Documents and whiteboards

Documents are CineFlow’s creative canvases and files: whiteboards, diagrams, beat boards, slides, text documents, and uploaded files. They live in two places: standalone on your dashboard, or inside a project on its Documents page.

Document types

Type	What it is
Whiteboard	A freeform canvas for boards, references, and planning
Diagram	The same canvas tuned for diagrams
Beat Board	A board of story beat cards
Slides	A canvas organized into presentable slides
Document	A block based text document
File	An uploaded PNG, JPEG, or PDF
Script Markup	Script pages rendered for drawing annotations (created from the Script page)

Create and organize

In a project: open Documents in the sidebar and use New Document (Whiteboard, Diagram, Beat Board, Slides). Views: Table, Rows, Cards, with sort options under Display options.
On the dashboard: New Document offers Whiteboard, Diagram, Beat Board, Slides, and Document (the text document type).
Folders (project Documents page): New Folder creates one; the folder menu offers Rename, Color, and delete (choosing between unfiling and deleting the contents). Move documents by drag or with Move to folder in the document menu.
Document menu: Open, Open in new tab, Rename, Duplicate, Move to folder, Share, Delete. Titles also rename inline (double-click on a card).
Pin documents to show them in the sidebar’s Pinned section.
Add file (Office, PDF or image) is one action for both kinds of file, and dropping a file on the Documents page does the same thing. PNG, JPEG and PDF are stored as attachments and open in a viewer where you can draw annotations. DOCX and spreadsheets (XLSX, XLS, CSV) become text documents; PPTX becomes a slides document, imported in the background with a progress card. Anything else is refused by name.
Dropping several files at once is fine: each one goes to the pipeline its type calls for, and only the ones CineFlow cannot use are named in the refusal. A drop of exactly one convertible file opens the result; a larger batch leaves you on the list.

The canvas (whiteboards, diagrams)

The floating toolbar has Select, Hand, Undo, Redo, and the tools Draw (with Pencil, Highlighter, Eraser), Shape, Text, Note, plus CineFlow items: Shot card, Column, Colour, To-do, and Media. Upload places image and media files, Paste link embeds a URL, and a snapping toggle switches between snapped and free placement. Contextual bars adjust stroke width, opacity, color, fill, and alignment. Drag files straight onto the canvas to add them.

Everything is multiplayer: edits sync live and collaborators appear as cursors.

Palette from an image

To build a colour palette from an image, select the image on the canvas (a dropped or uploaded image, or a media card holding an image or GIF) and click Palette in its bar. CineFlow reads the picture and drops up to five Colour cards beside it, one per distinct colour that actually occurs in the image, so a three-ink poster gives three cards and a flat image gives one. Each card is named automatically. The cards arrive selected, and one undo removes them all. YouTube and Vimeo embeds have no pixels to read and offer no Palette. An image pasted by link from a host that blocks reading shows Could not read pixels from <host>: it does not allow cross-origin reads.

Capture a frame from a video

To extract a frame from a video, select the uploaded video card, scrub or pause on the frame you want, and click Capture frame in the player bar. The frame on screen becomes a new image card beside the video, named after the video’s title plus the time in seconds (for example “Interview 12s.png”), uploaded like a dropped file. It arrives selected, keeps the clip’s aspect ratio, and undo removes it (if you kept editing while it uploaded, the first undo empties the card and the next removes it). Embedded videos cannot be captured.

Both actions are for editors; viewers see neither button.

Slides

The slides editor adds slide management to the canvas: Add slide, a thumbnail panel, Previous slide and Next slide, and a Present mode that locks the view to the current slide (Esc exits).

Beat boards

Click Add Beat to add beat cards with a title, description, and color. Drag cards to reorder, and rename the board inline.

Text documents

The Document type is a block based editor: type ”/” for the block menu (headings, lists, tables, callouts, images, embeds, math, and more). Choose a page width (narrow, normal, wide). Text documents export to PDF and DOCX and can be copied as Markdown.

Tables in a document

Insert a table from the ”/” menu, then drag across cells to select them. Selecting is what raises the toolbar, so a click that only places the cursor shows nothing. The toolbar that appears carries the table controls:

Merge cells joins the selected cells into one. To take a merged cell apart again, hover it and open the small handle at its corner, then choose Split cell.
Cell colour fills the selected cells and colours their text, from the same palette as the rest of the document. It applies to every cell you selected. This is not the same as the text colour button beside it: Cell colour fills the whole cell, the text colour button colours only the words you selected.
Dot points puts a dot in front of every line in the selected cells. A cell can hold several lines, and this marks each of them. The dots are drawn rather than typed, so you cannot put the cursor in front of one or delete one by hand: press Dot points again to take them off. Press it with several cells selected and any that are not already marked are marked too. If you copy a marked cell and paste it outside the table, the dots come with it; select that text and the Dot points button appears so you can take them off there as well.
Header row turns the top row into headings. It always acts on the top row, whichever row you have selected.
Calculate writes a formula such as =SUM(C2:C3) into a cell. Right click a cell for a single formula, or select a range for the running totals.

Hover a row or a column to reveal its drag handle, and drag it to move the row or column. Everything a table holds, including merged cells, colours, dot points and the header row, saves with the document, reaches anyone else who has it open at the same time, and comes out in the PDF and DOCX exports.

A formula uses spreadsheet style references (A1, B2) counted from the top left of the table, and those references do not follow a column when you drag it into a new place.

Pasting a table in

Paste a table from Google Docs, Word or a web page and it arrives as a CineFlow table. A cell holding several lines, such as a bulleted list or a few short paragraphs, keeps those lines as separate lines in the cell. A cell that holds a bulleted list arrives as its lines, one under the other, without the bullet marks. Select the cell and press Dot points to put the dots back.

One thing to know if the cell holds numbers. A cell with two lines is not a single number, so a formula that points at it answers #VALUE! rather than reading the two lines as one longer number. Put each number in its own cell if you want to total them. Dot points make no difference to this either way: a formula reads the same text whether the cell is marked or not.

Script markup

Create Markup on the Script page renders the screenplay into a markup document. Draw your coverage directly on the pages (circles, lines, notes), then click Convert markup into shot list in the markup editor to extract your annotations into shots on the Shot List. Up to 20 annotated pages are processed per run.

Canvas documents capture a thumbnail automatically when you leave the editor.
Share creates a guest link with Can edit or View only permission; guests join with just a name. See Sharing and permissions.
Exports (PDF for boards and text documents; PDF, PPTX, and PNG for slides; DOCX and Markdown for text documents) live in each editor’s Share popover. See Exports and PDFs.

Permissions

Project documents follow project edit rights; dashboard documents follow workspace rights. Viewers can open, read, pan, and zoom, but not edit, rename, move, duplicate, or delete.