Software Movie Magic Screenwriter Version 6
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - Best of the Best
I started using screenwriting software in 2000, with the purchase of Scriptware For Windows. I used it to write several screenplays and it works okay as far as formatting goes. However, it is difficult to navigate from one section of your screenplay to another, especially as it gets toward the end, when it's around 120 pages long. Recently, since there have been no upgrades of Scriptware, I began looking for a replacement. I found that the only two real contenders are Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft. I tried both demo programs before buying MMS and can't believe the reviewers who say that the programs are about equal.
From my experience they are equal only in the fact that they both make it easy to correctly format a screenplay (and other forms). From that point on, Movie Magic Screenwriter blows Final Draft clear out of the water. Ways to outline, annotate, navigate, and bookmark your screenplay are much more obvious and better implemented in MMS. You should also know that the "registration with the WGA-W" feature that is found in Final Draft (and in the Windows version of MMS) is over-hyped. [...]. Simple. So don't make your decision to buy based on that minor feature. Read Ralph Lombreglia's review here for more details; that way I won't have to repeat them. If you make the right choice, i.e. MMS, you will enjoy much easier screenwriting.

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Rating: - This software is great
Movie Magic is a spectacular product. It is very easy to navigate to and from any portion of your screenplay at any given time. You won't waste any time formatting because Movie Magic does it for you. It is truly a great program. I've never used Final Draft but I doubt there is any feature there that would pull me away from Movie Magic.

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Rating: - Am I Missing Something Here?
Maybe I'm missing some patches or something. I don't know. I've been evaluating Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 (on XP SP2) using the download from Screenplay.com and this is a pretty buggy piece of software. The screen display is erratic, for one thing. Blocks of text will suddenly be duplicated for no apparent reason. I was inserting and deleting script notes when the program suddenly crashed and locked up in an endless loop. Had to use Task Manager to kill the app in order to get out of it. It's hard to believe that MM6 is this erratic since it's supposedly an industry standard, so I must be missing some patches. My impression at this point is that the program is extremely unstable. The documentation is out of date as well. For example, the help for the novel template says you're supposed to use SHIFT-ENTER for a forced page break, but this didn't work and after some trial and error I found out the correct combination is CTL-ENTER. A small detail, granted, but it looks like the documentation hasn't been updated for the new version. At any rate, that's my impression. Your mileage may vary.

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Rating: - A Must-Own for Aspiring Scriptwriters!
So easy to follow, easy to use tutorial gets you all set to create that first draft.