Celtx vs. Final Draft?

Easom Aerospace

Easom Aerospace

Active member
Ok! I'm using Celtx and love its ease of use and layout. My gorgeous friend Crystal Damon www.myspace.com/wildflower6907 is writing a screenplay and using Final Draft. Is there any way to convert between programs ie: Cross platform file types or such?

Or? What would be the best and most used program for her to put her efforts into to keep most compatable? Thanks so much. I'm sure she would not mind hearing from anyone who can help 1st hand on myspace as well.

Cory
 
They can both export to rtf, pdf, and import rtf, but neither the export nor import work perfectly in my experience. If you want to collaborate with her on screenplays my thought is you two should have the same software. I use Movie Magic, love it; another feature of MM is that it even allows live collaborative writing over the net if both people have MM.


Easom Aerospace said:
Ok! I'm using Celtx and love its ease of use and layout. My gorgeous friend Crystal Damon www.myspace.com/wildflower6907 is writing a screenplay and using Final Draft. Is there any way to convert between programs ie: Cross platform file types or such?

Or? What would be the best and most used program for her to put her efforts into to keep most compatible? Thanks so much. I'm sure she would not mind hearing from anyone who can help 1st hand on myspace as well.

Cory
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I find that when I export an rtf from Final Draft, and say open it in Word, there can be some formatting changes, and some inexplicable errors (like a single letter in a capitalized character name for dialogue might be lower case). If you don't mind quickly going through the rtf copy to put these sort of things right, it's not the end of the world. I haven't used Celtx, but I understand you can work collaboratively when you create a Celtx Media Project.
 
I use both, and export often between them often (I often start writing in FD, then move to Celtx to figure out production costs, then move back to FD for serious edits if Celtx is too awkward.) If you export as plain text then it's flawless. Same with exporting to Word.
 
In Final Draft when you save a copy as "Text only" (txt) there are no errors except you lose all formatting (everything is aligned hard left and there are no line spacing), which in some instances can be a useful thing! When you save a copy as "Text only with layout" (txt) you appear to recreate the correct layout. If you open this in say Word, and enable non-printing characters, you see it has been produced with simple spacing for each line (obviously, margins aren't supported in txt format). Sometimes that can be more trouble than it's worth when you re-work it, though it looks nicer as a reading copy. In both cases, you lose any words you may have underlined for emphasis, or italics for the name of a ship, etc.
 
I myself use FD. I like the layout, though I did use CeltX for a while before FD became available to me and I loved that as well. But if you're looking for compatibility, I thought CeltX and FD had the same general formatting layout, so you should be able to finagle a way to cross over from one to the other. If not both export in .pdf, I'm pretty sure both do anyway haha.
 
http://wiki.celtx.com/index.php?title=Import_Script
http://wiki.celtx.com/index.php?title=Export_Script


Easom Aerospace said:
Ok! I'm using Celtx and love its ease of use and layout. My gorgeous friend Crystal Damon www.myspace.com/wildflower6907 is writing a screenplay and using Final Draft. Is there any way to convert between programs ie: Cross platform file types or such?

Or? What would be the best and most used program for her to put her efforts into to keep most compatable? Thanks so much. I'm sure she would not mind hearing from anyone who can help 1st hand on myspace as well.

Cory
Click to expand...
 
I was using FD until my Laptop **** the bed. Having lost the original cd with FD on it, my director-bud told me to check out Celtx...I will never go back to FD.


Ever.
 
Adversely, I am too fast in Final Draft to switch over to [free] Celtx. I could do all the planning in CeltX, but Final Draft is just much more intuitive where the keystroke is concerned and it retains fewer distractions, so you can actually focus on what you're supposed to be doing: writing.

That's just me?
 
I also use FD for "just writing", and import into Celtx for production-planning when MM-Scheduling is overkill.

The problem with Celtx is that it's still quite buggy, and the developers are very very slow to make releases. Also there's no provision for other developers to release patches (which is strange for something that's supposed to be open software). It hasn't been updated for more than a year.

Still, it's pretty good and will give FD a run for its money when all the bugs are worked-out.
 
I dont know, once you get used to celtx its pretty easy and fast, like anything I guess, after awhile the formatting things become second nature and doesnt hold you back... and its free.
 
It really isn't feasible to move back and forth between different screenwriting programs when working with a partner. You'll spend half the time reformatting your partner's work, because the program didn't correctly interpret everything on import. You're better off just using word, and then formatting it later.

