Hm. What to choose?
The industry standard is “Final Act“. It’s $250, and I had the demo, but… yeah. It’s $250. I really liked it, but apparently a lot of people said it was buggy and crashed and did bizarre things.
One man who had Final Act and was tired of the bugginess and crashes of it wrote the next contender, “Fade In“. $80. Eighty is a lot better than two hundred and fifty. I’m currently using Fade In, but you quickly reach the nag point, and printing my script excerpt on Saturday left the bold announcement on it, “printed using an unregistered copy of Fade In”.
Yay.
Scrivener people apparently rave about the Scrivener-like “Save the Cat“, which is a really odd name for software. It costs more than Final Act at $100.
Scrivener apparently also does screenplays, but I don’t know – It lacks the features of Fade In and Final Act – Enter, then tab, and it suggests who I’m probably about to have say something dramatic. Hit the enter twice, and the dialogue spacing is now active.
Scrivener doesn’t really do that. Scrivener is amazing for what it does, but I don’t see people using it to write feature films.
Which leaves me to wish that Final Act would get together with Fade In, fix the bugginess, and offer the program for $40.
Yes, Fade In is what the pro’s use. It’s so widely used, that I could collaborate with any pro screenwriter using it. And all the programs I just mentioned all use Final Draft extensions to save the file, so that you can mail it to someone who has paid the extra $170!
I guess it is what it is – if you’re going to play at writing screenplays, you gotta pay the piper, buy Final Act and (sigh) join the Writer’s Guild after your first sale.
