You can import a new inventory file or convert your inventory from our old software Finale Business by doing Option A, B, or C, and then right clicking on the imported items in the effects window and doing “Edit this effect simulation or rack” from the context menu to fix up the simulations one by one.   To see a preview of a simulation, hover the cursor over the white border of the black effect icon

Option A) If you want to convert your My Fireworks from Finale Business to Finale 3D, then please create a show in Finale Business containing one of each effect from your My Fireworks, spaced out one at a time with a few seconds in between each effect.  Save the show as an HBS file, launch Finale 3D, and do the menu item, “File > Import > Import Effects from HBS file…”

Option B) If you already have a Finale Inventory / Master Inventory account, then you don’t need to re-import it.  You can just connect to it with the menu item, “File > Finale Inventory > Configure Finale Inventory connection” or the web page “finale3d.com > My Account > Connect to Finale Inventory”.

Option C) If you have a list of products from your own inventory or a price list from a supplier in an Excel file or a CSV/TEXT file, or in the inventory file format from other major scripting software (EFX, MDB), you can import the list into Finale 3D to use those products for scripting shows.  Finale 3D will create simulations for the effects automatically from the descriptions and other information in your product list file, even if the descriptions are in a non-English language.

For Option A and Option B, that’s all there is to it.  You don’t need to read any further.  For Option C, there are additional details.  The rest of this article covers these details and provides a technical explanations of what is going on.

The detailed steps for Option C are:

1. Prepare the inventory file to import.   You need to convert the file to a format that Finale 3D can import.  If your original file happens to be an EFX file from Show Director or MDB effect database from ScriptMaker, then the file is okay as is; skip to the next step.  Otherwise please import your file into Excel and edit the file so that it has a single header row with only the supported fields and one data row per item.  From Excel, export the file in “Unicode Text (*.txt)” format, which produces the file that can be imported into Finale 3D.  Please refer to the import template Excel file at the bottom of this page for the list of supported fields.   Finale 3D supports importing inventory files in the TXT or CSV formats with comma or tab delimiters, encoded as ASCII, UTF-8, or UTF-16; but the “Unicode Text (*.txt)” option from Excel is the most reliable.  If your Excel file contains any line breaks or tab characters embedded in cell text, you need to remove them before exporting the CSV or TXT file.  The easiest way is to create a second sheet in Excel that references the original sheet with the Excel formula =CLEAN() for each cell, and then copy/paste the clean sheet using “Paste special > Values”.
2. Import the file.  Launch Finale 3D.  Do “File > Import > Import effects file…” then choose the location for the effects. The most common locations for importing are “My effects” or an effect database file (FDB file).  Upon import, Finale 3D will examine the file and present a dialog telling you how many products it contains, and indicating if any column headers were mis-labelled.  You also will have the option to select the units of measure for duration and prefire explicitly, or leave Finale 3D to guess based on the values (it usually guesses correctly).  Click okay to import the file.
3. Save the inventory file.  Once you are satisfied with the imported file, you will need to save the imported effects.  The steps to save depend on the location you chose to import your effects.  If you imported into your online “My effects” collection, then save by going to “File > Sync with network” to upload your effects to the cloud.  If you imported your effects into an exiting FDB effects file, or created a new FDB effects file with the imported effects, then save by going to “File > Effects files > Save (fdb format)”.  The FDB file is saved locally on your computer, you can copy, email, or transfer to other computers to share it or create backups.
4. Optionally copy to your Finale Inventory account.  If you are using the Finale Inventory web-based inventory management software (www.finaleinventory.com) or if you have a Master Inventory from Finale Business, then you can copy the effects to your account as by simply selecting the rows to copy, then Ctrl+C, then switching to your Finale Inventory account from the blue selector in the upper right of the effect window, then Ctrl+V to paste.  If your Finale Inventory account doesn’t appear in the blue selector’s context menu, then you need to configure Finale 3D for your inventory account by going to “File > Finale Inventory > Configure Finale Inventory connection”.

