Scrivener//In Depth Review//#scrivener3forbeginners #screenwriting #script

now in today's video we're going to give you a brutally honest review about scrivener and give it the screenwriting Mentor review process which is my way of scoring how good I think the software actually is now on that final score we're going to look at the following perspectives we're going to look at Cost we're looking at features ease of use resources and my favorite communication so stick around and see how scrivener Stacks up now I actually use scrivener prior to starting my YouTube channel when I was looking first looking into getting screenwriting um now I thought it'd be it was a good basic program but after several months I ended up going to use more movie Magic and the reason why it wasn't because of anything scrivener was doing wrong but movie Magic just had more ancillary programs and when we get to movie Magic I'll talk about those uh but yeah I mean there wasn't anything bad about scrivener I enjoyed working on it but at that point in time it didn't really work on my with my workflow however today I'm excited to give it a try again to see if it does fit my current workflow to see how it works for you because I've actually had some people say hey is there a good screenwriting software program that you can also write a novel on well guess what if it is it's going to be scrivener so let's take a look and dive in now our first category today we're going to look at price now scrivener at the time of this video is going for 49.95 now if you looked at my fade in review you know that fade in includes all the updates for free now scrivener is a little different and so let's talk about that now from their web page this is what they say they say minor updates are free but occasionally release when we release more major updates that are paid for for instance if you buy scrivener 3 and then all the three dot X updates will be free 3.1 3.2 yada yada yada but when one day we release scrivener four then you'll need to pay an upgrade fee if you want it to be updated now the scrivener's credit um they don't release a major update very often I mean there's been a lot of years between version one version two and version three now unlike final draft that seems to have a new version every year or every other year I don't notice that with scrivener um and the other thing I liked about their particular pricing model is there's not a subscription fee which a lot of people are going to and I'm not a big fan of because I'm like I get it that they can always improve their product a little bit by having the subscription fee but I also feel that if you've watched my review on squibbler that subscription fees don't always come through and I I feel like when I look at uh like video games too when you have a subscription model doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the product is going to be better and so I'm really happy that scrivener as of this writing is just going with it's a low price too 49.95 for entry into using a wonderful program and we'll talk a little bit more here in just a couple moments about the different features of what's going on and one final note on price 50 bucks is pretty reasonable when you think of how powerful this is uh when you look at it compared to movie Magic or final draft which are in the hundreds of dollars or even fade in which is a just a little bit more expensive than this one um but is still more expensive so our next category is features so let's explore on their website and see what we get with scrivener now as we take a look at scrivener's main page you'll notice it's not does not like scrivener.com or something like that it's actually called literature and latte.com so uh just so you know as you go to take a look and I'll have the link in the description below so let's take a look at some of the the features that we see for scrivener 3. now from blank page to book your way scriven your unites everything you need to write research and arrange long documents in a single powerful app at its heart is a simple uh ring binder metaphor that allows you to gather your materials and flick between different parts of your manuscript notes and references with ease and I'll show this when we get to um the uh ease of use I really enjoyed that and they really deliver when it comes to that again the thing that you're going to sort of notice about scrivener um it sort of gets summed up in this next step it says piece it together switch instantly between editing your script one sector at a time one section at a time and together as a whole working on a long text is easier when you break it into small parts and scrivener gives you complete control over how small or how large these pieces are and so that's one of the beauties of scrivener is the ability to break your project into small manageable chunks work on that man with a little chunk and so that you feel energized and you keep working on it scene after scene or page after page uh so some of the other features familiar text editing Styles you're able to import stuff um final draft scripts images PDF documents and uh during my ease of use um section it was really easy for me to download a previous script I had just gotten worked on in final draft it went right into scrivener no if-ans or buts and I was actually able to use that and you'll see that here in the next section it's got a wonderful cork board feature which is always one of my favorite features of any screenwriting software it has an outliner um as well too um it's got templates and icons great for screenwriting tools for non-fiction uh one of the things that I think works really well is the view document side by side it doesn't sound like the really big feature but when you're able to take uh like for this next part when I use an ease of use I'm able to put both my scripts up and right in one panel while I have my other script up on the other panel I don't need to have it down in you know next to me so it was really easy to look from from the page