Screenplay Software circa 2008
When I last looked at screenplay software, I bemoaned the sorry state of the industry and wished for more choices.
Well, two years later, there are choices galore, and many of them are free.
There are now several internet based screenplay sites, with full collaboration options. These are still fairly basic, but adding features all the time. The two I liked most were Zhura.com and Plotbot.com.
Last time, I looked at a brand new open-source effort, Celtx. It was still very young, and not able to meet my needs. Well, I checked back, and downloaded the new 1.0 version. It’s very good, especially for being free, and shows a lot of promise. I firmly believe that this program could be THE FUTURE of screenplay writing software, especially if more developers begin to support the celtx file format. However, for me Celtx still has some serious drawbacks.
I found typing a script in Celtx to be quite tedious, though much better than using an ordinary word processor. I found myself typing about twice as much to get the same amount of work done, and I found it slightly buggy (though not fatally so) when formatting text. Also, it doesn’t give you a running page count - this is a very important feature, as we all know that one page equals one minute of screen time.
The most worrisome omission from a producer’s standpoint, though, is the inability to lock your script. While I can forgive this feature not being there in a 1.0 product, an entry on the site’s wiki states that the software’s creators don’t plan on offering it, and don’t consider it an important feature! Script locking is one of the most important tools you can have when producing a film or TV series - it allows rewrites to happen and guarantees that everybody in the cast and crew are working on the same version of the script. Without this feature, Celtx will NEVER become a serious tool for film production. I repeat, NEVER. Hopefully the developers will change their minds.
Celtx has a lot of other cool features, the best being that it runs on many platforms. If you have no money at all, you can’t beat the price (FREE). I will probably continue using it myself, just so I can collaborate on scripts with my less-wealthy friends on some comic-book projects.
My writing software of choice remains Movie Magic Screenwriter, now in version 6.0. It’s expensive, but solid. Final Draft is still the king, and in basic usability is almost identical to Movie Magic. A new entry in the field is Montage, but it is Mac-only, which keeps me from considering it seriously.
The world still lacks an Open Screenplay Format. Each program out there saves in its own, proprietary format. Some headway has been made in the programs importing the competition’s formats, but what we need is a universal, open format. PDF is useless in this regard - the best we have right now is RTF, which is sadly lacking.
