Final Draft Audio Video

Other products by Final Draft, Inc.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005AT83
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 28, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #22,461 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #33 in	Software > Education & Reference > Script & Screenwriting
  #86 in	Software > Home & Hobbies > Movies & Television

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
Final Draft AV fills a niche that Final Draft's screenwriting software ignored: creation of two-column audio-video scripts and audio-only scripts for radio. Television news writers, segment producers, and ad writers usually create scripts with video in the left column and audio in the right column. Writers who don't have access to a professional scriptwriting system like Basys or Avstar usually insert text into existing script templates, or patch something together using tables and columns in a word processing program. As both of these options scream "hack!" students and freelancers will welcome Final Draft's venture into this format of scripting.

That said, Final Draft AV feels like a TV-writing program designed by screenwriters. The two columns are there, it's easy and intuitive to move between them, and the video column does stay aligned with the matching audio column. But there are also some glaring omissions. The program doesn't provide estimated times for scripts, nor does it provide a space to input actual running time once a script is produced. Some of the automatic functions are unnecessary: each time the writer tabs from the video column to the audio column, the program automatically underlines and adds a colon to whatever is written. Useful for screenwriters, who write dialog between characters that must adhere to a strict punctuation format, it's useless for segment producers, who usually have one narrator reading their copy.

Also, though the user's manual says that importing and exporting scripts to and from Final Draft AV from other word processors is simply a matter of making sure they're saved in rich text format, we couldn't successfully manage it with a multipage script for a half-hour cooking show without going back and forth between the scripts and then performing major surgery on the mashed together copy. We think the Frankenscript occurred because there isn't one "right" way to write a script for TV: unfamiliar capitalization and spacing confused Final Draft AV, so the program just crammed it all together. Scripts can be transitioned smoothly between computers if both were written in Final Draft AV. And Final Draft AV scripts can go from PCs to Macs with no hang-ups.

Using Final Draft AV is still a lot better than building homemade script templates with your word processor, but a template is really all this program provides. It will probably work well for student projects, single segments, and ad scripts. But if you want to use this program to develop and produce a multisegment half-hour show, you'll have to pull out your stopwatch and your calculator. --Anne Erickson

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dreadfully poor!, May 4, 2001

By	Carl Schlanger (Manchester, MO United States) - See all my reviews

After using Word and Pagemaker to do a/v scripts for years, I decided to "move up" to a product that's made specifically for the purpose: Final Draft A/V. It has too many shortcomings to list here, but try these three for starters: 1) You're stuck with Times New Roman, a deficiency that's admitted on page 45 of the User Guide. "A future version of Final Draft A/V will permit full font control. Make sure you register so that you will be notified when updates are available." Sure, you can change the font, but at the next new paragraph, it defaults back to Times, every time; 2) When the user inserts text in the midst of existing text, it jumps automatically WITH EACH KEYSTROKE to the end of that page. To get back to the insert point to type the next character, the user must press ENTER after each and every key stroke. The wild back and forth flipping is maddening; 3) one of the options is to offset-right the script to allow lefthand space when printing for 3-hole punching. Even though I have never activated this feature, and even though the live area appears centered on my computer screen, it ALWAYS prints out with the offset and I've tested it on the two ink jets and one laser printer that are attached to my computer. It's truly the worst software I've ever purchased, but the packaging looks very good in dim light.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally!, March 15, 2001

By	Jerry Meltzer (Suffern, NY) - See all my reviews

I have been waiting for a product like this for years. Writing dual-column scripts in Word using tables has been very painful (to say the least!) and Final Draft AV makes it quite easy. I have also been a very satisfied user of their screenplay software, Final Draft, for many years. I called the company and they are committed to improving the product substantially in the next few months...but right now I am extremely happy with what it does for me and all the time it has saved me.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Could be better..., August 15, 2001

By	"providproduction" (Peabody, MA United States) - See all my reviews

I've tried to use Word processors to set columns to write short commercials and scripts. I could never figure out how to keep the audio and video together without frequent adjustments. This was a dream come true...

I was willing to pay the bucks if it did what it said. And it did, without much difficulty...right out of the box. I wrote my first script within 10 minutes of installation and it looked like I wanted...a place for video that matched the audio.

My only negative is that this software is of little use for anything else...as far as I know, it's not doubling as a word processor. It does a script and if that's what you need, buy it! It makes life just bit easier...just forget the price.