Screenplay Markdown has a new home, a new name, and some very cool new friends.

Screenwriting Nerds Unite

As the SPMD spec was making the rounds late last year, I was contacted by John August, a well-known screenwriter and the creator of Scrippets, an elegant tool for embedding short sections of a screenplay in a blog or web site, using formatting hinted from plain text. It turns out John was actively working on expanding Scrippets into something that could support an entire screenplay—in other words, exactly SPMD’s charter.

When we compared notes, the similarities between his format, called Fountain, and SPMD were overwhelming. We decided that we would merge our efforts into one. And his name was way better.

Check out the beautiful new Fountain site, created by John, Ryan Nelson, Nima Yousefi, and me. You’ll recognize much of the content as originating from the SPMD spec.

I’ll pause here to gush a bit: I am delighted to be working with John. That he is a respected, working writer/director, a huge nerd who both blogs and podcasts eloquently, a software designer, a father, and a genuinely nice guy, makes it feel a little less crazy that I’ve attempted do be all those things at once as well.

Your New Screenwriting Software: Anything You Like

Fountain is everything SPMD was, now with the support of a respected industry pro with a track record of creating best-in-class apps for screenwriters. There are some minor changes to the syntax, but the mission is still the same:

• Allow screenwriters to write anywhere, using any tools they choose
• Support all the formatting conventions of a modern screenplay
• Archive screenplays in an obsolescence-proof format
• Welcome developers to support the format

If this is the first you’re learning about all this, read more on the Fountain FAQ, or check out John’s announcement post.

Apps Out the Gate

Using Writing Kit for iPad to edit a Fountain screenplaySPMD champions Martin Vilcans, Brett Terpstra, and Jonathan Poritsky have been working hard to bring the SPMD + Marked workflow in line with the new Fountain spec. Check out Fountain for Marked.

Kent Tessman, creator of the Fade In family of screenwriting apps, was an early contributor to and outspoken advocate of the SPMD spec. He has updated Fade In to import and export Fountain files.

There is open-source code available now on Fountain’s Developer Resources page.

For a complete list, check out the Fountain Apps page. But remember: the best Fountain app is one you already have—your favorite text editor, on any platform.

Fountain: Act I

Neither John nor I are done with Fountain. There are wonderfully cool things to come. So stay tuned. Or just get busy! Script Frenzy is coming up—maybe you could be the first person to write an entire feature-length screenplay in Fountain.

Read John’s announcement post here (if for no other reason than to learn the origin of the name Fountain), and if you haven’t seen his screenwriting-related apps, check out FDX Reader for iPad and Bronson Watermarker for Mac.

Final Cut Pro X was essentially version 1.0 of an entirely new app, and it shipped with enough features absent that many questioned the continued use of the “pro” name. Today Apple released a free update to FCP X that restores many of those missing features, including:

• Import FCP 7 projects via 7toX
• Media re-linking
• Multicam editing
• Video out via Blackmagic and AJA PCIe cards, as well as Thunderbolt devices

In this way FCP X is following the Apple pattern that is as hated as it is admired: if you can’t make it perfect, don’t release it. Some of these reinstated features are better than they ever were in FCP 7. Multicam tracks can be synced automatically based on audio waveforms, or even metadata. The new chroma keyer is greatly improved.

All these new and not-so-new features are wonderful to see, and I’m delighted that Apple is advancing FCP X so quickly. But what makes me happiest today is that this new release represents the collaborative effort between Apple and Red Giant to resolve the issues that were preventing Magic Bullet Looks 2 from working properly. Starting today, Looks users can download a free update that enables full FCP X compatibility.

Red Giant is so excited about this that they’ve put Looks on sale for 50% off (that’s $199). For every platform.

So if you haven’t tried FCP X or Magic Bullet Looks, today is a great day to do either, or both.

The 50% off sale (offer code LOOKSFCPX50) is for the next seven days. Magic Bullet Mojo already works wonderfully in FCP X, and is still 50% off—only $49.

The Canon EOS C300 is now available for pre-order at B&H, for $15,999—in both its Canon and PL mount variants. Expected to ship around the beginning of next month.

Looks like Nikon is starting to take video seriously with their new D4 flagship DSLR, announced yesterday.