from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen as opposed to looking down and looking up down looking up it worked really well I I didn't think I really appreciated this view as much um or this feature as much uh before but but doing it for this review I really found that that feature to be to be cool full Sky full screen writing uh set targets and track progress some people I know that's very helpful to have is just to either write for a number of minutes or words um metadata use metadata to record and find useful information color code sections using labels track the progress of revisions by applying a status collections lets you create lists of related documents from anywhere in your project um you can choose your tools different writing products demand different thought processes and scriveners flexible interface adapts to the work at hand arrange index cards along colored lines on the corkboard perfect retracting different story lines or thematic developments experiment and place cards anywhere in the free form mode so like I said it's really got some wonderful thing you can print export and publish snapshots right from anywhere so that's the nice thing there is a iOS version a Mac version and a Windows version and if I remember the price for the iOS version I want to say is only 19.99 let's take a look and see how much that cost just to see if I'm right and there you go 19.99 in the Apple Store and the neat thing about this scrivener app is it's the full program they don't you know so if you just have an iPad go for this this is the full 49 put into your iPad I mean that is just freaking awesome I mean that's that's better than final draft and better than fade in so there's a lot of useful stuff to go through so let's head over to the next core category which is ease of use and I sort of teased that uh through this last part of the video so let's take a look as I write some of my screenplay not to make it uniform I'm going to type I don't think it ended up being three to five pages but I'm using the same type of script that I've used for other reviews as well too to keep it sort of uniform so let's get working on our scrivener script say that fast five times so it's really easy to do so I'll flip over to where we're at in the program so I just pulled up scrivener and right now I am going to act open up a um or create a new screenplay so the nice thing too is when you jump into these projects uh when you jump into the screen here it starts with an interactive tutorial a screen scrivener user manual as well as video tutorials so this is one of the things that really uh like about scrivener is that it gives you a lot of resources just even before you open the document that you want to do as you can see along this left side here there's a lot of different things you can start you can do a blank template you can have fiction non-fiction script writing and miscellaneous we're going to clip script writing and then into that you can see that we have a lot of different options we have the BBC Radio scene style BBC tape drama uh comic script documentary script screenplay stage play UK and stage play us we're going to select the script so we're going to create that and I'm going to do test two all right let's take that okay so we're getting started here now for simplicity's sake as I did this I actually forgot my draft that I was working on I didn't have a paper copy so I had to end the end of the importing it into the document which is our fast screenplay uh draft 1.1 uh is I know it's a very original title isn't it uh so the nice thing about this though is I put it under the research section and then I can simply click uh this button here which will allow me to have a new scene and then I can double click on here and it'll pull up in that extra scene for me so now I can just look from right to left it's really pretty neat and so I can go back to here and then I want to type in interior house night so let's just see how this all works out so so far so good so what I ended up doing with Lucy is I just tapped and that gave me right into um writing her name and then I just hit enter again and I'm right into the dialog so so far so good pretty seamless back to action again and you can see where you're at with this little bar down here it tells you that you're in an action thing right now so again tap gets me to character again right it's got a nice feature here so here's something really interesting too so since I brought my screenplay in and I hit L I have a character named Linda and also a character named Lucy these are all going to change but that's a whole different story um so it's nice that it remembers that from the other screenplay that I loaded in to copy alongside of so that's a really nice feature I can just announce that Lucy automatically puts me into um uh dialogue and you can also look right next to it too if we hit tab again it'll put us in the parentheticals so looking really good real easy to use so far um pretty um pretty standard stuff all right so now I'm going down to the next scene hitting I ended up just I was having some problems with the tab because the tab was sending it too far over so what I ended up doing was just going to this menu here selecting scene heading which looks like the default key is s um and so that's uh good to know um and I'm back to being able to write interior and again it highlights that as I'm using this I assume I'm using scriven right now it's really been really easy um again the nice thing about this is I pulled up an open another tab so I can as you can see I can type as I go along there's not anything that's really hard or difficult so far very standard play um and so that's been it's been really easy to do that uh so let's try a couple of different things right now I'm going to add a couple things to um the script I'm going to try parentheticals which for some programs I'm looking at you squibbler not scrivener but squibbler squibbler had a really hard time doing parentheticals and a lot of other programs do have a