Hello Pyro_88670000,

Sometimes MP3 files show artifacts like this when imported into Finale 3D due to the way the files are encoded and decoded, so this probably isn’t your fault or because you did anything wrong.

Here’s a post that addresses the MP3 issues and describes how to solve the…Read More

There isn’t currently any online repository for sharing effects, but you’re not alone in wanting something like that. I hope we can eventually have a place where we can share our effects like that, but for now, one way to share effects is just to copy/paste the full VDL text. Alternatively, you can export your My Effects or Per-Show Effects list…Read More

Hi Roger. I’m glad you found the pro line effects you were looking for! Though as you’ve seen, the current selection of consumer-focused cakes is much smaller than the pro line and generic effects and doesn’t include most of what you’re looking for. We recognize the growing demand for consumer cake catalogs, and adding a larger selection of…Read More

Congratulations to everyone involved, especially Uros Petrovic, Patrick Sheeder, and Nick Archer! And huge thanks to Tim Jameson and the entire PyroJam and Finale crews!

Engineer Cat , Go to File -> Render settings (or press Ctrl+Shift+J) to change the render settings for those options.

However, launch times should be reasonably close for effects placed at the same time on the timeline, so if you’re seeing extreme differences, there might be another issue. What is the product ID of the sim causing the problem…Read More

Sky Fire Forge , DrewFinale , I’ve reproduced the issue. It happens on that full release version but it works as expected with the latest beta release.

I checked the effect with the latest beta version (2024.01.15-f5d87c0dd) and with the questionable full release version (2023.10.02-5d6e6ec44) and the issue is apparent on that full release…Read More

I’ve used Finale 3D with a touchscreen before and it suffers from the same problems nearly any natively-desktop user interface suffers from. It’s not ideal but everything is usable (of course, like it would be with regular keyboard/mouse input, just not specifically optimized for touchscreens). It’s difficult to do anything with high precision…Read More

“68. Effects: Improved the size of custom sim blob text, reducing them to about 60% of their former size”

“71. Effects: Added a check in the ‘Combine as cake’ and ‘Combine as chain’ functions for whether VDL is too large, more than 16384 characters, and display error message to user if so.”

Oh, nice! I knew about the 68 update but som…Read More

The length limit is still an issue. If you have your individual effects created and the problem only happens when combining them into a cake, one (sort of) work-around is to keep 2 versions of the problematic cake — one version that is just the individual effects/tubes arranged on the timeline, but grouped together as a group (so it’s r…Read More

Hello! My name is Neil and I’m a UX and brand designer, web developer, photographer, and pyrotechnician from southern Iowa/Northern Missouri. I shoot with COBRA equipment and over the past couple years, I’ve traveled all over the Midwest to attend and help out with pyro conventions, club shoots, demo nights, and everything in between! I’m also an…Read More

Great! Glad you got it figured out!

When you combine individual effects to create a cake, the pre-fire time of the cake (specified with “PFT” in VDL) will match the first effect you used in the cake. For example, If you’ve set a 1.5 second pre-fire time for an individual effect (“1.5 PFT ” in VDL) and then use that effect as the first 5 shots in a cake, the cake should have a…Read More

Hey there, Phil! I think your question touches on exactly what the contest is about — 😀 to see how different people handle creating sims for the various effects using the VDL system, knowing that the effects won’t always be completely accurate, that VDL is limited, and that peoples’ knowledge and experience with the system varies wildly, to see w…Read More

Thanks for the warm welcome and especially for the detailed reply! As soon as I read “character limit”, I felt a little like an idiot for not recognizing that as a very reasonable explanation for the issues I was seeing (albeit, I hadn’t even looked at the raw VDL data at all yet, but my quick mental debugging had already cornered the problem to…Read More