Review Final Draft Version 8
Use your creative energy to focus on the content; let Final Draft take care of the style. Final Draft is the number one selling application specifically designed for writing screenplays for film, television and theater episodics.
Customer Reviews
By David Baugnon (Bronxville, New York)
I have been an end user the project since 1998. I have known and lived with his nature buggy all the time (and without much complaint), but 8 was no hurry before it was ready or horribly thought. Here are some oxen are in:
1. Have lost STRIKETHRU button on the toolbar. I find this inexcusable. I’ve heard rumors that it will release an update to address this problem, but only for the hardships that give a thumbs down.
2. find the switch of the CAP took forever and took some ingenuity to do it on the toolbar.
3. STILL no button on the toolbar to highlight. MS Word has had a highlighter on each toolbar until I remember. Why is FD overlook this simple tool?
4. The program forces you to save format FDX mode autosave. Most of my writer friends were smart enough not to upgrade so in order for them to read the file, it must be saved in fdr. It is possible, but I still get instructions to save to FDX and no way to turn this off (or more importantly, make it save regularly FDR), except to turn off the automatic saving, so seriously, What for?
I have no doubt there are several other issues, as I just received 8. Do yourself a favor and stick with 7 if you can find.
By E. Miner “Paperback writer” (Carlsbad, CA, USA)
Yes, I know this is the industry standard, but the new version, Final Draft 8, is so complex and complicated that I have been tearing their hair out over it. First of all, most of my social contacts have version 7. One might think that the conversion would have been 8-7 easy. Not! I spent 3 hours with a tech on-line to try to solve my problems. I ended up having to figure it out myself. And speaking of support, which the company expects to fork over $ 200 and then only provide 20 minutes of telephone support before asking for $ 2.50 per minute for telephone support once you have used during those few precious minutes? Convert my script writer of FD 8? It should be easy, right? Again, no. FD has fallen more times the effort. This should be the first line of defense. Eventually I gave up and have not tried since.
Other difficulties have arisen as well. I can not get any answers on why it is so difficult to find the automatic backup, if indeed there are. Nobody seems to know why the caps on the first letter of a sentence, sometimes functional and sometimes not. I could go on but you get the point. Believe me, if I could go to Hollywood screenwriter and make people happy industry, I would do it in a blink of an eye!