Built in a cutting room, for the cutting room.

Why DigiBind exists

In 2021, I started on my first feature as an apprentice editor. The editor, Alan B., was kind, and he worked with a script binder. The only thing was, this show was WFH during production and he lived across the country. The first assistant editor was Paul A., an amazing AE who taught me so much. He showed me a cool feature in Adobe Acrobat: drawing page-view “links” that, when clicked, take you directly to a specific spot.

This became a light bulb moment, and for the next two months I would spend the first part of my day stitching together a digital script binder: breaking apart the PDFs that landed each day, figuring out where those scenes needed to be inserted into the larger master script binder, and then drawing these “links” from a table of contents page to the first page of each scene, wherever it landed in the master PDF.

It was pretty exhausting and would take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how complex the added pages were. It was cool, but not effective. And that’s where the drive to scratch this itch came from. We live in a digital age where so many advances have been made, but this process still hadn’t been automated. It was still far faster to print the pages, hole-punch them, and build a binder by hand.

I continued to build binders this tedious way for a few more years, and by then, building DigiBind seemed doable. It took a lot of research and time, but I built the binder I wanted. DigiBind runs on one Mac in the cutting room and serves the whole team through their own browsers, with nothing to install on their end. Your project never leaves your network. It’s designed to give you control over how your production data is used, and hopefully to speed up your workflow and get you the answers you need faster.

Thanks for reading,