Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Version 7 2nd chance?, 28 Sep 2004
This should be a great new version of Final Draft but it's been dogged by bugs: it's crashed, chewed up text etc etc and I wrote an at-the-end-of-my-tether review of it a few weeks back. However, to their credit, the company does respond to user's comments quickly and they've just put out yet another update. I'd still reccommend getting version 6 and waiting to see if the problems with 7 are solved. Don't get me wrong, though: Final Draft is a wonderful programme, if you're a screenwriter it'll change your life.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Great software, shame about the activation, 3 Dec 2007
I have to say I disagree with many of the other reviews here; I've written several scripts using Final Draft 7 and, on the whole, I love it. The first release was buggy, but those bugs are long gone.
But... I only love it when it works.
Final Draft 6 used the CD as a 'key', and required it to be in the CD drive to run. That was a bit annoying, but I just left it in the CD drive all the time and forgot about it. Final Draft 7, on the other hand, forces 'activation' on you. You can 'activate' it on two PCs, and then it runs. It won't run on any PC which isn't 'activated'.
Which, in theory, is better. Unfortunately in practice it's awful. I installed it on my laptop a few months ago and a few weeks later it told me it wasn't activated. I reactivated it, and then a few weeks later I wanted to activate it on my desktop system (from which I'd previously deactivated it while the PC was being shipped across the Atlantic). It told me I'd used up my activations.
I then had to spend fifteen minutes on the phone to California to get them to allow me to use the software I'd paid for on my desktop system.
Which was annoying, but it was OK for a while since I then had it running on both systems with no problems. Until a few days ago when I tried to run it on my laptop and... guess what... it's not activated again.
Now, I have no desire to do the phone hold runaround to California again to get the software I've paid for running on my PC because it randomly decides that it's not the same laptop that it was previously activated on. Fortunately I've been able to go back to Final Draft 6, but I will be very wary of buying any future versions of the software, and I really can't recommend it to anyone while it forces compulsory activation _WHICH DOESN'T WORK_.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More of the same, 13 Sep 2007
I have been using Final Draft since version 4 and was one of the writers who nagged the BBC into approving it as a submission format, after becoming frustrated with their insistence on MS Word. FD is still better than Word for screenplays - what isn't? - but IMHO it is not the best screenwriting program. I have upgraded FD twice since then to v5 and v6 and have recently been trying a demo of 7. I have to say I have found nothing new, useful, or greatly improved in version 7.
A lot of the revisions added useless gimmicks like having the computer read your script back to you (as if a synthetic voice could ever make any script sound remotely interesting) as well as a handful of frustrating bugs. Back in v4, when FD was small and personal and you could still have conversations with the programmers I suggested adding a few basic wp functions useful for badly-self-taught typists, such as correcting transposed letters - I'm still waiting.
Three years ago a script editor introduced me to Movie Magic, aka Screenwriter 2000, and today that's the one I use for all my TV scripts. It just works better than FD and is far less buggy. It has commonsense features like the ability to change the case of a highlighted block simply by pressing f12, rather than faffing about with the mouse. Note that FD just switches the case - Peter becomes pETER - but MM changes the whole word to PETER. Thats the sort of common-sense detail that makes MM easier to use than FD.
Again, if in the middle of dialogue you type '(' Move Magic recognises you are going to a parenthetical and automatically adds a carriage return. After all these years and versions Final Draft 7 still doesn't! MM recognises names and capitalises them automatically, or puts them into uppercase if you like. It's just smarter than FD and less buggy.
Some people grumble that Movie Magic hasn't been upgraded for years - but that's because it works fine as it is. Why fall for FD's marketing and go for the latest version, when all it does is change the design of the buttons on the menu bar?
I have to say that I don't write in collaboration with anyone and so I cannot pass judgment on Collabowriter, which I think comes bundled with FD. If you have a writing partner who can't be there in person it might be useful (presuming it works.) If you're just writing a straight movie or TV script go for Movie Magic. Look for a cheap copy of FD 6 somewhere, so when you've written the script in MM you can dump it into FD for submission, as thanks to early adopters like me Final Draft is an industry standard now. The problem is in my opinion FD has used that status as an excuse to sit back on its laurels and focus on marketing rather than product improvement.
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