Product Description

Fully integrated screenplay formatter, word processor and index card system Spell Checker & Thesaurus Drag and Drop Editing Extensive Importing & Exporting Script Notes Optional Foreign Dictionaries - Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and UK English Real Time Formatting Production features Auto-Recognitions Tab/Enter Simplicity Script Scanning

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4507 in Software
• Brand: Write Brothers
• Released on: 2002-01-08
• Platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, Windows 2000, Mac, Windows NT, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Number of items: 1

Features

• Movie Magic Screenwriter's mix of powerful features, adaptability to your working style, and ease-of-use blew away the competition
• Expanded Production Features-including an automated Revision Draft process, Productions Solutions help, and onscreen Revision Draft colors-are organized on their own dedicated menu
• Built-in index cards are fully editable
• Create countless unique character names from NameBank's huge database of male, female, and last names
• Exports to StoryBoard Quick format for scene visualization

Amazon.com
Write screenplays! Collaborate with your partner! Hear your script performed! Movie Magic Screenwriter won't find you an agent or sell your work, but it enables point-and-poke writers to create an acceptable-looking script, and has enough added goodies to keep an aspiring Hollywood hotshot entertained.

This program automatically formats your script, putting character names, scene headings, and action in the appropriate places. It also does a good job of guessing what you want once you've started writing: filling in a character's name after you've hit the first letter or automatically attending to details such as pagination, MOREs, and other script-writing tasks.

Program creators added templates from actual television-show scripts, so writers can get a glimpse of formatting for everything from Friends to King of the Hill, an invaluable tool for writing spec scripts or just peeking into the working mechanisms of Tinseltown. There are 50 partial scripts in all. Extra bonus--use this program to name your baby after you're done writing a masterpiece. Movie Magic Screenwriter contains the most comprehensive name bank we've ever seen: first names from Abramo to Zola, and every surname imaginable.

This program also allows online collaboration, via voice or text, and can publish scripts on the Internet. There's a production-scheduling function and revision options should your work make it into production. Finally, one old-fashioned touch that we found rather charming in this high-tech, "does everything for you" screenwriting program: it can print directly onto index cards (provided) for writers who prefer to order their scenes like they did in the good old days before computers did everything for us. --Anne Erickson

Amazon.com Product Description
Writing scripts for film, television, and theater is usually a time-consuming task. There are many elements in a script (i.e. scene headings, character names, dialogue, scene breaks, etc.) that must be correctly placed in your script. Following these conventions is essential in making sure your script is receiving proper attention from agents, producers, and contest judges. Screenwriter works by your side, automatically formatting action, character name, dialogue, and other elements as you write your script.

Customer Reviews

Good script writing software.
For years, I used to use Microsoft Word to develop all of my scripts in. While it could be done, it wasn't the best nor the easiest way to do it. I had always put off buying specialized software to do something that but the problem is that I spent more time formatting and paginating my scripts than I did writing.

Finally, I decided to break down and buy scripting software. But before deciding on which one to buy I did a little research on the titles that were currently available. I wanted to make sure I got the best product for the right price. What ultimatly sold me on Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 was that both the Writers' Guild of America and Project Greenlight both recommend this software.

One of the claims made by the software company is the ability to get up and running right out of the box. I found this to be--for the most part--true. Upon receiving my copy, I was entering my first script in about 30 minutes (including installation time). There are some things that you may need to know, but the software company was intuitive enough to add booklets that contain this information in it so that you didn't have to hunt through the manual.

There are also a nice collection of templates included with the software that allows you to write for both movie and television (like I do). The templates for the TV shows comes in many different flavors (Sci-fi, sit-coms, dramas, etc.) and are even set up in the format used by several different shows.

What I especially appreciated was the fact that Screenwriter 2000 kept track of the names of my characters. I used to have to do this on scratch pads and Post-It notes or I would have to read back in the script to find a name. In Screenwriter 2000, I can call up a list of names to find the one I'm looking for. I'm able to do the same thing with scene heading, so I can keep my scenes in a consistant format.

Since I post some of my work on Zoetrope.com for review by other writers, the fact that I can create an Adobe file (.pdf format) was also of importance to me. While I could use a translation program to turn my Word document into an Adobe file, such translators have their problem and don't always retain the format that you created. With Screenwriter 2000, my Adobe documents come out looking the same as the original file. But this feature wasn't as intuitive as I had thought it would be. I was expecting this feature to be a part of the file exporting system. Instead, it's part of the print function. (You "print" a .pdf file.)

While there are a lot of pros about the software, there were also several cons, which is why I only rated it four stars. One is that this software is set up to installed on both the Mac and the PC from the same box. Becuase of that, they designed the user manual to address both opperating systems by printing it as a flip book. (One side has the instructions for the PC--flip the book over--the other side has the instructions for the Mac.) This means that the index is in the center. If you use an index as often as I do, plan on placing a bookmark there.

Another problem is that not all of the features available to the PC user is available to the Mac user. As of this review, only one feature--the Storyboard Linking--was not available on the Mac. However, this should be of little consiquence to the average user (unless you're a professional writer in Hollywood with a Mac).

Finally, one feature that was touted to me time and again was the voice readback capability. By using a Text-to-Speech engine, you can have your script read back to you, even to the point of assigning different voices to the different characters. It took a little effort to get this feature working on my PC, and when I did it sounded like a room full of Stephen Hawkings reading my screenplay.

Still, as softwares goes, this is possibly the best product out on the market.

Professional's tool
I am both a working screenwriter and script supervisor. I use Movie Magic Screenwriter for both those jobs. Its an excellent, straight-forward, and cleanly built program for formating and writing professionally styled scripts.

Compared to Final Draft Movie Magic's formatting simply looks cleaner - with more accurate and useful spacing, sluglines, and transitions - and is far easier to use. Now this doesn't mean it will teach you how to write or what to write, but it does mean what you do write will at least look good.

Minor problems I've had and things that could change for the better...Screenwriter is a tad unstable with Windows XP and occasionally crashes at start-up (although I have yet to lose a file because of that). Some of the production tools - like scene numbering and CONTINUEDs - are buried deep in the program and not the least bit easy to get to. Also they still have annoying and non-standard formatting in there sluglines and transitions. For instance you can select Continuous and Moments Later for a time portion of your slugline. Any oen that works in production knows that there is no Continuous or Moments Later. Simply either DAY or NIGHT. For transitions they still have CUT TO which is no longer used.

Aside from those minor things Movie Magic is an excellent script writing program.

Compares with Final Draft
Choosing screenplay software for me comes down to Final Draft and MM Screenwriter 2000.

Final Draft looks and feels a little more professional, but MMS 2000 has some features that are a little better.

For example, MMS 2000 has a nice little "automatic scene bookmark" feature that allows you to use a single button click to navigate to any scene in your script. Nice. FD has bookmarks, but you have to create them all yourself.

Both products have an index card feature that allows you to view your script in outline format. MMS 2000 allows you to make edits to the script while in this format. FD does not. Its also easier to move scenes around in MMS 2000. Its a little clumsier in FD if you're moving a scene say, from the beginning of the script to the end.

But which to pick, you say? In the end, I still like FD better. The beauty of these products is that they race to copy each other, much like Netscape and Internet Explorer used to back in the day. Whichever features one has, the next version of the other is also sure to have.