Even Rocky Had a Montage

[thirdstreet]

I took cordwainer's advice and downloaded the trial version of Montage, a made-for-Mac screenwriting application to replace Final Draft, which I have been using for the last eight years. I am happy to say that, upon first inspection, it makes a very strong impression. It's fast, easy enough to use and has a great interface. It looks a lot better than the

Comments

[cordwainer]

I hope it works for you. It has a few things to get used to when going from another program. (And whenever I try to paste text into an element, like dialog, it pastes it in as action, so then I have to highlight it to turn it into the dialog I want.)

I'm sure it will get better as it moves to 2.0 with more features.

Some other apps that people like, but I've not used much, are Celtx, which is a free screenplay and media app that has a lot of same features for notes etc. that Montage also has. Scrivener also has similar organzing features, but I think is more geared toward prose. And there is a Textmate plug-in for script writing as well.

But, I'm pretty satisfied with Montage. I like the various script templates that are built in, I like the full screen mode. There's a nice feature to add in page numbers, or whatever you want as a header. And it automatically puts in More and Cont'd when you go to print. So, it's pretty well thought out.

[thirdstreet]

I'm going to try Celtx and Montage simultaneously, one on each monitor and see how it goes. Interface-wise Montage looks a little better, and the templates help, whereas Montage is limited to only standard screenplay style. Still, both look to be worthy replacements for Final Draft which, quite frankly is a distaster of an application and has been giving me grief since day one.