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July 13, 2010 3:57 PM   Subscribe

Final Draft 8 for OS X - message board?

For reasons I can't control, I'm forced to use Final Draft 8 for OS X. Last time I've used FD was years ago, but I have a general idea of how it works... after all, there's not much to it. Except. There is a thousand little things that I have no idea how to do that drive me up the wall.

The problem is that I don't have a lot of time, and things come up at odd hours, so calling tech support is not a convenient option. I've looked in the useless help section, but came up empty.

What I need is some kind of user community message board, where I can drop my questions at any hour and then at my leisure check out for answers. I've googled, but have not come up with anything.

It's small stupid stuff, like for example, I need to put next to a Character in dialogue both (CONT'D) (V.0.) and FD will not let me do it, no way, no how (or it will but it'll disappear as soon as I move the cursor). FD is convinced it knows how to format and will simply not allow me to decide on one off cases. I want to force it to. And so on, and on.

I'm going insane fighting the software instead of working. Is there a message board, or am I SOL?
posted by VikingSword to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Perhaps the Done Deal Forums? Or you could submit an email question to a Final Draft Technician.

For that specific question, perhaps Final Draft is trying to force you to have them reversed [ (V.O.) (CONT'D) ] as they should be? Or it's trying to automatically manage CONT'Ds, an option you should be able to disable. I'm not sure about version 8 as I have an older version.
posted by sharkfu at 4:31 PM on July 13, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks sharkfu. Reversing order doesn't do anything, I tried a dozen ways, plus there's a complication in that the character transitions from speaking live to a (V.O.) over a cut (CONT'D) to the next scene. I wish there was some command like "force" for any unorthodox thing you want to do. Eh, probably a stupid question to put on the green. I think I'm just gonna give up and resign myself. Man, people had it easy in some ways, with a typewriter. Thanks anyway.
posted by VikingSword at 4:52 PM on July 13, 2010


I hate FD and don't use it... but in Movie Magic there's a setting in preferences for dialogue that's broken by action (as opposed to broken by pagebreak) which can be turned off or on. Then, it automatically fills in the Cont'ds where needed (whether there's a v.o. present or not).

Perhaps FD also has a preference for toggling cont'd. (In the past few years I've started seeing more and more scripts which don't use cont'd (or even character names!) when breaking dialogue with action.)

If not, and FD requires you to add your own cont'ds under all circumstances but is deleting them when you add v.o. then perhaps a solution would be to use another technique I see a lot lately: avoiding v.o. altogether and using this:

TOM'S VOICE
Blah blah blah.

instead of

TOM (V.O.)
Blah blah blah.

Then of course if you have to add your own cont'ds, there's no v.o. to knock it out.
posted by dobbs at 10:32 PM on July 13, 2010


Oh, a hack that might work is to create a character name with the cont'd. For instance, have a Character name TOM and TOM (CONT'D) and then just use the latter whenever you need to (and FD should let you add a v.o. as it considers the bracketed content part of the name variable instead of an actual (cont'd). Of course, if FD doesn't permit brackets in character names...
posted by dobbs at 10:35 PM on July 13, 2010


And you might want to throw screenwriting and screenplay tags into your post so it pops up in Screenwriting MeFite's MyAsk.
posted by dobbs at 10:42 PM on July 13, 2010


Response by poster: All good suggestions, dobbs, thanks. I'll try. I forgot how much I hated FD... I guess I was hoping that through all the years I wasn't using it, they fixed it up, but I guess you can't fix up lack of logic.
posted by VikingSword at 11:35 PM on July 13, 2010


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