Final Draft, one of the two Hollywood standards for screenwriting software, releases its 8th version, which heralds such changes as a new file format, scene navigator, and color-coded scene view.

Anyone who writes screenplays. Final Draft is, by far, the popular choice among production companies and studios.

Final Draft finally incorporated anti-aliased text, which makes the on-screen writing experience much easier on the eyes than in past versions where the text was pixelated and grainy.

I also like the fact that the toolbar buttons are on the actual script window, so if you're the kind of person who likes to move your windows around on your desktop, the icons are always within easy reach of your script, rather than tied to the taskbar on the edge of your desktop screen.

They moved the "Save as PDF" option - after conveniently placing it in the file meny - back under the "Print" options, which now requires an extra step to save your screenplays as a PDF.

Also, the new .fdx file extension is supposed to be better than the old .fdr extension, but there's no default option where you can set it to automatically save as one or the other... meaning you can't share FD8 files with FD users with previous versions of the software, unless you specifically convert the file.

I feel lukewarm about this release. Although there weren't any major problems (as with the monster PDF problem in FD7), this release seems to be another case of "two steps forward, one step back", where they have a lot of nice little improvements... but also remove or change around some of the features that previous versions did well.

I only recommend this upgrade if you're someone who likes to have the latest and the greatest. If you're not easily impressed with shiny objects or new bells and whistles, the previous versions of the software work just as well.

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Created Jul 10, 2009 at 3:03pm • Submit your own review...