Auto-Draft Schedule Engine

Most ADs have always built call times by hand. Until now, that has been the only option. Auto-draft is a new tool in the toolbox: a wingman that sketches out a landing zone so you are not starting from scratch when the schedule arrives late or changes hit at midnight. Use it when it helps, skip it when you do not need it. When you do use it, G-Casper Pro runs two separate engines in sequence. The schedule engine runs at import time and is what this article covers. It reads the day's scene schedule, builds a timeline, estimates durations, and places structural banners. The call-time engine (covered in Auto-Draft Cast Call Times) then reads those timeline results to derive individual Call, Block, On-Set, and Lose At times for each actor. Together they take your scheduling software's data and produce a fully drafted call sheet in seconds.

Every shoot day starts with setup: cameras, lighting, sound, and set dressing before the first scene begins. The schedule engine automatically inserts a SETUP banner at position zero of the scene schedule if one is not already present. The banner's duration is pulled from the 'Avg daily setup' setting in your Globals tab (default 30 minutes). This matters because the SETUP banner advances the clock before the first scene, meaning every scene start time and every actor's On-Set time are calculated from after setup, not from raw crew call.

The engine does not use a fixed rate per page. It looks at the total available shooting time for the day, subtracts any scenes with existing estimates and any banner durations (setup, lunch, company moves), and divides what is left by the total remaining page count for that day. minsPerPage = (available shoot time - existing estimates - banner time) / total unestimated pages Each unestimated scene then gets: pages x minsPerPage, rounded to the nearest 10 minutes (minimum 10 minutes). Add a scene to the day and every other unestimated scene adjusts automatically. A typical shoot day runs 10 hours with 2-10 pages scheduled. That puts the realistic per-page range at 1h to 5h depending on how much is packed into the day:

The 6-hour rule is a cornerstone of SAG-AFTRA agreements: the meal break must be provided within 6 hours of crew call (or the first meal of the day). The schedule engine enforces this automatically when the 'Insert lunch' option is enabled during import. After building the scene timeline, it finds the best clean boundary (a point between scenes) that falls at or just before the 6-hour mark and inserts a LUNCH banner there. The lunch duration is configurable (default 30 minutes from Globals). If a clean boundary is not found (because a single scene spans the entire window), you can optionally tell the engine to split that scene.

When no clean scene boundary falls within the lunch window, enabling 'Split long scenes for lunch' gives the engine permission to cut through a straddling scene. It identifies the scene whose time window crosses the 6-hour deadline and splits it at exactly that point, creating a Pt1 / LUNCH / Pt2 arrangement in the schedule:

• Pt1 covers the portion of the scene before the lunch deadline, with a proportionally adjusted page count
• The LUNCH banner is inserted immediately after Pt1
• Pt2 covers the remainder of the scene, with the complementary page count
• Both halves share a split group ID and carry the Pt1/Pt2 visual annotations described in Splitting Scenes into Linked Pairs
• The lunch window setting (15–60 minutes) controls how far past the 6-hour mark the engine will look before giving up

Here is a step-by-step walkthrough of what happens to a sample day when the engine runs with all options enabled:

• Crew call is set to 7:00 AM in your Globals
• SETUP banner is inserted: clock advances to 7:30 AM
• Scene 14 (2 4/8 pages = 20 min): scheduled 7:30–7:50 AM
• Scene 22 (3 2/8 pages = 30 min): scheduled 7:50–8:20 AM
• Scene 31 (1 6/8 pages = 20 min): scheduled 8:20–8:40 AM
• Scene 45 (2 0/8 pages = 20 min): scheduled 8:40–9:00 AM. This scene straddles the 1:00 PM lunch deadline (6 hrs from crew call).
• Engine splits Scene 45 into Pt1 (1:00 deadline − 8:40 start = 140 min pre-lunch) and Pt2, inserts LUNCH at 1:00 PM
• Scene 52 (1 2/8 pages = 10 min): scheduled after lunch at 1:30 PM
• Call-time engine reads these start times: Actor SARAH's first scene (Sc 14) starts at 7:30 AM → Block at 6:30 AM → Call at 6:00 AM → Lose At after last scene plus 15 min buffer

The schedule engine runs automatically during import when you have auto-draft enabled in the Import dialog. You can also apply it to a specific day after import via the 'Apply Auto-Draft' option available on the call sheet. Each run recalculates estimates for scenes that do not already have a manual estimate set, re-evaluates lunch placement, and re-derives actor times. Your manually approved actor times and manually set scene estimates are preserved.