Not that it applies to me, as I am a dedicated Final Draft user, but can Scrivener import/export Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 files?
FD seems to be the industry standard in Hollywood but MMS is a close second, and I’ve had a couple of screenwriters ask me.
ANYONE have an answer on this? Please?
I can’t say, but a sure-fire way of finding out is to determine if MM can import Final Draft files. If so, then compiling to FD and then opening it in MM would be the thing to try.
Uhmm. Not sure that would work with a pro-- they want specific answers before downloading a program. (and I don’t have MM)
Amber, Jennifer?
Hi Marta – Sorry for the delay on this. I don’t have a copy of Movie Magic, but it looks pretty smart about importing RTF files, so that’s how you’d need to go from Scrivener to MM. I saw a little video tutorial showing how it can import an RTF file saved out of Word, for instance, that didn’t originally have all the formatting set up, so it shouldn’t have a problem doing the same with one generated from Scrivener.
Going the other direction, importing a script from MM into Scrivener, woud be a little rougher. I need to do a little more experimenting with that one, but it’s certainly not going to be so simple as importing an FDX file, which gets recognised as a script from the get-go with all the elements assigned and ready for you to edit. You’d need to export from MM as RTF and then import that into Scrivener, which means you’d have to do some manual processing to set that up as a script in Scrivener.
How much of that is an issue depends on what your colleagues want to do, of course. I’d think the process would be starting in Scrivener and writing there to make use of its organisational tools, then compiling to RTF and importing that to Movie Magic to clean up and handle the final formatting–basically a one-way route, in which case they should work together fine. (Again, I haven’t tested the actual RTF import for MM, but from what I can in the online videos, with their demonstrations of importing a script from Word, for instance, it looks like this is simple to do.) If there’s going to be back and forth, I suspect it would just be more hassle than it’s worth, since you’d need to keep switching to RTF to move between programs–whether the tools in each for the various stages of writing outweighed that inconvenience would really need to be a personal decision, which would mean trying it out for one’s self. I’d hesitate to recommend it to someone who just wants to buy and start working that process immediately.
Whew! Way more complicated.
Just another reason why I’m so glad that I work in Final Draft (since Final Draft 4, if fact)
Thanks for the info.
Marta