Adobe Story Online Scriptwriting Solution Review (page 2)

Writing the Story

One feature that we often see in more robust scriptwriting applications is also available in Adobe Story. When you type common words such as a scene heading, Adobe Story uses its SmartType feature to fill in the entire word. This can speed up your basic script elements that occur often.

Adobe Story also does a great job building an outline of your script as you write. The outline shows you each scene heading title. This allows you to click on any of the scene headings and the script will jump to that section. Additionally, the outline shows which characters are present in that scene heading by displaying a small color square. A different color represents each character, meaning that a busy scene has quite a rainbow of colors in the outline.

Collaboration and Exporting

Scripts can be shared to allow other users to write, edit, review and tag your script. There is a variety of user types, including Co-writer, which allows another person to write and change the script, to Reviewer, which simply allows a user to read the script and make comments. Comments are easy to add. You can select a word or a section of the script and click on the add Comment icon.

The process of sharing a script is very simple when using Adobe Story online. You can select which script to share, enter an e-mail address and then assign the type of user it will be. Scripts are automatically synchronized between the users when using Adobe Story online. If you work with the offline version of the application, you can synchronize a script the next time you log in.

Adobe Story allows you to export your scripts in a variety of formats too. You can export your script to PDF, XML, Text, Microsoft Word, Movie Magic scheduler or CSV (Microsoft Excel comma-separated value file).

What's to Come

Adobe Story is not ready for prime time, but it does give you a glimpse of what's to come. Adobe plans to integrate this application with the Production bundle. How it will be implemented is yet to be seen, but Adobe is looking to make monetizing your productions easier with a forthcoming tagging feature. Adobe plans to allow you to tag elements of your script. This may help you build in keywords to your production, perhaps to help online video with search engine optimization. This is all hypothetical at this point, but we're intrigued.

Overall, Adobe Story has some nice features that work well if you consider it's only in its beta version. There are still a lot of features that have bugs or are just missing from a solid web application. We were very pleased with the way Adobe Story allows you to organize your scripts. The SmartType feature and Outline feature are fantastic scriptwriting functions that make the whole process of writing much easier. Our recommendation is to give it a try if you're interested, but waiting for the full-featured and polished version will be in the best interest of most of our readers.

TECH SPECS

Browser: Windows Vista: Internet Explorer 7, 8 (TBD); Firefox 2.x, 3.x (TBD). Windows XP: Internet Explorer 6, 7; Firefox 2.x, 3.x. Mac OS 10.5.x: Safari 2.0, 3.0, 4.0; Firefox 2.0, 3.0
Flash Player: Flash Player 10.x or higher. Please update with the latest Flash Player.

Strengths

• Online collaboration
• No download required, but you do need Flash Player 10 and AIR
• Good organization of script projects
• Outline feature is superb

Weaknesses

• Importing not perfect
• Lacking all features

Summary

Keep your eye on Adobe Story as it matures into a polished application and is integrated with the Adobe Production bundle.

Contributing columnist Mark Montgomery is a web content specialist and produces instructional videos for a leading web application developer.

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