maintenance is where click count turns into hours.

Batch Operations, locked days, a navigation bar that gets you to any day, group tag actions, multi-currency budgets, and a calendar that exports cleanly all attack the same cost. Open a project, tick a block of strips, and move the whole thing to a new day. That is the release in one action.