Because the new functions they added really do make a difference.

If you’ve been holding off until now, I think version 12 is a good version to buy. Of course that’s always a hard question because it depends on the way you like to work. If you go to “Window - Merge All Windows” it shows you your open documents as tabs, which is nice. On the MAC, Final Draft uses the MAC OS function of having a tabbed interface. It’s just a little thing, but in the past it bothered me that the navigator was always in the way when you had it open and in this version they fixed that. Your outline will be shown in the script and the contents of your outline will be converted into Outline Elements (“Outline 1” and “Outline 2” Elements respectively). You can send your outline contents to the script if you click the “Send to Script” button on the left. So, if you move an element in the upper row, or change the range, the elements below will move along with the element above. If you hover over the beat in the Outline Editor it will pop up and show you the contents of this respective beat.Įlements in the “Outline 2” row are considered “children” of the elements in the “Outline 1” row. What I just called “duration” is called “Outline Goal” on the beat. The page numbers will be reflected in the “Outline Goal” of your beat. You can also change the duration of the beat, make it longer or shorter in the Outline Editor. The color of the beat will be reflected in the Outline Editor. You can take beats from your beat board and simply drag them into the Outline Editor. That’s also the way they show it in their tutorial videos, and this really seems to make sense to me, without having tried this functionality extensively.Īt the time of this article, Final Draft 12 only has been released for a day or two, so watch out for future updates on my user experience. For example, you could use the upper lane for acts and the lower one for scene sequences. You can use the top two rows to outline your story. You can resize it up and down and also zoom in and out. It’s this little strip at the top of the window, and now, it’s not so little anymore, because they added a whole bunch of features and gave it a new name. The Outline Editor is what was called the Story Map before. So, all in all, I think the additions to the Beat Board functionality are great and they’re going in the right direction, so I guess they will be adding more functionality in the future. I would like to have different ones for different things. I was hoping they would update that, but no.Īlso, you’re still restricted to one beat board. You can only export the Beat Board as one big pdf file, there is no possibility to get your text or image information from the beat board out to another structured data format. In terms of exporting the Beat Board, you’re still restricted to pdf. Both participants of the collaboration can see the changes and movements on the beat board in real time. When someone changes a beat, that beat is locked until editing is finished. The collaboration works the same way as in version 11, just that now you can collaborate not only on the script, but also on Notes, in Track Changes mode, on the Beat Board and on the Outline Editor.

Now, in version 12 you also can collaborate on ScriptNotes and on the Beat Board. Version 11 of Final Draft already had live collaboration on the script itself. You can also change the color of the connections. You can connect them with lines or arrows if you drag them on top of each other, or select them and them connect them via the right click menu.

Final draft 11