Sent you email as well

Excellent, I think that’s exactly what we needed. I’ll pass it on to my daughter for editing.   Derrick  

Select all positions, right click, ‘Edit position Properties’, fill in the “Section” box with something (‘Spiral’ maybe?) Make addressing blueprint call Spiral with no constraints (section is always in play) and assign the blueprint to the same positions.     Just did a quick 8 position circle with 72 effects and this blueprint…4 modules (aka 1 72m) assigned

We are trying to figure out how to create a spiral effect and get it addressed properly for a Cobra 72M.  The effect consists of 8 different launch positions all facing each other with the racks laid out in a V pattern with the V pointing at the launch position directly across from it.  Each side of the V has the racks tilted at an angle. Each V could have at least 8 shots on it. We know how to script it to fire around the circle of V’s but we don’t know how to address it. There will be a single 72M in the center of the circle.   Is there a way to have those 8 firing positions all automatically use the 72M in the middle or do we need to manually assign the addresses to it? Derrick Miller Mum Pyrotechnics Group  

Hi All, now that the PyroJam competition is over (congrats to the winners, looking forward to being there in person), I wanted to share some of my thought on using Finale 3D, now that I finally got them down on paper. This was really my first time seriously using Finale and first and foremost, I found it a great piece of software to use. It is very user friendly and intuitive. However, being the good engineer, I have a few fixes and improvements I’d like to see. Please take these with a grain of salt since I am a true novice and may not have found some of these in the software. Also, these comments are limited to scripting as I didn’t do anything with addressing, site layout, or rack design and are based on version 2024.02.23-18f9290b1.   Fixes: – In the script window, when setting a filter for cue count, it only shows the first 999 cues. It should go all the way to the end of the show. – In the script window “Part Number” is available to be used as a filter. However, it is not available in the effect window. This would be very handy to have in the effect window as well. – In the “Render Settings”, all the settings seem to save between session of using Finale, except “Particle Limit”. Please consider having “Particle Limit” save between sessions. – Similar to other Windows applications, pressing Ctrl the dragging an item or items will copy them in the timeline or in the render window. However, unlike other windows applications, you cannot drag the item(s) then press Ctrl to copy. Please fix so that order of operation doesn’t matter.   Improvements: – Sometimes, I found I was accidentally opening a window (example, the fan window) and wanted to get out of it right away using the keyboard. I found myself hitting ESC to close the window, but that doesn’t work. I would suggest having ESC assigned as the cancel button. – Being used to the Windows standard redo of Crtl-Y, it took a while to get used to Ctrl-Shift-Z for redo, I would suggest adding Crtl-Y as redo. – It would be nice to have the ability to adjust playback speed in the simulation and not just when generating a video to help fine tune timing. – A few times I just wanted to see what a single cue looked like. An isolated window that showed just a preview of the selected cue might be helpful. – Several times I created an effect on one side of the layout but wanted to quickly mirror it to the other side using the same timing and effects, just the opposite angles. A mirror function would be really handy instead of manually having to set the other side up.   Really Cool Idea: – Any thoughts about integrating VR headsets (like Oculus) into Finale 3D? I think that would be totally amazing to watch a simulation in a fully immersive 3D environment!!!   Thanks for listening, Tim

Thanks…just thinking out loud here…it would be nice if each entry into My Effects had an immutable ID/index field that was used on the back end to allow part changes like this without having to to bulk replacements in existing shows.  Probably more difficult than I’m expecting but … 🙂     Thanks   J

Yes, it’s as simple as Ctrl+A (Select all), Ctrl+C (Copy), paste in Excel, do cleanup. When you’re to bring everything back, delete everything in My Effects, copy/paste from Excel, and ‘Sync with network’ to save.   You’re instinct to be concerned about in-progress shows is totally justified. The script events are linked to the effect definitions in the ‘Per-show effects’ collection. Updating My Effects won’t “break” shows. However, if you want the shows to reflect the new part numbers, you’ll need to replace items that have obsolete part numbers with the equivalent new items. By contrast, if you were to change part numbers directly in ‘Per-show effects’, this would break the links to the script events (not good).

I need to do a huge cleanup of part numbers/description in ‘My Effects’ to align with a much more usable schema.  Is it as simple as export the entire contents of ‘My Effects’ as XLSX, make all the edits (Part Number, Description, etc.), delete everything from ‘My Effects’ in Finale and copy/paste in everything from the XSLX?  Want to make sure I’m not missing something here. And I’d assume it’s best to do this with no actual shows open.  I’m a bit paranoid so probably overthinking this….   Additional question just popped into my head that is a bit scary…if part numbers change is this going to break shows already partially created with the old numbers ?

Not that it’s difficult to convert inches to mm, but having the option in the Physical Specifications for racks to change to imperial measurements would be nice as well as a rack weight field (useful for verifying total equipment load on a trailer/barge/floating dock)

Thanks