WHY USE SCREENWRITING SOFTWARE?

From William Holden, using a traditional typewriter in 'Sunset Boulevard' to Nicolas Cage, typing away on his electric in 'Adaptation,' and Bradley Cooper on his laptop  in 'Limitless,' many readers are familiar with the idea of screenwriters struggling with the blank page. But with Final Draft, the industry standard screenwriting software, that struggle is somewhat overcome. Gone is the stereotypical image of a screenwriter hunched over a typewriter. 

Final Draft automatically formats your screenplay to industry standards so that you can focus on what you do best – writing.

Final Draft 12 makes the task easy and saves you hours of retyping all your script pages via its available Templates.

A Final Draft Template is a reusable document that’s formatted to industry standards, or your personal preferences.

INDUSTRY STANDARDS

Scripts written with a regular word-processing program or a free web-based screenplay template can’t be used in professional film productions. They’re often retyped or must be converted to a proper FDX to get them ready for production. Screenplays written in Final Draft in the FDX format are ready for professional use.

Final Draft is still the standard and used professionally all over the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and over 60 other countries. There are dictionaries in English (U.S., Canada, and British), Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Swiss-German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Spanish, and Swedish. So whatever country you’re in, if you’re using Final Draft, you know you’re using the industry standard.

Final Draft formatting has its roots in the studio script standards established over one hundred years ago. Not a lot has changed since: the same proper pagination, the same format, the same twelve point Courier font (the Courier Final Draft font was built specifically for this purpose), and keeping to approximately one minute of screen time for every written page is still important. This pagination guideline was and is used for quick high-level script evaluations by writers, agents, producers, and studio executives when promoting, planning and budgeting projects.

OTHER SOFTWARE PRICES

Other programs are less expensive but not nearly as widely used, and their pricing structures differ.

 - Celtx uses a subscription model - you pay monthly or yearly to use their cloud-based app. They offer a free 7-day trial, after which you need to subscribe.

 - WriterDuet has a stripped-down free version. You’re limited to 3 scripts at a time and you can’t work offline. To get the full version you need to pay for a monthly subscription.

 - FadeIn lets you download a trial version that doesn’t have real-time collaboration and all scripts will have a large watermark. You have to purchase a license to remove the watermark and use the collaboration features. It’s about half the price of Final Draft but, apparently, does not paginate too well, especially if you’re importing scripts or collaborating.

You can open scripts using Final Draft‘s file format .fdx in other programs, but the pagination is sometimes incorrect; for example a 100-page screenplay in Final Draft may open as a 110-page script in another program.

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