hard time with parenthetical so we're going to give that a try next try the parenthetical see what happens and then we'll also try some dual dialogue to make sure scrivener can handle all the different types of things that we could possibly do for writing real quick all they did um to so from Lucy uh which was I was in the in the character screen I hit tab automatically brings the parentheticals easy as that hit return and we have our parenthetical uh formatted just right so that looks pretty good let's try a little bit of uh let's try do a dialogue see what happens so all right so on first glance I can't find how to do a dual dialogue right off the bat so I'm going to you see how well this works search scrivener for dual dialogue no results found for dual dialogue all right so let's take a look online all right so I was able to find after doing some youtubing and some Googling I finally figured out how scrivener does dual dialogue it's not very easy first of all you need to just basically as you can see I have I just highlight this I like the particular text that I do and so I've actually have just gone through and done it I highlighted the text I go up to format I hit preserve formatting and that will leave me with this particular box here which if I when we export it to a final draft we'll have both the the text next to each other in proper format um the the thing that I was disappointed with scrivener in in doing this was that there was nothing in their help section about doing that I typed in dual dialog and as you can see e nothing popped up from Dual dialogue I'd like to thank the writer's territory for helping out with figuring out how to um figure this particular how to figure dual dialogue out in scrivener so thank you again writer's territory for your your video on that so so let's take a moment really quickly to look at scrivener and just the basic um UI that you get to work with so as you see here it looks pretty easy to deal with you have a scene which is where we ended up putting our screenplay uh like I said before it was really easy to add a screen and so I just click this little button here and the screen I had before is has been pulled out and I can look at it um but if I just want to go back to the regular screen boom it's there you have your title page here where you can work on putting in your title pages in there characters you can put documents here so if you have like a Word document you want to throw in there it's easy to throw in there if you have pictures same with places if you have notes all these things are really easy to put in there research we have my my fast draft that I put in there I also you can take a look at sample screenplay format you can look through this as well too and like I said it's a sample screenplay that they automatically give you you got some template sheets and you also have stuff to put in the trash and so basically like I said this is just like a big binder so think of scrivener as a big binder where you can place different things so all your research that you need is great it's right there where you need it and like I said the nice thing too is if you want to look at it you can just pull it up and put it in a separate window so if you want to take a look and and have your picture up while you're typing away feel free to do that or if you have a list of notes like a character you're writing a character and you want those characters trades and notes and dialogue to be up on the screen so you can sort of see like their catch phrases or something along those lines something that really reminds you of that character you can have it up while you're writing so so scrivener is really pretty um how it was pretty easy I will dock it a little bit for not making dual dialogue that easy now to be fair uh not every screenplay has dual dialogue do you need dual dialogue in every screenplay no but it should be easier to get at than what it is in here but other than that uh I thought it was pretty easy to use having used a bunch of different programs in the past I do like a lot of the power that you have in in when you look at how I can add like stuff to characters places notes of research how easy it is to do that type of stuff um and to be able to pull up and look at it so I don't have to fiddle with stuff on the side I really appreciated that from scrivener um so yeah I think the uh like I said before too just looking at the UI one more time you can see how easy um it is up here with all this other other things I mean it's basically just like a WordPress a word processor um it's really pretty easy to use the nice thing too is over each of the different um tools it automatically comes up and tells you what each of the different things are which I think is very helpful uh and uh makes the quality of life with using scrivener very good so this leads us to our next section which is on resources so the nice thing is I'm back at the main menu uh before I get started and you have these wonderful tutorials that are right here so we can click uh video tutorials and it automatically pulls up um well we'll see if it automatically pulls up several tutorials or not this would be interesting whether it works or not so interesting so the video tutorials are not present there let's try an interactive tutorial tutorials is an interactive tutorial walks you through all the main features so let's take a look through the tutorial real quick so here we go here is a basic tutorial on how to use scrivener um so this is sort of nice that you can walk your way through it it covers the key Concepts what is scrivener who is it aimed after how to do research how the main interface looks like um you know the inspector getting organized splitting the editor so it looks like it's very well done and so I'm impressed with that particular resource uh going through here now there is a video uh I'm gonna see if I can pull it up on on YouTube but but I want to say there's a video that it does exactly the same thing let's take a look at the scrivener user manual