Customer Reviews

Movie Magic Screenwriter Version 6

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

If you write scripts for film or TV, there's really no need for a review of this product. Screenwriter 6 is what you're going to use. There's a competing product called Final Draft, but from what I hear, writers in film and TV are now flocking to this.

But I'm here to report that Screenwriter 6 is not simply for film and TV writers. I do some script work, but I'm primarily a fiction writer. I started using Screenwriter 2000 (this program's predecessor) about a year ago, and after a couple of weeks I converted all my work-in-progress to it and never looked back. Now, with the new features in v. 6, it's even better. I'm writing short stories and a novel in Screenwriter, and having a better experience than with any other software I've tried.

For one thing, I've been waiting more than 20 years for somebody to get document outlining right. Screenwriter 6 nails it. You can see and navigate the structure of even long, complex projects quite easily -- by chapters, scenes, or any other element you choose, including notes. You can have as many types of notes as you want -- to-dos, action summaries, research queries, whatever you use notes for. You can insert bookmarks. You can see your scenes as index cards that you can drag around. You could write "War and Peace" in this thing and not get lost. That's the main reason many fiction writers will want to start using this.

But the program is also much smoother and much less obtrusive than most other writing software. It stays out of your way while you're working, yet it automatically does what you need it to do. Screenwriter is a formatting program. Fiction writers have far fewer formatting concerns than scriptwriters, but they have some, and they want to set up a manuscript and stop thinking about it. When a chapter or a section begins or ends, a certain thing should happen. It might be a page break, or some white space, or an indentation change, or whatever. With Screenwriter, it happens. You don't think about it.

In more than 20 years on the Macintosh, I've used (or at least tried) every piece of writing software on the market -- commercial, shareware, freeware. None of them was entirely satisfying. I was never really happy. Today, I'm happy. If you plan to spend a lot of your life in front of a laptop creating dramatic or narrative work of one sort or another, the price of this software (especially with the Amazon discount) is a ridiculous bargain.

Note: Screenwriter is NOT the sort of program that attempts to help you write "formula" work by suggesting story-structures, plot developments, character conflicts, story "problems," etc. The creators of Screenwriter have a program for that, called Dramatica. I don't use such things. If you want that, you can go buy it. Note also that Screenwriter is not for academic writers who need footnotes, citations, etc. For the Macintosh only, there's a great and inexpensive program for that kind of writing called Mellel.

I should disclose that for nearly a year I have helped beta test-- extremely modestly--Screenwriter 6.0. I've had the privilege of observing the diligence, cleverness, and ingenuity of the developers and the dedicated, resourceful work of beta testers who've nurtured this beautiful program. The development team asked me and my fellow beta testers to post a comment on [...]...if we felt so inclined.

I do.

Screenwriter 6.0 is an enormously powerful program for not only writers of movies and stage plays, but radio plays, TV scripts, and novels. Its radically new outlining feature gives writers the ability to organize, structure and consolidate their work in ways they might never have explored without this tool. The editing commands are intuitive and easy to learn. I've written two stage plays with Screenwriter and I've never been disappointed.

Kudos to the development team. This program beats its competitors hands down.

After struggling to write stage plays with the pathetic and totally incorrect "stageplay template" in FINAL DRAFT, I noticed Movie Magic Screenwriter, which I used to use years ago, had a new version out.

After spending a couple hours on the tutorials, I have to say, they really got it right this time. The integration of flexible outlining and note-taking with the draft of your screenplay, play, novel, or whatever is superb.

Writers need to outline, take various types of notes, and draft. I'm not sure why it took so many years for a program to finally combine these functions on one screen rather than separating them, but MMS 6 is the best I've seen yet. It's also very flexible and you can show or hide any elements, as you wish.

With the new version of Final Draft said to be over a year away, I'm ready to jump ship. MMS 6 seems more stable, sensible, and convenient all around.

I can't comment on the Mac version of MMSW 6, but the Windows versions is full of bugs. I have submitted at least half a dozen bug reports to the developers and those were only SOME Of the major ones. There are a lot of minor ones I just deal with.

I also owned the previous version and was really looking forward to the release of version 6. I was/am very disappointed.

The program itself it good. It's relativly simple to use and it comes with some nice features. The new outline and the "NaviDoc" feature is a great idea and it's useful, I just wish it was a little more flexible. But overall, it's a very nice feature.

I wouldn't mind the bugs as much if they would release regular updates that fixed them. However, the last update was over a year ago. (last version is dated 2/1/2008)

I'm a software developer by profession and I'd be embarassed to release software with this many bugs in it. Unfortunaly, from what I hear, Final Draft is not much better.

I've worked in and around the entertainment industry for almost 15 years now and though there was a time when Final Draft could be considered the industry standard those days are long gone. No matter what you hear I am here to tell you that in my experience, literally, most people actually working in this town use Movie Magic Screenwriter. Not just the writers and directors but the producers and nearly everybody who has to do something with the script during production. The simple reason is: it is more powerful and easier to use.

For that matter I've seen far too many people finally decide to throw Final Draft away (after I had been telling them to do so for years) when in the middle of shooting and trying to rush to get something ready for the next day Final Draft either crashed or had some funkiness that completely gummed up their files. I've never had anybody tell me they've experienced that with Screenwriter.

The new outlining feature is great if still not fully realized. Ultimately the company should have found a way to just integrate StoryView into the program, especially considering it seems this outline feature is the primary reason it took them about 7 or 8 years to come out with a new version and it isn't anywhere near as powerful as StoryView. Having said that the whole Navidoc is excellent. The notes feature is enhanced to make creating different kinds of notes super easy and much more functional than it was before (and light years ahead of anything Final Draft offers). I don't really use the book marks feature all that much but I've spoken to a lot of my co-workers and friends who use bookmarks frequently so you may find it a useful feature.

