VIDEO: A look at Final Draft 8 from John August on Vimeo.

Final Draft 8 is largely identical to FD7, with some better chrome. If you’re happy with FD7, the addition of a fairly useful navigator and a new XML file format may or may not be enough reason to upgrade.

I’ve been using it for a week, and so far, no crashes. There are a few quirks — awkward colorization during drag-and-drop, click-lag when editing summaries — but nothing approaching the bugginess of early FD7. It feels stable and looks like a 2009 application.

I’m not endorsing Final Draft or any of its competitors; each has its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve ping-ponged between Final Draft and Screenwriter over the years, but given its interface improvements, I’ll probably stick with Final Draft for a bit. Some of that is familiarity, frankly, particularly with how it handles production drafts.

There’s a demo version available at the company site, which is worth checking out.

If you’re upgrading ($79), the mechanism for checking your current license is a bit slow. If you’re buying it new, note that it’s $50 cheaper on Amazon.

Today’s scriptcast focuses on how you start scenes.

The standard advice is always to come into a scene as late as possible, and exit as soon as you can. That’s a lot of what I’m doing in this tutorial. By picking the right opening action (or opening line), you can jump past a lot of boilerplate and get to the meat of the scene. Along the way, you can provide more texture and detail to keep it from feeling so generic.

To save your eyes from the tiny type, you may want to go full-screen. That’s the second button from the right on the bottom of the video.

A new screencast (scriptcast?), a little shorter than the previous one.

In the audio, I say “parallel action,” but a better term would be parallel structure: You’re lining up sentences to omit the subject. Action sequences tend to benefit from these staccato word bursts.

My occasional “How To” articles tend to get a good response, but it’s hard for me to show the difference between the process of writing and the product of writing. No matter how long the article, I can’t go through word-by-word, explaining my decisions. Scrippets only go so far.

So today, something new. I work through a scene on video with the goal of improving the scene description. This is still very much an experiment, so let me know what you think.

As usual on YouTube, buttons in the bottom-right corner let you go full-screen and/or HD.