Archive for the 'Software' Category

• e  41 iMovie 09 is much better, still maddening

  A few weeks ago, I expressed exasperation upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?

  It’s actually a lot better.

  Yes, that could [...]

• e  12 Trailer competition, second update

  Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)

  We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re [...]

• e  13 The Unnecessary General

  In Final Draft, what do you use the “General” element for? The manual describes its function negatively, saying only that it’s for whatever doesn’t fit into the other elements. Personally, I haven’t found a use for it yet and was wondering what the pros use it for.

  – Richard Budd

  As far as I know, [...]

• e  40 Title page trouble with Final Draft .pdfs

  Reader Josh C wrote in with one solution to a problem that’s been frustrating me for months. When you want to save a script as a .pdf, Final Draft won’t always include the title page. It’s frustratingly inconsistent. The obvious workaround is to save the title page as a separate file, which is [...]

• e  20 I heart WriteRoom

  For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists [...]

• e  12 Final Draft updated

  Final Draft, the screenwriting application I use most despite profound reservations, has upgraded to 7.1.3. I haven’t gotten it to crash, so that’s something.

  My assistant Chad had never used the Tools>Reformat command, which despite its clunky interface is a huge timesaver when importing text from other places.1 Basically, it steps through your script [...]

• e  17 Final Draft serves left-overs

  This afternoon, I opened up a recently-created Final Draft script in TextMate, to see how easily I could pull out the text. As one would expect, there was a lot of incomprehensible goobledygook. But there was also a surprising amount of detritus left over from previous projects — notably Big Fish.

  It’s a little troubling [...]

• e  23 Final Draft buys Script magazine

  Today’s Variety reports that the makers of Final Draft have bought Script magazine and some related assets from Forum Publishing.

  The deal probably makes sense for Final Draft. Rather than buy a big ad every month, why not just buy the whole magazine? Plus, Final Draft probably has a huge mailing list from its [...]

• e  26 Macworld review of Montage

  Macworld has a review of Mariner Software’s Montage, which is pretty much right on the money. They give it two out of five mice, admiring its interface while pointing out that it doesn’t do nearly as much as it should: page locking, scene numbering and many other standard features are still on the drawing [...]

• e  14 From FD to MMS

  Some thoughts on the two major screenwriting platforms.