I can also tell you this: if you truly have plans to actually see your screenplay go into production anybody who will be working with you and the file will greatly appreciate you using Screenwriter. Everybody is still using Scheduling and nothing, NOTHING, works as seemlessly with Scheduling as Screenwriter. Sorry Final Draft. Nobody wants to open another program to do their tagging and production work and go back and forth between that and the main program while doing rewrites and going through the production cycle. Not to mention having all that work go to waste when bugs wipe stuff out.

Beyond the basic funtionality there are so many advanced features in Screenwriter that it would take an expert manual to cover everything. In my experience any time I've thought "hey, it would be nice if I could..." after poking around a bit I've discovered Screenwriter can and I'm off and running. Now with the new outline feature and script notes changes I am almost 100% fully loaded. Not quite, but as close as anything else out there.

I've been using Write Brothers products since they first introduced script writing software. They offer great software products, and Movie Magic Screenwriter 6(MMS) is one of them.

However, as the company, Write Brothers, has downsized, their interest in completing and delivering badly needed software upgrades to MMS have been empty! They admittedly outsource the fixes to their software because they claim to be working hard on other software projects. Their interest in maintaining MMSW seems waning. And MMS Version 6 does have well-document software glitches.

For screenwriting, you shouldn't have any problems. If, though, you choose to write plays or novels using their software -- glitch galore! They're aware of the problems and promised FOR YEARS to fix them, but nothing. And they don't seem to care. What a shame that such great software crumbles apart, as does their customer support.

In the future, when it comes to upgrades, I'll purchase Final Draft. Their upgrades are frequent and they're responsive. What a shame. Bye-bye Write Brothers. Been nice knowing you.

I've been using Movie Magic for over 15 years and lemme tell you this is the worst version ever! It's amazing, but they've screwed up so much in this "new & improved" version that it's almost not worth reviewing (let alone buying). Large chunks of what you're writing will suddenly vanish from the screen because of a margin wraparound bug; call tech support and they'll tell you not to worry because it's not really gone - it's just not there on the screen. What? Huh? You also get error messages for no apparent reason that will send you in endless loops of frustration that would make Kafka proud. In short, do yourself a favor: BUY FINAL DRAFT. Loyalty schmoyalty, that's what I'm going to do!

I owned version 4x of this software for many years and loved it. I spent the money to upgrade when version 6 came out a couple years ago and have had nothing but problems with it. It is EXTREMELY buggy and doesn't work with Windows XP, Vista, or any other Windows software. I called the company on at least three occasions over the last two years to ask when they were going to issue an update to fix all the bugs. I got the same answer everytime: "Oh, that will be coming out in a couple weeks." I'm still waiting. I also tried addressing the problems individually throught the email tech support feature and got no response to any of them.

If you don't mind having text drop off your pages (I'm talking entire lost paragraphs), sentences that disappear and reappear, constant program freezes, strange spacing issues, and a title page publisher that inserts random fonts within the same page layout (with no ability to correct or change them), then this is the software for you. I wish I could get my money back for the upgrade, because I've gone back to using my old 4x version. Write Brothers must have purchased the original company that designed this software (which was a good company) but they've done nothing with it since. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY.

After trying both Final Draft and Screenwriter, I decided on Screenwriter, simply because I had an easier time with the demo than I did with final draft, though it seems others have differing opinions judging by some of the other reviews on Amazon. After looking through the tutorial in the manual, I was easily able to quickly format my scripts, leaving me to think solely about the creative process. As I find writing a difficult process at times, it's nice to be able to let the computer do the formatting instead of me having to worry about it. The Templates included are useful to see how the pros do it, and would be very useful for those writing spec scripts. I use the Mac version, and have had no problems using it on OS X. One great feature I have used was the ability to import a script formatted in Word into the correct formatting of Screenwriter. While only about 75 percent accurate, it sure beat typing all of what I had already written outside of the program again. In summary, I've found it does everything it sets out to do, and you can't ask more from a product than that!

A warning for those who actually want to write fiction/novels at this time, with this program:

I bought this program several months ago, when it was full-price ($249-ish), primarily due to Ralph Lombreglia's glowing review. After using it for several weeks (for novel writing purposes) and tentatively familiarizing myself with the program (I would not be described as tech savvy), I found that in many respects I agreed with Mr. Lombreglia: I loved the outlining capacity, the ease of use of the notes, the ability to navigate. I thanked my lucky stars.

Then, for no apparent reason, the program became unstable and I experienced frequent crashes to the program that caused my entire computer to crash. Thinking I might be overtaxing my ancient computer, I upgraded to a new one, with the same result. With the help of technical services (who are very responsive, but have no solution at this time), I made sure all paragraphs were short, stopped using the document navigation feature (the best part, to me), reinstalled the program, and restarted my document in a new folder. Same problems. They helped me export what remained of my work to a Word document, and said that these "known issues" would still take a couple of weeks to repair. I believe that was in April or early May, 2010. At the end of June there is still no known date for the release of the upgrades that will fix these issues, and no hope for people like me. I have not tried the screenplay or other features, just the novel writing one, so that's all I can testify about.

It was too late to get my money back from Amazon, Screenwriter Customer support does not answer my email requests for a refund, and technical support says only "This is a reported issue for which an update has been developed and will clear up those issues. We do not have an ETA on the update yet, but we hope to have it available in the next month or two. It is unknown as to why some people experience this error and others do not...."

Again, this program may work as advertised for scipts--I don't know. But my version doesn't work for novels....

Hope this helps.