There isn’t a VDL term defined for “7 arms” at the moment, but you can do 8 arms with the term “Octopus”. Here’s an example:

5″ Very Dim Very Thin Charcoal To Green Octopus w/ Purple Pistil

Hi Pyro_86840000, That depends on whether you’re running Finale 3D Lite, Hobbyist or Pro.

Finale 3D Lite includes a basic set of built-in reports, the only export option is PDF, the sort order on the reports can’t be changed. Hobbyist includes a wider array of built-in reports and allows you to export any report in a wide variety for formats…Read More

Hi PyroDad, the Hobbyist version does not populate rack and tube assignments. You can do this manually using the ‘Rack’ and ‘Tube’ columns in the script window. We have given a great deal of consideration to which features are available in each version of Finale 3D.  I’m sorry, we don’t anticipate making a change in this regard.

“Actually, a…Read More

Hi PyroDad, great questions. Regarding racks, it’s important to distinguish between ‘adding racks’ and assigning effects to racks (i.e., loading racks). The add racks functionality adds the necessary number of racks to the show, but it does not assign each event in your script to a specific rack. The specific rack and tube that each script event…Read More

Hi brad, thanks for the post. The Hobbyist and Pro versions of Finale 3D have a timeline button (represented by the radioactive symbol) that allows you to toggle between three modes: the standard duration bars, effect descriptions, and duration bars hidden altogether. In other words, as you suspected, the feature does exist but it’s not available…Read More

Hi Kristine Ernzen, the “sky mine” effect, where the burst pattern of the stars is in a tight cluster (as opposed to a sphere) isn’t really possible in VDL yet, but it’s on my short list of effects to add as soon as possible. In the meantime, the best approximation in VDL is probably a half and half effect like:

25mm Very Dense Bright Red…Read More

Thanks for the great question. We don’t have a shared community effect collection yet but this definitely something we plan to implement in the future. To alleviate any privacy or security concerns, we would not pull effects from users’ private “My Effects” collections, instead we plan to add a feature that allows users to selectively upload…Read More

Hi Kristine Ernzen, your screenshots show that your computers are not running the same version of Finale 3D. The ‘Edit Effect’ dialog in your second screenshot has a middle section titled, ‘Optional inputs’, this represents a recent “BETA” release of Finale 3D. In contrast, your first screenshot shows an older version of the edit effect dialog,…Read More

Hi Kristin, here’s a video that demonstrates how to add silence to a song (or soundtrack) using Audacity, replace your existing soundtrack in Finale 3D, and then use Script > Time adjustments > Shift times… to re-align your cues/events.

There is no need to start over! In Finale 3D Hobbyist and Pro, you can copy and paste your timeline events and songs to combine them into a single show. Check out the tutorial video below. In the Lite version of Finale 3D, music editing isn’t supported, so the process would be to combine your songs using a 3rd party music editing application like…Read More

Andy McKeeman, Pyro_86840000,

Good news, I spoke with PyroDan at Spirit of 76 this morning and he graciously offered to add missing items and make some improvements to simulations in his catalog.

Hi Mark, great question. In the Pro version of Finale 3D, you can add a conditional formatting expression to highlight rows by address. Here’s a quick video tutorial: