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Organizing Features

Import and export

Written By Clayton Combe

Last updated 5 months ago

Scenario is part of your larger workflow, which means you need to be able to bring information in and out of it. Our goal is to ensure that everything you import can be handled properly, and everything we export is the highest possible quality.

Export & import projects

We have a cool update today that a lot of you have been asking for. Uh we know that sometimes syncing or sharing isn't the best way to get information from one place to another. And so what we've done is to the share menu here for both starter and pro users, we've added export project and click this. And as you can see, this is going to save an external file of your project. It's going to be everything inside the project. uh lists, diagrams, crew, although you can turn that off. And it's worth noting that only you can import the crew that you know. And when you hit save as, you can see we're going to just save this external file. I'm going to call this a project export, but it's just going to give it your project name, whatever that is. And now it's saved. And I can see that here I now have this project export.CE file. I can do anything I want with that. I can email it to somebody. I can put it in an external drive. Doesn't matter. So, it works as backup. It works as distribution. It's up to you. And now when I go back in here, we have this import button. And you can double click on a file and it'll open in the scenario app if you have it. But the easiest way here is to import. I'm just going to hit project export. Bring it in. It's going to show me that it has two diagrams in one list. Good. That's what we expect. And I can include the crew member details for my projects. Again, that's only if they are your own crew. Import it. And now here we here we have it. This is the the imported project. This one was the original. This one is imported. And when you open it up, you can see we have all the same silly looking stuff there. So that's project exporting and importing. Enjoy it.

Scenario projects contain diagrams, crew lists, and information about themselves. You may want to export a project to:

  • Send it to a colleague

  • Create a record of a certain version

  • Back it up for safety

Exporting or importing a project effectively creates a new copy. A project will not be shared or connected to anything unless that’s set up in the Scenario account.

Scenario exports in .sce format, which is specific to Scenario files.

To export a project:

  1. Select the project in Scenario

  2. Click the Share button in the upper right corner

  3. Click the Export Project button

  4. Choose where to save the .sce file

To import projects:

  1. Click the import button next to Projects

  2. Choose up to 10 .sce files from the file picker

  3. Confirm import; the new projects will appear in your list

To protect privacy, you can choose whether or not to export crew details with your project. When importing, you can only import crew details for projects you have exported.

Image options

Scenario handles different image file types in different ways, based on what they allow. We try to do as much as possible with vector images (mathematically-defined paths) because they’re resolution-independent; they look sharp at any scale, and take up much less file space. Sometimes, using raster images (made of pixels) is necessary, but they take up more disk space, and cannot be scaled without losing quality.

  • PDF - these can contain vector, raster, or a combination of both

  • SVG - vector-only format (the one that all Scenario items are created in)

  • PNG - raster format that allows transparency

  • JPG - raster format with no transparency

We highly recommend using vector formats whenever possible. This helps all your images stay sharp at any scale, print well, and sync to the cloud more quickly.

Import images to a diagram

Adding images to a diagram means you don’t have to build everything from scratch. It’s common to have existing floor plans, maps, and reference images.

  • Images can be imported from PDF, SVG, PNG, or JPG files

  • There is a 25mb file size limit on image formats, but images will be optimized for syncing, not stored at full size

  • See Markup, Text, Images for more options

Import custom items

Custom items (which behave like fixtures and allow you to upload your own images) accept SVG, PNG, and JPG images.

  • We recommend SVG for vector performance, faster sync, and changeable colors

  • See Custom Items for more info

Export from a diagram

To create documents from a diagram:

  1. Open the diagram

  2. Click the Share button in the top right

  3. Choose to export Diagram Image, Shot List, or Patch List

    • For Diagram Image, choose the format you want to export: JPG, PNG, or PDF

    • Shot List and Patch List can export as PDF only

Export as JPG or PNG

  • Both formats are raster images

  • Scenario will attempt to render this at “actual size,” but for large diagrams, we down-res as needed to ensure the export can complete

  • Note: JPG images have much smaller file sizes than PNG, and are better suited for exporting on a mobile device

Export as PDF

PDF export is available to Starter and Pro users. See Scenario account for more info.

It's release day and this week's release is small but mighty. A lot of you have been asking for this because when you finish a diagram, you can do a few different things with it. One, you can share it with your crew and that's great, but uh you might also want to make it part of a presentation packet. You might want to print it out, have a few different copies floating around. And when you do that, you need a full resolution image, like truly full resolution. and the ability to render an actual image like that just doesn't really work. So, we added PDF export. You can save a PDF right from here. That's going to generate a PDF of your entire diagram and save it to wherever you want. Uh this is on a computer, on an iPad, you can uh email it to somebody, that type of thing. Now, the great thing about it is when you go look at that PDF and you zoom all the way into it, you'll see that all of the items, all of the text are vector. They're res they're resolution independent. You can print this any size that you want and it's going to look perfect. Keeps the file size small. Obviously, with images, uh those are just going to be what they are, but the rest of it is going to look crisp no matter how big you want to print it. Uh so that is the the main update that we've made. We've also made a little usability update because we realized that when you lock something, it's kind of a pain to go unlock it or hide it in this case. So we have this fixture here. Uh and before you had to go to details and you had to go to hide and you had to do it there. Now you can just click over here just to undo that. And it works the same way with lock. If you Select that and lock it. I just use command K because that's the fastest way. But now if it's here, I just unlock it like that and it's done. So we hope you enjoy that little update as well as the massive update that is PDF rendering.

  • Maintains the source formats of each item, so vectors stay vector, and rasters stay raster

  • This means any raster images that are included may need to be down-rezzed to fit on larger diagrams (which is why we highly recommend using vector sources as much as possible)

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