I've never used Celtx, but neither Final Draft nor Movie Magic is particularly good at importing from other programs. I'd say that Movie Magic is probably a little better at it than Final Draft, but that is offset by the fact that, though there might be fewer glitches to fix within MM, they are harder to fix than in FD.

Overall, I prefer Final Draft.

Movie Magic is probably more stable and powerful, but in my opinion, the menus feel like they were designed by somebody who had never used a computer program before in his life. You know the good old shortcut "ctrl-s" that is universal for saving your work? In Movie Magic it does something different: it creates a new scene. Why would they change that? That kind of thing is common when using Movie Magic. If you are a regular user of MS Word, Excel or any other office software, Movie Magic will make you feel like smashing your face into a brick wall. Menu functions just aren't where they are supposed to be.
 
I second the bugs. Celtx seemed to work for me, until i imported, or tried to import, a full length script. Then it jammed up. I also do not like that Celtx requires typesetting. A few other features annoy me, but all in all I guess it is an okay free sw app.

pmark23 said:
I also use FD for "just writing", and import into Celtx for production-planning when MM-Scheduling is overkill.

The problem with Celtx is that it's still quite buggy, and the developers are very very slow to make releases. Also there's no provision for other developers to release patches (which is strange for something that's supposed to be open software). It hasn't been updated for more than a year.

Still, it's pretty good and will give FD a run for its money when all the bugs are worked-out.
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I used FD but I think Celtx is easier to use. It took me a couple days to get used to the keystrokes needed for everything but I haven't gone back since.
 
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I guess it's all about what you like, but Final Draft is THE industry standard software. That's why I see no point in using anything else. I've heard people talk about Movie Magic, I've never even heard of this crap Celtx though, I mean if you want to use something nobody else uses I guess you suffer the consequences of that.

It's like saying well gee I really like Sony Vegas. First, I hadn't even heard of that until about a year ago, second nobody uses it, third it's like saying you use iMovie to edit your films or something, total amateur hour. That's even worse than using Premiere, which nobody uses either but at least it's actually good software and Adobe tries hard. Final Draft is the only way to go with screenwriting software if you want to be professional about it. Even our screenwriting teacher said Movie Magic is a great program, but ultimately when she was collaborating with other professionals she realized everyone uses Final Draft, so it's pointless to use something different.
 
Movie Magic won a special Oscar. Movie Magic also interfaces with Movie Magic Budgeting and Movie Magic Scheduling - industry standards.

But here's the thing - anything electronic works.

Most important thing - script's gotta be good.

- Bill
 
Celtx is great free software and I recently used it in collaborating on a feature. My partner didn't have a computer of his own available at the time and it really was useful to be able to upload a readable version of the script to the web so that he could type up a quick email at the library and send rather than being required to have a computer of his own.

My only problem with Celtx is that there is no ability to lock the pages. On the Celtx forums, the creators have indicated that they don't really intend to provide this feature in the future because they don't see the point. Locking is invaluable when it comes to production and distributing new drafts of a script to cast and crew. I also wish they would switch to normal strip board format for their scheduling components, but the new release (available tomorrow) should take care of that.
 
I used to be a FD guy. Don't get me wrong, FD is good at what it does-writing a movie script. But that's all it does. With all the extra features of Celtx, to me it makes more sense to use it. The free part is nice too. They just released version 2.0, and so far, it's worked great on my Linux laptop-no issues. The great thing about using the one program is that I don't waste time converting scripts from one program to another. I can go back and forth between writing, breakdowns, and scheduling, and back again.

On a more personal note, I'm also a die hard Vegas user. Anyone who says that Vegas is amateurish and can't be used to edit a professional feature obviously has never even used or seen someone work with the program. All my shorts have been edited on it, many of which have won festivals, and I edited my feature with it too. Nobody has once said it looked amateurish.
 
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Vegas rocks. I tried Adobe Premiere, Avid demos, etc., they crashed and burned when I tried loading and editing a two hour 1920x1080 film and they could not playback smooth with audio. Vegas did it all no problem. I think Vegas won video editor of the year for 2008, maybe it was 2007.
 
i love Movie Magic. I actually prefer its clean interface, without the scheduling stuff and all that which appears in Celtx. I might have to get some of those other products that interface with Movie Magic at sometime though.
 
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