#Final draft script writing upgrade
#Final draft script writing mac

you have a system crash and reinstall, or (as I did) you upgrade to Snow Leopard then have to roll back because SnoLe isn't really ready to print with your new HP printer (tsk). The activation system will dump you like a shot if e.g. In Screenwriter you have to set up an 'outline element' which isn't quite so well-behaved, though it does work.)īUT. ( I'm working on a musical at the moment, which needs a LYRIC element. It does its stuff and it's easier to set up new script elements than Screenwriter. Though I might try Storyist which looks like it has lots of promise for what I'm currently looking for.įD8 isn't so bad. So until it's changed it's back to Scrivener and Word for me. Not 8 pages of scene headings to look at and intimidate me.īottom line, if Final Draft can unlock the outline from the script I think this would be a great product again, but right now the big improvements they are touting aren't quite ready for primetime yet. There's an option not to have your summaries show up on the script view, but you still see all your scene headings on the page view and this is very very distracting. If my outline changes it's no longer an outline, it's merely an extension of the script and not an outline. Personally I need to separate things to write a good script. But the program is designed so that whatever you write in your outlining phase is accurately reflected in the script. I need a locked outline so I can go back and refer to it, but when I contacted Final Draft they said there was no way to unlink the two. So I finally got my outline entered into Final Draft 8 and as I start writing my information in my outline changes as I go. You need to be able to do all three in each view.

So I figured I would write just fill out the outline in index card view, but alas you cannot enter scene titles in index card view so I figured I would try using just the summary cards, but there you cannot enter the scene headings! This was crazy to me. In the outliner/scene view you cannot enter your summary, you have to switch to index card view.

I 'imported' the outline I was already working on and by imported I mean I cut and pasted each individual story beat and then continued using FD8. Playing around with the demo I was excited, but when I upgraded for $80 I was very disappointed. They claim they took note of other programs like Scrivener and Save the Cat and others. Well now Final Draft claims to have built an ideal outlining program into their program. The text in outline mode is a little small, but I loved the notes features and the importing of html snippets and pictures and whatnot, but I didn't enjoy writing screenplays on it and to have to switch between Scrivener and Final Draft while writing was a bit of a pain so I'd ultimately end up just exporting it back to Word.

But moving scenes is a bit of a pain in Word so I started to use Scrivener to outline my scripts. I've never been into the index card thing. I'm a meticulous outliner and used to outline everything in Word. It floated in 7 and I'd lose the top of my document underneath it.

#Final draft script writing mac

One of the best Mac improvements is that the menu bar is now back attached to the script document. Though there are a few school down artifacts, but I'm used to that by now and I've found them to exist in other screenwriting programs. FD8 is far less buggy and the text is now crystal clear. 7 was very buggy until the end and its text was very unclear and there were artifacts virtually every time I scrolled down. I've been using Final Draft since version 1 or 2 and have always found the actual screenwriting aspect of the program great and easy to use.