A script coordinator unglitches the Matrix (and an .fdx)*
An adrift SC wrote to us: "Help! My file's corrupted, it's after 5:30, and I'm miles from dry land!"
And while working from a showrunner's boat sounds quite lovely, those cabins start feeling cramped when tensions are high. Let's get uncorrupting.
*Soon after publishing this article, Final Draft titled their Cyber Monday promotion "There is a glitch in the (pricing) matrix". We see you looking at us.
Common Corruption
Final Draft files seem to corrupt on the reg. Final Draft has their opinion on how to fix a file, and it's an issue even ScriptCoord.com has touched on previously.
Generally, a corrupted file can only be repaired by Final Draft. But with a little technical wizardly (or a whole lot of elbow grease), any script coordinator can also repair a file. That, by the way, should be one of your tactics to negotiate above union minimum when getting a new gig: if you can repair a corrupted file at night or over the weekend, when most distro occurs, you could save production thousands in avoided delays. That deserves an extra thirty cents an hour, right?
What is File Corruption?
File corruption happens when code shows up in a file that Final Draft doesn't know how to process. It then builds code around that unidentified material to try to give itself instructions how to handle it.
But then, when it reopens, it has to try to re-parse out the code it doesn't understand, further adding more code to the file. It's like watching a tumor metastasize in real-time. On and on it goes until it's 2 AM, production is waiting on double pinks, and Final Draft customer support doesn't open for 53 hours.
What Causes File Corruption?
The biggest and most notorious issue is copying and pasting material. This is a no-no for several reasons, but when it comes to file corruption, copying and pasting not only adds text to the .fdx, but it also adds information about formatting. Final Draft captures text, font, and formatting information for every individual paragraph (which is why you can cheat margins).
Even when it looks like there's nothing on the page, there could be code providing formatting information about that blank space if, by any chance, someone happened to put some text there.
Corruption can also occur when a file goes back and forth between two different versions of Final Draft. As each new version gains more features, there's more going on behind the scenes to keep track of everything (Final Draft 12, for example, contains character arc beats, scene arc beats, character details, and other features that didn't exist in earlier versions of FD). Consequentially, if a writer opens an FD 12 file in FD 10, Final Draft won't understand what a variable called CharacterTraitData is supposed to do.
Corruption can also happen if, for example, a writer wants to use a different font than Courier Final Draft, but the new font isn't natively available on another writer's computer. It can also happen naturally if a file didn't save to a hard drive correctly, the hard drive was damaged, or a download didn't completely attach.
Signs of Corruption
Corrupted files make themselves known in a few different ways.
Opening and saving files take longer to accomplish. If your file on a recently-made (2015+) Macbook takes longer than 30 seconds to open, there's probably something wrong.
Files are too large to email. In Gmail, this means larger than 15 MB. But Final Draft files usually are smaller than a single megabyte. So if you find files starting to bloat over 5 MB, then you're probably observing the early signs of corruption.
Final Draft simply refuses to open the file and gives you a warning, "The document could not be opened."
If you've got any of these issues, then it's time to sit down, pour yourself a stiff drink, and get ready to work.
Repairing a Corrupt .fdx File
The Official Final Draft Solution
Final Draft doesn't actually provide a way to repair a corrupt file. Instead, it wants you to capture all the text in your corrupted .fdx, export it and as a plain text file (this eliminates most of Final Draft's formatting code which, as discussed above, is usually where things go wrong). To do this, go to File > Export Script. Under File Format, click "Plain Text Format (*.txt) and save with a new file name.
FD then asks you to open the plain text file in Final Draft, save it as a script, and then manually add all the formatting back in yourself.
To do this, go to File > Open and click the new plain text file. You'll be prompted to select whether you want it opened as Text or Script. This method loses a significant amount of data that's important to script coordinators, like revision history, omitted scenes, adjusted margins, custom formatting, or any of the other goodies you've input along the way.
This is basically p from "retype the whole script from scratch." Which, for the record, is always in your toolbox as a last resort.
Just make sure you get the overtime approved beforehand, because you'll be raking it in.
The Unofficial .pdf Rebuild
Final Draft can open and read .pdfs (if the pdf wasn't distro'd via Scenechronize). And since you, the script coordinator, were likely the one who created the pdf that was used for the distro, that's an excellent place to start. Find the pdf, and right click on it. Right click (or ctrl+click) > Open With > Final Draft. This will open it back up with a good amount of formatting still intact.
Your headers will get screwed up by this, and you'll still need to comb through the .pdf, input the new round of changes, and do whatever you have to for your Collated Revisions tool to match the revision history of the previous version.
But you're a step ahead of Final Draft's solution.
Repairing the Code
(Note: Final Draft sternly poopoos this method. Proceed at your own risk)
Your script is written in a code that's surprisingly easy to read - and Final Draft simply compiles it into a dynamic, interactive format for you to work in. But that means you can access the script code directly. Create a copy of your .fdx. Right click (or ctrl+click) > Open With > Final Draft, and it'll open up a file that looks like this:
Don't worry if coding is not your thing - what you're looking at here is pretty easy to decipher. <Text> describes the text in each <Paragraph> and the <Paragraph Types> describe the element of that paragraph (eg: action, dialogue, etc.). The / symbol is used to end that line of code. Code that reads
<Paragraph Type="Action">
<Text>Sasha lies in bed, writing in her notebook. Sherlock enters from the bathroom, donning only a towel, and slips under the covers next to her.</Text>
</Paragraph>
looks like
Final Draft's code is straightforward and written in English. That means if you see code that looks like:
you've found the problem. Delete this. But since issues like this don't crop up all on their own, you need to scroll through the file and delete everything else that looks like this.
Corrupted files can also contain characters that shouldn't show up in a screenplay, like the pi symbol (π), repeating lines of <Paragraph> </Paragraph> (eg: a paragraph with no text in it), or an embedded image <Picture Id=> it can no longer find.
It might be hard to trim out every single thing that's going wrong - but if you can find giant blocks of garbage that are bloating your file past the 15 MB limit, then you can triage the file into one that, while still problematic, at least works for now.
Preventing Corruption
Final Draft is a little bit like a Jeep Wrangler: pretty, expensive, and surprisingly fragile. If one small issue goes unattended to, it'll balloon into a corrupted file. Therefore, there are some best practices your showrunner will ignore, but you can keep in mind when wondering who exactly made your life the living hell it is.
Never copy and paste text between Final Draft files, even if they're on the same computer and using the same version of Final Draft
Never attempt to put emojis in your script (Final Draft's official advice is for you to take a screenshot of the emoji, embed the image into the text, and resize it to the size of your font)
Ensure all writers are using the same version of Final Draft (the current most recent build at the time of this article is 12.0.5 Build 82.1)
Avoid, if at all possible, writers using different operating systems
Good luck, script coordinator. We know this wasn't your fault, and bravo/a to you for handling it. Godspeed and get some rest.
Got a question for tech support? Found a corrupted file that's corrupted for a new reason we should know about? We'd love see it - shoot us an email. We're actually very nice.
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