I watched this very nice sample film by Corey Rich at 1080p and it looks great to my eye—no aliasing, no rolling shutter issues, plenty of detail, luscious “Top Gear” grading.

• 1080p 24, 25, 30
• 720p 60 (and presumably 50)
• 30 minutes record time
• H.264 B-frame, 24Mbps
• Two different movie crop modes, DX and 1:1 (2.7x)
• Smooth exposure adjustment while recording
• Tracking autofocus while recording
• External mic input with manual levels
• Headphone jack for audio monitoring
• Clean HDMI out (it seems)
• Remote control via iPad/iPhone
• MSRP $6,000, available in February

Great to have you back at the table after starting the party with the D90 Nikon.

UPDATE: The Nikon D4 is now avaiable for pre-order at B&H.

The iPad is a wonderful focused writing tool. Both Harry McCracken and James Kendrick have perfectly described how its simplicity and one-app-at-a-time model encourage attentive productivity. McCracken writes:

With the iPad… You can devote nearly every second of your time to the task at hand, rather than babysitting a balky computer. I don’t feel like I’m “using an iPad to write.” I’m just writing. It’s a far more tranquil, focused experience than using a PC or Mac.

McCracken and Kendrick agree that using an iPad to write tranquilly and focussedly requires a physical keyboard (both like the Logitech Keyboard Case). I love using my iPad with my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. I really wish someone at Apple did too, because unfortunately, the device’s keyboard support feels like a bit of an afterthought. I can’t help but feel that if anyone on the iPad team was passionate about the physical keyboard experience, a few glaringly obvious shortcomings would be corrected.

• Command + Tab, optionally in concert with the left and right arrow keys, is the keyboard shortcut for switching apps on Mac. I want this functionality so bad on my iPad that I actually mocked up what it might look like. I hope this video makes it as clear to you as it is to me how incredibly useful this would be.

I know, first I extol the virtues of the iPad’s focus and single-app view, and then I beg for an easy way to bounce among my apps. What can I say—the only thing a writer likes more than a distraction-free environment is distractions. Now on with the gripes.

• When a search or other text entry, such as an email field, presents a list of suggestions based on what I’ve begun to type, I should be able to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate that list, and Return to select—just like we do on OS X. iOS 5 added this functionality in a few places (address fields in Mail, for example), but there are still many text fields where it is frustratingly absent (most notably Search in Safari).

• If you purchased your Apple keyboard after July 2011, your F4 key is devoted to Launchpad, the iPad-esque app browsing screen in OS X Lion. This key, with its grid-of-apps icon, is just dying to function as an iPad home button.

It’s not just Apple that thinks of iPad keyboarders last, if at all. Most of my writing apps exhibit an understandable, but nevertheless frustrating behavior when used with an external keyboard. Writing often means adding text to the end of a document, so frequently the part of the screen that I’m focussed on is the very bottom, as far from my eyeballs as possible (especially when I’m using my Incase Origami case/stand). You can work around this by padding the end of the document with a bunch of empty lines (or, better still, raising the iPad closer to eye-level if possible—not easy, but if you can pull it off you’ve created something much better for your posture than any laptop), iA Writer in full-focustard modebut I do wish that some of these apps would recognize that without the on-screen keyboard naturally pushing my words up to the center of the screen, there’s utility in padding out the bottom of the screen and keeping your typing area near the vertical center—the way, say, Scrivener does on the Mac in its excellent full-screen mode. Of all my iPad writing apps, the only one that nails this is iA Writer—but only in its full-focustard mode.

McCracken wrote about using his iPad as a laptop replacement. That’s not how I see it. There are many occasions when the power to do anything that my MacBook Pro offers is exactly what I want. But there times where that potential creates such a distraction that I long for something simpler. The amazing thing about using the iPad for creative work is that the device goes away, and the task at hand becomes the entire experience. With a just little more of Apple’s characteristic attention to detail, the physical keyboard experience could be just as transparent, and the iPad would truly be the best writing tool I’ve ever known.

If you agree with all or any of this, consider letting Apple know via their iPad Feedback form.

See also: What I Do With My iPad Part 1: Storyboarding