Saturday, February 23, 2008

Zhura.com is a brand new totally free Web-based, screenwriting tool that lets writers easily create ideas or complete scripts of all kinds, in a professional, industry-standard format, either privately, with invited friends of a group, or in a public forum. With Zhura, writers can collaborate and seek comments on their scripts, and finally say goodbye to expensive software and to the hassle of downloading uploading and backing up files. No more emailing colleagues for comments and edits, only to wonder which version of your script is the most recent.

Has anybody checked this out? What do you think?

How does it compare with Scripped?

Labels: software

10:56 AM

4 Comments:

i'm in the process of checking it and getting registered. Having a bit of trouble, but the team there are being great at trying to fix it.

By  Tim, at 5:00 PM  

I was literally moments away from sending you an email saying you needed to try this site when this blog entry showed up in my Google Reader.

I really like it so far.

I've been playing with it for a few days now and so far, it does all the basic things you'd want a screenwriting program to do. MUCH better than Scripped. Zhura has similar auto-complete features to Final Draft, and you can tab and enter just like in FD.

The collaboration features are really nice and much easier than FD's Collabowriter (not familiar with Movie Magic to know what they have along these lines). There's an option for writing a script as a group that you can invite other members to, and it nicely tracks everyone's changes. It keeps a constant revision history where you can go back to any previous version.

And as Tim said, this product is still in the process of being created, and I've had a couple of glitches and issues I've pointed out to them that they immediately fixed. They even took a suggestion of mine and implemented it within a day (TXT export), so they very much listen to what the users want. I anticipate this product to become really valuable as it matures. The support and feedback from the team has exceeded anything I've experienced from any other new website like this.

Zhura is already completely usable to write a script in, and in fact, as an experiment, I'm going to write a sitcom spec exclusively in Zhura, along with my brother, who doesn't own FD or MM, and doesn't plan on ever buying them. This will allow us to collaborate without having to export pdfs and email them and then get notes emailed back and forth.

This will be a fun experiment and I'll keep you up to date on my thoughts as I really try to put Zhura through its paces.

Again, it's miles ahead of Scripped. I think Final Draft and Movie Magic will have to eventually do something similar to keep up in this world of Web 2.0. I wouldn't be surprised to see FD buy Zhura soon.

By  Victor, at 8:48 PM  

Slight update:

Since the last time I played with Scripped (about a week ago), they've added tab and enter support when writing scripts. I don't think it was there last time, but it may well have been there.

Even still, Zhura.com is way ahead in features and usability.

It'll be interesting to watch this battle play out.

By  Victor, at 8:58 PM  

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By  Anonymous, at 12:21 AM  

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