Final Draft AV

May, 2001
by Eric Ross

Final Draft AV will generate sighs of relief from everyone creating visual productions including commercials, sales presentations, documentaries, and corporate videos. This program lets you spend time being creative by freeing you from the drudgery of maintaining the deceptively simple-looking two-column format used by audio/visual scriptwriters. Final Draft AV can successfully transform your conceptual musings into a professional-looking script.

Final Draft AV knows you are writing a visual and sound script, and it is smart enough to keep the audio -- the right half of the page -- always connected to its corresponding visual description on the left half of the page. When you type a character’s name in the audio column, you can either hit return once to enter in that character’s dialogue or hit return twice to automatically start typing character action or mood within sets of parentheses. While there are a number of scriptwriting (or script formatting) applications on the market, most are better suited for dramatic works where the focus is on the actor’s dialogue, shot location (interior/exterior), and camera direction. Because of its two-column format, production requirements such as talent, props, and overall production time are easily identified. Final Draft AV’s intuitive interface requires you to learn few uncommon keyboard commands, and once you get going, the built-in spell-checker and thesaurus assist in any lapses in your memory. Scripts created in other word processing applications like Microsoft Word, once properly formatted with tables, can be imported and exported from Final Draft AV.

The Final Decision: If you write scripts for corporate videos, documentaries, music videos, or commercials, check out Final Draft AV. Its ability to always keep audio and visual scene elements linked make this program a must-have for any serious or "wanna-be" audio-visual screenwriter.