The shape of the job

You have a bucket or a directory with thousands of .fdx, .fadein, .fountain, and legacy PDF files. You want, at the end, a parallel directory of validated .json ScreenJSON documents with the originals preserved.

Step 1 — inventory

find archive/ -type f \( -iname "*.fdx" -o -iname "*.fadein" \
  -o -iname "*.fountain" -o -iname "*.spmd" -o -iname "*.pdf" \) \
  > inventory.txt

wc -l inventory.txt
cut -d. -f2 inventory.txt | sort | uniq -c

Step 2 — convert + validate

For up to a few thousand files, a parallel shell loop is enough:

mkdir -p out
cat inventory.txt | xargs -n 1 -P 16 -I{} sh -c '
  in="$1"
  name="$(basename "$in")"
  out="out/${name%.*}.json"
  screenjson convert  -i "$in"  -o "$out" 2>>errors.log || exit 0
  screenjson validate -i "$out" --strict 2>>invalid.log || mv "$out" "${out}.invalid"
' _ {}

Beyond that, use Greenlight — the same work, but with retries, progress tracking, and an admin UI.

Step 3 — triage

errors.log — conversion failures. Usually corrupt originals or legacy format variants. Inspect a sample; the majority resolve with --format hints or a clean re-save in Final Draft.
invalid.log — validator rejections. Usually missing authors or malformed character cues. Fixable; keep the .json.invalid file for later manual repair.

Step 4 — preserve the originals

Archive the sources as-is. Do not discard them. Do not overwrite them.

tar -czf archive-sources-$(date +%F).tar.gz archive/

An archive keeps the evidence. The ScreenJSON is the accessible rendition, not a replacement for the source.

Step 5 — catalogue

Derive a simple catalogue row per successful conversion:

jq -r '[.id, .title.en, (.authors[0].family + ", " + .authors[0].given)] | @tsv' \
  out/*.json > catalogue.tsv

From here, load into your cataloguing system, your search index, or your content management platform.

Step 6 — schedule a re-validate

Pin a schema version for the project. Re-run screenjson validate periodically to catch drift when the schema evolves.

Migrate an FDX archive to ScreenJSON