real quick to see um that comes in as a PDF um so if you're wanting to read the PDF all right well that was interesting let's try opening it one more time and just going through so let's try one more time going through here and we'll just take a look and see if it'll close it down on me again no thanks so it dropped me out but it looks like I can basically go wherever I want custom icons okay so again this is uh this is um the the written documentation looks pretty good so let's take a look and see uh again uh the video tutorials didn't start but I know there's one that I got to watch last time so let me see if I can pull that up real quick all right let's take a look at how many videos they have so this it pulled up really easy it was called I have a scrivener app um they have been your way around scrivener um useful tips about backing up your work finding what you've written finding your words customizing scrivener the heart of any project um so they look like they have a lot of good small long tutorials as well as as short tutorials and so this one I was looking at uh was talking only mainly about word and I believe a lot of these things are are good for just uh for for Mac as well too so so I think it's good that you can find that the other interesting thing too is we just do a basic YouTube search about YouTube discriminary tutorials um you have a bunch of ones that pop up right away learn scrivener in 20 minutes how do you scriven her to write a novel plus my three favorite tools scrivener for dummies on screen demo how to use scrivener tutorial part overview one how to use scriven her to write a novel so you see a lot of there's a lot of videos talking about how to use scrivener and so that's something nice there's a lot of nice resources out there and they like I said they have their own channel uh on YouTube which I really appreciate as well too to help with things and to figure out things as well too let's take a look at the main site to take a look and see about learn and support uh so this let's take a look here at least in the app it was hard let's take a look and see if they have video tutorials um and you can change this for Mac OS windows or iOS so that's nice so just on the main page getting started the Core Concepts and introduction distributor finding your way around so so there's YouTube videos you can also go to the site and look at um different videos as well too uh so I think this is really this is really nice there's a lot of nice videos user manuals they have Explorer they have forums as well too to explore and that's where I actually asked them a question myself and I got and uh an answer and which I'll tell you about here in a little bit they have some common questions scrivener from Mac scrivener for Windows so it seems like and they help us to improve our products contact us um and which we did like I said we'll talk about that here in a little bit so so there's a lot of different Avenues and resources for someone who's trying to learn scrivener um so so know that there's a lot of other uh reviews and opinions and videos out there so if you're having problems you can always ask me as well too but you can take a look at these to find the answers to your problems so I think that's that's good that they have a lot of different ways that they're interacting with their customers finally communication now to make this part of the review as even-handed as possible I've been sending the software supports the exact same question basically how to use your parentheticals and I and I and I do that particular question because I want to see a if they get a little pissy with me because a lot of times parentheticals are really easy to find and they're really easy to perform so I'm checking to see if their customer service is um really sort of patient with us will they answer the question at all and the neat thing was um scrivener did this that it was 24 hours again and I got a response um and they just they double checked and they said is this to make sure that we answer your question I thought that was just really well done so well done scrivener I really appreciate that um compared to some of the other programs I've used where there's hardly any customer support or they've been actually not helpful at all scrivener support I think was very helpful so good job so here we go as we finish this review up on scrivener let's read it on my five real systems where five is great and one is ooh I wouldn't know if I would touch that type of software so uh now for price I give scrivener five reels at 49.99 plus minor upgrades I think is great now I know I've seen people might push back on me and they say well but in your fade in review you gave fade in five um five reels and they take care of all the upgrades now this would probably be a little shorter or a little lower in terms of of reels if scrivener would put out a new product every year every six months but there's a long development for scrivener so I haven't yet had to pay for an upgrade yet and so I will have to wait and see how much they charge for that but for as long as I've used this particular type of or this particular version of the software I've been quite happy with that and also I also like this price because it's a one-time fee which sadly many people in the industry are moving away from and they're going to a subscription model which I'm not really thrilled about I don't know about you but I don't like having to pay for my software every month I think it should be a one-time fee uh call me old school call me a boomer but I would rather just pay once than every month features uh I it took me a little while to sort of figure out what I wanted to give for scrivener I think I'm gonna probably get it a four um it's got some really good tools uh for writing novels and screenplays so that's why I sort of gave it a four otherwise it's pretty pretty Bare Bones I mean there's nothing that really makes it stand out so much in terms of features everything that they sort of pointed out in terms of features