A Little Help With Batch Saving Final Draft 9 Files (.fdr) As .fdx Files (Modern Format)

Questions & Suggestions
1

Okay, I'm finally being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, and I'm preparing to update my daily Mac to OSX Catalina. This means saying goodbye to 32-bit apps, including the old version (9) of Final Draft I've kept around for opening old screenplays. I've been writing screenplays for many years, so I have 300+ .fdr files which can only be read by FD9.

Fortunately, FD9 has a built-in feature that will resave the FDR file as FDX (the format of current Final Draft 12). All you have to do is open the file, close it and save it.

Since I have so many files to convert, I wanted to use KM to batch convert them from a Finder selection. Each file needs to go through these steps:

  • Open the selected FDR file in Final Draft 9
  • Click OK in the alert that explains how to save as FDX
  • Close the FDR document
  • When the Save Button comes up, click it
  • When the second Save button comes up, click it
  • Set the tag of the FDR file to Green. to show me that it's been converted

If tried this a few times, and can't get it to behave. Any help appreciated. Here's my macro WIP:

-- convert FDR to FDX.kmmacros (7.9 KB)

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image758×1694 119 KB

Thanks for your help.

2

What fails? I glanced over it, and didn't spot any obvious errors. You didn't say what the error was.

In any case, I would open the Debugger window and ensure "Pause New Macros" is checked, and step through the macro one line at a time to see when it misbehaves. Have you tried that?

3

I tried it with two files selected. KM did these steps:

  • opened both files with FD9, bringing up two copies of the dialog that explains that the old file can be auto-saved in the new FDX format.
  • clicked the OK button on the first dialog box
  • opened the first file
  • The macro stopped here.

I have not tried stepping through the macro as you described. I will try it -- thanks.

4

That suggests that your macro is looping without pausing where it should or pressing the buttons that it should.

I didn't thoroughly read your macro. I just gave it a once-over. Try the debugger and you'll probably discover something.

P.S. Did any of your 300 scripts ever get made into a show/movie? Are you a famous producer? Are you in jail right now? :slight_smile:

5

Hey @anamorph,

Drop Final Draft onto the Script Editor.app and see if it has an an AppleScript dictionary.

-Chris

6

I'm guessing you meant "Script Editor." I don't have anything called that.

7

Yes. Thank you.

My fingers did the walking and hit my Typinator shortcut for the old Applescript Editor which was sometime pre-Mavericks if I remember correctly.

8

Whew. You have no idea how nervous I am when I correct someone like you. Most of the time I get burned.

9

I've been using a macro that does essentially this but for Excel files for a while now. It's very similar to what you've got here, but the big difference seems to be that I use the Split Path action to grab the current file's name and ensure it's frontmost before saving and closing it; maybe doing something similar would help you? Here's my macro for reference:

Open and Save all Selected Excel Files.kmmacros (6.0 KB)

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image984×2556 278 KB

10

I dropped Final Draft 9 into Script Editor and no dictionary was listed for any version of FD.

Is there another step besides dropping it in the main window and checking the dictionary list?

11

Yes.
I'm a producer as well as a writer, but not famous. There are only a handful of people famous for being a producer -- like Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott Rudin and Jason Blum.
I've been working from home since March 2020, which sometimes feels like jail. :wink:

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12

If FD had a sdef the Script Editor would have opened a dictionary window – a completely obvious window similar to this:

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Too bad; that would have made the process more organic. A Keyboard Maestro will be slower, but you can get the job done.

-Chris

13

Thanks for this; I'm going to give your approach a try.

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14

Okay, I've found one problem with my original approach: I opened the Finder Selection in FD9, rather than each one by name in turn. That's why it was opening all the files without clicking on the buttons.

Still working on it...

15

I 100% understood your other message to me and I apologize for the inconvenience. No harm done.

1 Like
16

Thanks to all, I finally got it to work. The debugger was a big help, as was the Split Path.

Ultimately, Final Draft 9 was doing some weird things that KM couldn't understand, so I changed the commands from a close-and-save to a save-and-close. Now it works like a charm.

Here's the final working macro:
[EDITED] I added a go to path right before the save so that the new file is saved to the same folder as the old one.

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image757×2617 192 KB

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