Remember Betamax?Īnd when it comes to popularity, and number of users, Final Draft, at least for now and the immediate future, is the platform most screenwriters appear to be using. Unfortunately, the best product isn’t always the one that’s most popular. It’s human nature to want to know, before you buy: What’s the best product? Movie Magic Screenwriter?įact: Nobody wants to be the only gal in the room using the software that nobody else is using. How many people are using Final Draft vs. That’s what I’m going to find out in this article, one feature or design flaw at a time. So how do these two screenwriting programs measure up? Both to one another and to the state of modern app usability, and to what screenwriters want and need from a screenwriting app? (And now you know why they call them “pitches.”) Most screenwriters are the ones on the other side, with the pitchforks. The fact is, most screenwriters aren’t the ones inside the Hollywood gates. the substance of many conversations and arguments about which screenwriting platform is the best (whether that conversation is in forums, or on Reddit, or in snarky blog comments) seems to always come back to someone asking the same question: Should I use Movie Magic Screenwriter or Final Draft?īut what I’ve never seen, in all my internet travels hither and yon, is a detailed assessment of these two software suites, pitted against each other, using criteria and metrics that go beyond the “feature-bloat” features that each seem to suffer from, and go straight to the heart of what matters most: How usable are these two programs to screenwriters in a real-world situation? (Whether that real world situation is multi-million-dollar film production or Jerry from Iowa and Jill from Washington writing the spec scripts that are going to save Hollywood.) And the two most dominant in the last decade or so? You guessed it: Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft.īut as I write this article, I find it a bit odd that while marketplace is fairly replete with a score of alternatives as of the last half decade or so - Fade In, Slugline, Adobe Story, CeltX, Highland, Scrivener, etc. Why is that? Because there have only been a small handful of screenwriting programs available. But I’ve only used a small handful of screenwriting programs. Since then, I’ve written, co-written, or worked on hundreds of feature screenplays. I hit RETURN, just like I’d done a billion times before when writing in Microsoft Word and other word processors. In short, with all due praise to John Hodgman, I was a “PC.”Ī different kind of “PC,” Production Coordinator Joey Geiger laughed at me because I didn’t instinctively know to hit TAB to get from the scene heading to start typing the action text below. It was on a “Macintosh” because I didn’t call them “Macs” back then. Clarity in explaining myself can be a problem for me at times.At Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Studios in 1997, I opened a script file using Final Draft for the first time. (Which is successive superimposings fading in and out.) (I hope I have explained myself clearly enough. Or is no one really going to care, as long as it is clear what I intend. I guess the main question is, would this be considered bad formatting form. For successive supers, I not only have a blank character name, but I have a (CON’T) as well. I’ll just have an extra blank line there. When I do one of these dialogues on MovieMagic, I get a box that says the dialogue has to be accompanied by a character name, even if it is a blank name. At the end of a couple of my historical shorts, I use 3-5 of these supers to describe what happened after the scene was over. First of all, I was trying to follow David Trottier’s guidelines for formatting superimposing words on a screen (which may not be necessary that I follow them strictly.) He instructed to put “SUPER:” on the left hand margin, then put the words on the screen in a dialogue box.
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