Managing ‘Tracks’ or Events

[Pyro_335640000]

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I’m wondering what the best ways are to manage tracks?

 

A few of the challenges that I’ve come up against, and somewhat overcome, but wondering what others do?

 

I don’t have the luxury nor trust in my product to script an entire show so generally fire the show as many small sequences. I’m assuming I’m not the only one?

 

So far, my approach is to use the minute marks as the starting point for each sequence to assist with logical grouping (eg 1m xx sec is for Track 1, 2m xx sec is for Track 2 and so on). My longest sequences are usually around 40 seconds and this has worked relatively well transitioning from my script in a spreadsheet to placing it on the Finale3D timeline, which then exports nicely to FireOne. I’m not sure yet whether it is more efficient than going straight from the spreadsheet to FireOne yet but thats a different matter, however the visualiser is kind of nice and did allow me to pick up on a couple of minor glitches in my ideas.

 

What do you do however once you get to the point of having a show scripted and then decide you want to insert another track/event somewhere in the middle?

In FireOne UF there is an event manager so quickly creating a new event at the end, and then bumping it up to where it needs to go is a trivial task but it seems like there is no similar functionality in Finale3D at least not that I can find, nor any real reference in the documentation.

 

In a Lighting Console world, you would insert a ‘dot’ Cue – If you have Cues 1 and 2, inserting Cue 1.1 will place it sequentially between. Most Lighting Consoles then let you to perform some type of resequencing resulting in all Cues having a major number.  Finale certainly accepts a decimal in the Track field, but doesn’t do anything to process it.

 

I’m certainly not expecting anyone to answer before New Year. Enjoy the festivities!

 

Also (maybe I should ask separately – so feel free to tell me to get lost) – but is there a way to sort columns in numerical order rather than alphabetical/string order? Currently the Track Column sorts 1,10,11,12,2,21,22 etc which is inconvenient to get events in a row.

[DrewFinale]

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Welcome to the Finale 3D forum and thanks for posting!

 

Even though we chatted by email, I wanted to follow-up with a reply here on the forum to benefit everyone.

 

The example scenario you gave on inserting a new track in an existing track sequence makes perfect sense. Based on your feedback, we’re going to add a new option in Script > Tracks titled Renumber tracks, which will reassign the track numbers chronologically.

 

Several of the columns in the script window, including the Track column, are sorted alphabetically because they support values containing both numbers and letters. For FireOne, numerical sorting is ideal, but some firing systems use letters to identify tracks, and some systems even support full track names as part of their track numbers. As a workaround to the alphabetical sorting, just including a leading 0 in your single digit track values, as in, 01, 02, etc.

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