Bid the script. Bid the cut. One shot list, end to end.
Slate bids a show before a frame exists and keeps bidding once the cut arrives. Break down a script into work types, or mark shots inside the QuickTime — both land in the same shot list, priced with your departments and your rates, and sync back out to the tools you already run.
Pre-production starts with the script. Post-production starts with the cut.
Same departments, same rates, same export.
Bid off the script
PRE-PRODUCTION — SCRIPTBeta — in active use
- 01Load script
Drop a PDF. Slate reads scenes, pages and eighths — no retyping, no manual breakdown grid.
- 02Break down
AI proposes VFX work per sequence. You confirm, exclude, and train it with supervisor notes.
- 03Bid work types
Bid the work, not 600 phantom shots. Easy / medium / hard tiers with a complexity factor per bid.
- 04Sync shot list
Tiers materialize into a live shot list that stays in sync as the breakdown changes.
Bid inside the QuickTime
POST-PRODUCTION — CUTLive today
- 01Load the cut
Local QuickTime or Slate storage. Multi-reel packs, embedded timecode, nothing leaves the browser unless you say so.
- 02Mark
Scrub, drop markers, bind to shots — or let the burn-in sweep find shot codes and in/out points for you.
- 03Bid
Price every shot by department in one dense bid bar. Days × your rate = live cost.
- 04Version & compare
Snapshot bids, diff shot by shot, and undo the last seven days of changes.
Whichever door you come in, the output is the same object: a shot list with days per department, work-type tiers, versions you can diff, and a seven-day undo. Bid the show at greenlight, then re-bid it against the cut without starting over.
Your bid shouldn't be trapped in another tool.
Push shots and bid days into ShotGrid with an encrypted per-workspace connection.
Two-way sync into your own templated bid sheet — headers mapped by AI, not by hand.
Plain exports that drop into ftrack, Excel, or whatever the show already runs on.
Scoped API keys and public endpoints so your pipeline can read bids and trigger flows.
Stop rebuilding the same bid spreadsheet for every show.
NodeFlow lets you draw the steps you'd otherwise do by hand: take a shot list, filter it, reshape the columns to match a studio's template, then send it to ShotGrid or a Google Sheet. Build it once for your workspace, tweak it per project, and run it with one click — or let your pipeline trigger it.
Unreleased scripts deserve better than "trust us".
Bring your own AI key and calls run from our server straight to your provider account, under your enterprise agreement — keys encrypted at rest, nothing routed through a shared model account. Breakdowns send scene text, not the whole PDF. Media sits behind short-lived signed URLs, scoped per workspace with row-level access control.
Like what you see? Let's shape it to your studio.
Client-side or vendor-side, production has been traditionally underserved — tools are built for artists, not for the people managing the work. Through whatifi labs, we build custom implementations for the manual processes still run in spreadsheets and email — pipelines, dashboards, and the databases underneath. Slate can be tailored to your workflow.