I've seen in most other screenwriting software there isn't the nice thing it does have a nice research tab where you can put a lot of stuff in it's nice that you're able to to put be able to see the research that you're working on at the same time so I like all those type of things is it incredible no uh I think if it didn't include the ability to write a novel or other type of work I probably would have rated this more like a three uh but because of that because of the way it works with the novels uh I think I'm gonna give it a four ease of use again another one that I've been trying to sort of figure out after I've been using it um I think I'm gonna go with four wheels uh there if there is a learning curved with scrivener I'm not going to say it was really easy to start with not as easy as fade in where you could just sort of type and go uh there is a little bit more complexity to scrivener that it didn't have an easy way to do dual dialogue and the funny part of that you know even when we left from my ease of use section you can remember you can see that it just gave it a blue outline and you're only going to see that when you do the um fade in but if you compile it according to a fade in script if you put it as a PDF or put it as a or if you compile it in a different manner you're not going to see that formatting difference and I had to hunt for that it was not easy to find that dual dialogue function I had to go outside and of of the scrivener website I didn't see any Forums on it I couldn't I tried typing in the program it didn't show you how to do that I actually ended up having to go to an outside YouTube channel in order to find how to do that so uh so but that's just dual dialogue all the rest of it was really pretty easy I mean it was really easy jumping between um dialogue and action and and you know heading scene headings and stuff like that it was really pretty slick and like I said pulling up a separate screen so I could look at my research right next to it holy cow that was amazing I didn't realize uh because a lot of times I do when I retype the stuff I have my my script right in front of me and I'll retype it but this was a hell of a lot easier doing it this way so I like I said I think I'm pretty comfortable uh as I talk to you guys about it about giving ease of use about four wheels I think I think it deserves that resources for reels they had a lot of stuff um I think on the website for scrivener which I thought was really impressive they had that long list of videos uh in the in the app itself I was disappointed as you can see uh from the video that we didn't we weren't able to access some of those videos from my scrivener program but going to the website I was able to access all those programs or all those video files so I think that was I think that just works just fine um they also have a ton of other printed resources if you're more who wants to read through it and in the app it was really easy to look at those those things too and those actually pulled up so those worked as well so and like I said on YouTube there is a bunch of videos about how to use scrivener so overall I have to give it four wheels if you're looking if you need resources you know I think you've scriven her you can't go wrong there's a lot of resources out there to answer your questions communication five reels my mandatory question was fine it was great it actually got answered pretty well you know you can't beat that I mean like I said you know I've had like I said before I've had a couple um software programs where they don't even respond to me I mean granted it is a dumb question but you still need to be responding to your customer base and right now I'm batting two out of three for companies and their abilities to answer questions quickly as well as professionally scrivener has some great people who answer questions quickly good work so here you go out of 25 reels scrivener gets 22. it's a good piece of software again um I can definitely see why screenwriters and novelists like using this one it has a lot of good features it definitely doesn't break the bank it's really affordable really cheap and like I said if you get bored of writing screenplays or you get bored of writing a novel you can switch up to something really easy to do um it has a ton of resources if you get stuck I mean you can't beat that the people are professional when you ask them questions and they get back to you fairly quickly so so if you got the money it's 50 bucks it's fifty dollars it's well worth it uh plus if you get tired of writing scripts you can write books I mean this is a very versatile piece of writing um software um and so it makes it easy and comfortable to write a screenplay yes there's a little drawback there is a little bit of a little bit of a learning curve with it but it's nothing that a couple of uh maybe an hour or two you wouldn't have down and get going um so like I said it's not in my opinion it's probably not as good as fade in uh but I I think uh like I said if you're looking for an entry-level software program um that allows you to to do it and to do it well I want to look it does have a free trial the other thing too if you have an iPad and you do most your writing off the iPad get the app it's 19.99 and it's it does the same thing it's really cool that they were able to do this in the app so get that if you're just trying to think of to give it a try 20 bucks I mean if I mean for Pete's sakes they have a software that works as well as this now kind of content please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more product reviews a playlist on how turning your idea into first draft and much much more now if you have a particular software you you want a brutally honest review about please feel free to leave it in the comments section below well until the next video write well and live well

Channel: ScreenwritingScribe

Views: 425

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Id: ssinXxbmWak

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022