A comprehensive catalog of special effects fixtures is a long way out, but Finale 3D does keep track of the fixtures it knows about, to facilitate conversion between fixtures and to avoid conflicts. Users can define their own fixtures by creating their own effects that contain within them the fixture definition, and DMX patch, and visualization instructions in the VDL. User-defined fixtures can use fixture IDs in the range 1000000 and up to avoid conflicting with known fixtures listed in Table 1, as it grows.
If a safety channel is separate from and not at an offset within the DMX personality of a fixture, then it is not counted in the number of DMX channels of the fixture. For example, a flame fixture requiring one ON/OFF channel at its DMX Channel Base and one safety channel at some other channel number configured separately has a number of channels of 1, not 2. For this kind of fixture, the user must configure an additional position to hold the DMX safety channel for that fixture. The additional position’s DMX Channel Base becomes the channel address of the safety channel. While the requirement of adding an entire position in the user interface to hold the safety channel effect is inconvenient, it does have the benefit that the safety channel can be shared by multiple non-slave fixtures, which is not possible if the safety channel is within the DMX personality of the fixture.
The DMX safety channel “fixture type” is listed separately in Table 1, and it always has a number of channels of 1.
Table 1 – Supported flame and spark fixtures