Is Final Draft 8 worth it?

Final Draft has an interesting reputation among screenwriters – while it’s the undisputed industry standard, stability of past versions is legendary for being, well, unstable.

In particular, v7 started out on wobbly legs and a lot of us thank God every morning that FD7 starts up and runs without a random crash or formatting glitch. And – for those of us who have found a stable set-up – the idea of not only giving up this comfort but also *paying* for it is difficult to swallow. So any new version had better have some serious upgrades to catch my eye.

…which FD8 does have. In particular, they’ve finally addressed kerning their font so it renders smoothly in OS X. Sure, this was a feature for all apps since OS X’s release a decade ago that FD simply ignored until now. But this feature addition means there’s no reason to export your current draft into a PDF that’s exponentially easier on the eyes during review.

They also hammered away on stability (a senior exec at FD explained that this was the real reason a new version took years to code) and I’ve heard very little complaint from their user base. Kudos in that area – I think new users can confidently embrace this version.

Another huge addition is the new FDX file format. Unlike the proprietary FDR format we’re all used to, this one is actually accessible by other apps – like Screenplay for the iPhone. More importantly, it should be future compatible – so all your scripts can be reasonably recovered decades from now. Even if FD is out of business at that point.

Finally, they’ve added amazing navigation tools – you can now attach colors to different scenes (something I use to track different storylines) in addition to being able to drag and drop the order scenes. This has been huge for my workflow.

The strikes against FD8 include the insane removal of the “Save as PDF” command – which is now buried in a sub-menu. This is supposed to be fixed in the next revision, so it will be a non-issue (hopefully) in the near future.

They also have again neglected to include a “Two-Up” view option, allowing folks with enough screen real estate to view two pages side by side. I was told last year that this feature would be included in FD8. It wasn’t. Hopefully, this feature will be added in the future. If Microsoft’s Mac engineers can figure it out, I believe FD’s engineers will find a way too.

So what is my final recommendation? I’d say download the trial from FD’s website and see for yourself if the new features are worth the $79 upgrade price. If you’re considering your first FD purchase, this is certainly a better option than 7.0. Consider using one of the links on the right-hand side of the page – it’ll save you loads off the $249 MSRP.