Final Draft 5.0-parent

Rating:
Summary: EZ to use, even 4 this computer goober & quick delivery, too
Review: A writer wants to write not get bogged down with hard to decipher manuals, and difficult setup instruction sheets. Not to worry with Final Draft! In no time I was doing what I love to do: creating & writing!

Excellent program. Should have made the investment long ago!

Hope to see you at the movies enjoying my movie, "Country Inn, Dead & Breakfast."

Rating:
Summary: Final Draft 6 Far Exceeds Expectations
Review: I am a screenwriter who is proficient with Microsoft Word. I put off buying Final Draft because I thought with the macros I'd created in Word, this product could not be much better than what I was already using. I WAS WRONG!! This program GREATLY simplifies screenwriting and is INCREDIBLY easy to use.

The program is also able to convert screenplays written in Microsoft Word into Final Draft documents, and does so with a minimum of errors. My hard spaces in Word were inconsistently converted to question marks; some of the scene headings in the Word document were mistaken for character headings in Final Draft - both easily fixed. (However, Final Draft documents are not easily converted back to Word, as the formatting is lost.)

Final Draft is also able to save documents in pdf format. However, one cannot simply click on the document and have Adobe Reader open it. Instead, one must open Adobe Reader, and then open the document through that.

In spite of its minor faults, this is a TERRIFIC, easy to learn and operate program!

Rating:
Summary: Quirky program made useless by copy protection
Review: I purchased Final Draft a couple of years ago, and it was the best investment for writing I've made yet. I had loads of story ideas in my head, but had no idea how to write a screenplay or teleplay, and didn't have the patience to read a book about it.

I am a VERY basic computer user and feared formatting software would be nothing short of a nightmare, but within a month I formatted three one-hour teleplays, started on a screenplay, and knew how to navigate the software fairly well. The Smart-type feature is a lifesaver, and the various view, outline, and report features are incredibly helpful and save loads of time.

There are a few features that were more complicated to learn, and as an absolute novice I had some questions that I couldn't find answers for in the program, but overall - I'm thrilled with it and use it everyday.

I'd recommend this software to anyone, rank amateur or paid professional ,who's looking for a user-friendly, helpful, and reliable formatting system.

Rating:
Summary: Instruction book is worthless and phone support is $$$$$
Review: I test drove this and Movie Magic 2000 before making my purchase.

Movie Magic is just NOT ready for prime time. It is BUGGY. The cursor will pop into different places on the screen after operations. The voice read uses windows system and is MUCH harder to control than Final Draft.

Also, some of Move Magic's default formatting is outdated (like CONT after action between the same character which is no longer used).

This is clearly better and more professional. Movie Magic may have more "options" but when you want a correctly formatted screenplay, what kind of options do your really need anyway?

If you want to save the test drive time which I did for several days, go ahead and just get Final Draft. If you run the two side by side, you will see what I mean... Movie Magic is so unprfessional looking and feeling.

I do hope they put an index and a way to edit in index mode in future versions however.

Mike

Rating:
Summary: There's a reason the whole world uses it -- it's the best
Review: I've use Final Draft for about 4-5 years and in terms of development as a useful app it has done nothing but sit still. It is in fact a dinosaur, a left-over from a forgotten era when computers (macs in particular) were a pain and totally incompatible. The Mac community has changed dramatically in the past 3 years. Final Draft is, at best, doing the bear minimum.

It continues to be the one app I use on a daily basis that I hate. I hate it because it is buggy, clunky and doesn't conform to MacOS standards. I hate it because it uses proprietary standards for everything (including e-mailing scripts), it fails to take advantage of Quartz smoothing, the toolbar is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, the layout of the program doesn't make any kind of sense, the different "modes" do NOT function as they should, you cannot export into an useful format whatsoever (the only way to send a script to someone is via OSX's built in PDF exporting, and thank god for that), and all the "bonus tools" like scene reports and location reports are utterly useless.

And don't even get me started on the authorization process. I have absolutely no problem with companies requiring some kind of direct consumer-producer contact to authorize that you actually bought the software but the implementation you've developed is unusable. What kind of sense does it make to ask that a person de-authorize their hard drive before they re-format it when one of the only times one must do this is when the system goes down and access to the app is impossible? I've had to do it a few times, and I've moved computers a few times. Every single time I attempt to de-authorize the computer online, it as failed. Oh, it tells me while I'm de-authorizing that everything is honky-dory, but come to find out that it's not and the ONLY way to fix it is to make a phone call. I also have no problem with the phone, but what kind of a company in a multi-billion dollar a year business is not open on the weekends!? This has happened to me in the middle of production and I had to use a pirated version to get my work done.

I could go on about the shortcomings of the app, but I think the point is made.

Beware Final Draft, your days are numbered. Linux is ready to crush Microsoft in the business and server markets because companies refuse to choke down one more piece of bad code and wait in vain for the next "security update" which will do little to protect them against real threats. Businesses are realizing that open industry standards provide them with both flexibility and insurance against obsolesce. Unless you too make this realization, you too will become obsolete.

This is by far the worst quality app on my computer, and the one I use every single day. You want to improve things? Take a look at Mellel. Take a look at anything the Omnigroup is doing, Take a look at Nisus Express (even though it is a half-ass app). Take a look at any cocoa app written in the past year, hell take a good look at TextEdit. Take your costumers seriously and support, for real, open industry standards like RTF and XML, which would make your product easy to use and much, much better.

Rating:
Summary: It formats everything to industry standard.
Review: If you want your screenplay to look like an industry standard screenplay then FD6 will do exactly just that. It is also simple to use and the learning curve is like 10 minutes. It is so easy to format a screenplay that you will no longer need to pay attention to the format. Once you understand how it works your ideas will flow from you brain and will almost automatically format themselves correctly on the page.

This is a must for any screenplay writer.

However this package is a waaaaaay toooooo expensive!!! Please lower the cost of this thing by a $100. People need software like this for school theatre work and other community scribes.

Rating:
Summary: THE BEST
Review: ITS EASY AND EFFECTIVE. DONT SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS THAN THIS. IT IS THE BEST SCRIPTWRITING SOFTWARE AVAILABLE!