Soldum vs Movie Magic

Movie Magic did not become a standard by accident. Scheduling formalised the breakdown sheet and the strip board the way the industry still practises them today, and Budgeting remains one of the most granular costing tools on the market, able to carry complex budget structures, multiple rates and nested subtotals. The documents it produces are read fluently by an entire production chain, from first ADs to line producers, and that familiarity is worth real money: nobody has to relearn how to read a schedule. On a feature prepared by a crew that has used these tools for fifteen years, switching is not the same question as it is on a project starting fresh.

This is the structural difference, and almost everything else follows from it. At Movie Magic, the schedule and the budget are two products, bought and opened separately, with information travelling between them through import and export. In Soldum the breakdown, the budget, the shooting schedule and the call sheets are views of one database: the script feeds the breakdown, and the breakdown feeds everything else. That separation is invisible on day one, when everything is consistent because everything has just been entered. It shows up on the third draft of the screenplay, when someone has to decide which file is authoritative.

In Movie Magic Scheduling the breakdown is done by tagging: you work through the script, mark the sets, characters, background, costumes, props and technical needs, and the tool builds the sheets and the strips from your tags. The work is guided, but completeness rests on you. Soldum flips the starting point: you upload a PDF or a Final Draft file, AI extracts the same categories in a single pass, and your time moves from data entry to review. That is not a comfort detail — on a feature, the first pass takes days on one side and hours on the other, and it is the one step where automation changes the order of magnitude rather than a percentage.

The objection is fair and deserves a straight answer: a model can misread a screenplay. A location named two different ways across forty pages, a character who only appears in a line of action, a prop implied rather than written. Soldum therefore treats the AI pass as a first draft, never a verdict. You review the breakdown scene by scene, correct what was misread, add what the text leaves implicit, and it is the approved version that feeds the budget and the schedule. An experienced professional reviews faster than they enter data: that is where the saving comes from, not from blind trust in the extraction.

This is the test that separates two tools in daily use, far more than the accuracy of the first pass. A scene moves from interior to exterior, a location falls through three weeks before the shoot, an actor shifts their dates. In Soldum the breakdown, the budget, the schedule and the affected call sheets are linked: the change propagates, travel costs and accommodation nights follow, the sheets for the affected days are regenerated, and you approve what you keep. With two separate applications, the same change has to be carried by hand into the schedule, then the budget, then the documents already sent to the crew — and the real question on set becomes who is holding the current version.

It reads like a local detail and it is worth half a sentence, because it decides the choice for a whole category of productions. A budget filed with a French financier follows standardised categories set by the CNC, the national film agency, with pay based on national collective-agreement rates and specific lines for employer contributions and overheads. Movie Magic Budgeting is flexible enough that a line producer can rebuild that structure from an in-house template passed from project to project — many do. But rebuilding is not producing: the template has to be maintained, checked every time rates change, and reformatted for each dossier. Soldum produces that format straight from the breakdown. If you never shoot in France or co-produce with French partners, discount this section entirely; if you do, it is usually the deciding one.

Movie Magic is installed on a machine and used under a licence attached to that user; collaboration happens by exchanging files, which works as long as few hands are involved and everyone knows which version is authoritative. Soldum is a web application: you reach it from a browser on any machine, and documents are shared from the same database rather than duplicated. The subscription is billed per account rather than per seat — €149/month excl. VAT on Solo for one film at a time, €479/month excl. VAT on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole team invited at no extra cost per member, and 25% off with an annual commitment. On a crew where several roles only step in for a few days, that billing unit changes the arithmetic: giving people access to the documents does not cost per person.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write screenplays and offers neither a text editor nor a storyboard: the script is imported, not drafted here. We do not cover editorial post-production, nor production accounting in the sense of cost reporting during the shoot. And we do not claim to match the configuration depth of Movie Magic Budgeting on the most intricate budget structures: if your costing rests on nested subtotals and multiple rate layers built up over years of practice, you already know which tool carries them best.

The only conclusive trial is the one run on a real project rather than a demo screenplay. Take a film you are currently preparing, break it down in both tools, and compare three things: the real time it takes to reach a breakdown you would be willing to circulate, how many manual steps it takes to reach a budget you could show a financier, and what happens when you move two shooting days. Soldum's first project is free and Movie Magic offers a trial period, so the comparison costs you an afternoon — and it beats any table, including the one on this page.