Step (1) mentions “fixing” the format of your product list or inventory file or making the column headers match “what Finale 3D expects”.  The basic idea is that if you make your CSV file match the column headers displayed at the top of the effects window, then those columns of data will be imported from your file into the “matching” columns in the window.  The full explanation is a little more complicated because Finale 3D relies on some columns of data that your imported file may not include, such as the Duration column, the Height Meters column, and the Type column. When you import your file, Finale 3D will calculate default values for these properties of the columns are not in your file or if the cells are blank in of the effects in the file.  Thus, even though these columns are required in the effects window, it is okay if your original imported file does not contain them.

So what columns do you actually need, and what columns are optional?  At a minimum, you need these two columns in your imported file:

Table 1 – Required columns for imported inventory files

Based on this information alone, Finale 3D can fill in the other columns, like Size (extracted from the Description field if present) and Duration and Height.  Finale 3D uses machine translation algorithms to translate the description from the original language into a standard pyrotechnics terminology called VDL (Visual Description Language), which consists of approximately 300 mostly English words.  After importing your file, the VDL column in the effects window shows the translation.

Usually, imported inventory files contain more than just the two columns in Table 1.  It is very common for the inventory file to contain its own Size column or Duration column, for example, as well as other properties like Price or Category.  To import these other columns, just make your column header match the Finale 3D column header in the effect window, exactly. For example, the Finale 3D column header for height is actually “Height Meters” so please make your column header be exactly “Height Meters”, not just “Height”.  You can unhide all the columns in the effects window from the gear menu on the right. By default, most of the columns are hidden.

The column headers in Finale 3D may change depending on what language setting you are using.  If you match the column headers that you are looking at, exactly, the import process will work.  But if you want the import process not to depend on the language setting, you can also change the column headers in the file that you are importing the Finale 3D’s Internal Column Name, which is an English word or phrase with no spaces.  The full list of possible columns, along with their Internal Column Names and explanations, is shown in Table 2.

Table 2 – Full list of columns that can be imported

The effects window also displays some special columns that are not intrinsic properties of the products.  These special columns, shown in Table 3, cannot be imported as part of the import inventory process.

Table 3 – Quantity columns  that cannot be imported as part of importing inventory

If you are importing or modifying a Finale Inventory to use with Finale 3D while maintaining backward compatibility with Finale Business, you will need to give special consideration to three fields: Prefire, Type, and VDL.

1. Prefire.  Finale Business and Finale 3D interpret the term “prefire” for aerial cakes differently, and action is required on your part to change the prefires in your inventory to a value that works for both.  The table below shows the options, but the best solution is: change the prefires of aerial cakes to blank.  The default prefire for cakes in Business is 0.3 seconds.  Unfortunately this value causes aerial cake shells in Finale 3D to break at 0.3 seconds on the way up, looking like a geyser or flowerpot.  Please change the value to blank, or one of the other good values in the table below. Please see Cake and candle duration (and prefire)
2. Type.  Finale 3D and Finale Inventory support all the values of Finale Business, and a few more.  Thus if the Type values in your inventory are from Business, they’ll work fine in 3D.  But if you change them to values other than Cakes, Candles, Shells, Mines, Comets, Other, or Non-Choreographed, then they will no longer work in Business. (Type is called “Choreography Tab” in Inventory, and “Category” in Business.) Please see Why is ‘Type’ so important?.
3. VDL. Finale 3D and Business both support VDL effect descriptions for simulations, but Business requires a strict form of VDL.  If you type or import VDL into Finale Inventory directly, it most likely will not work for Business because it will not be in the strict form (e.g., case-sensitive).  If you need backward compatible VDL then please copy/paste the VDL field from 3D after creating or editing the simulation via the dialog, which puts it into the strict form.

Table 4 shows four possible prefire values for a 3” aerial cake, and indicates whether the result is good or bad in Business and 3D.  You can see that 0.3 is bad, but the three other possibilities — blank, 0.0, and the lift time of the first aerial shell in the cake — are all good.  There are slight differences, but the blank value is the best choice because it works exactly the same way as 0.3 in Business, and it also works 3D, and it is simple.

Table 4 – Finale 3D/Business compatibility matrix for prefires of aerial cakes like “10 Shot 5s Red Peony Cake”

Table 5 – Template files