The version of Finale that supports drone shows will be available in beta in the first half of June (within about two weeks from now).  We expect it to be in the full release before the end of the month.

The features include the ability to slide the drone show around on the ground to reposition the whole show, but not the ability to…Read More

Creating “Safety ON” and “Safety OFF” effects as an alternative to “With Safety (For Duration)” effects is a good example of what you can do with the new dialog: First, copy/paste the safety channel effect definition to create two new copies named “Safety ON” and “Safety OFF”, and then edit these two copies with the new function “DMX > Edit DMX…Read More

Now that we have these new “Create DMX effect” and “Edit DMX effect” functions in the DMX menu of the latest beta release, I have written up new instructions for creating your own effects and fixtures here:

Creating fixture definitions and effects

It is way easier than before.

Previously it was possible to…Read More

Some good news on this front — the new features for defining your own DMX fixtures and effects are coming out in a new release tomorrow.  The DMX menu now has menu items, “Create DMX effect…” and “Edit DMX effect”, which enable you to define the visual appearance of the effect using VDL and define the corresponding DMX channel values for the…Read More

I hadn’t thought of reports, but yes, we get “timeline notes” reports for free with this implementation, since you can make a report template from any of the table windows including this window.  It is easy to make a template for the camera key frames table window.  The template could filter for the timeline notes, excluding camera keyframes, l…Read More

When I read 20-30, that was a shocker!  I had been thinking 4 or 5, but after reading your explanation 20-30 makes perfect sense.  Your use case explanation is very compelling, and I would like to support it.

After giving this some though, while writing this response, I think the best initial solution is to support 26 more collection k…Read More

Yes, we still plan to give users the ability to re-map almost all the shortcuts, with just a few exceptions.  The warning message you mention does not interfere with that goal.  The warning message actually pertains to the new “effect macro” feature.  Effect macros have their own user-defined keyboard shortcuts, but these effect macro shortcuts ar…Read More

This is a terrific feature suggestion.  It is especially helpful that you’ve listed the four example use cases.   Example 2 implies that these notes need to be easy, lightweight, to create and delete.

We’ve been thinking of generalizing the camera key frames feature to other kinds of key frames, and I think this implementation strategy is a go…Read More

For technical folks who want to get the most out of copy/paste between Finale and Excel, here is a documentation article that explains exactly how everything works:

Copy/paste

There is quite a lot going on behind the scenes when you copy an event from the script or 3D window, like whether the copy buffer…Read More

All of the table windows in Finale support copy/paste between Excel, which is the general way to import data in Finale.

You can copy/paste rows or cells or selection rectangles of cells, in either direction to or from Excel.

To select a rectangle of cells in a Finale table, double-click on a cell and hold the button down on the second…Read More

I understand.  For small shows it is not uncommon for people to create position names like P1, P2, P3, and to want the position number to be the same as the module number (or “channel” in Cobra terminology).  This strategy works as long as each position needs only a single module.

In Finale 3D the position names are unrelated the module n…Read More

Adding onto Simon’s answer about light fades, most pyro+DMX controllers do not implement a ramp function in hardware, so the only way to implement a fade is with a rapid sequence of events.  That can be an issue with the controller’s script rows limit, as Simon points out, but it doesn’t totally rule out the idea.

Here are the steps we are…Read More

The part number field is editable in the per-show effects table, but since the part number field is the key for effect rows it is not possible to have two rows with the same part numbers.  That may explain why the part number appeared to be not editable in the table.

Bear in mind, the script rows contain part numbers that are references to…Read More

TRANSLATION TO ENGLISH:

I managed to design a small demo show in order to get to know the software but when I arrived at the time of programming I encountered some difficulties:
I use Firemaster 3 and I encountered the problem with the beeps that are too close to me (firemaster requires 0.50 sec. Between one beep and the next) and if I put 100…Read More