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 when using a touchscreen (examples: adjusting column widths in the various Finale 3D windows, dragging events on the timeline, etc). Similar problems exist when using a touchpad or trackpad, but to a lesser extent.   Years ago, I bought a touchscreen laptop for portability reasons and the convenience of having a cool touchscreen, but it didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off and for me to regret letting that factor weigh as heavily as it did in my purchasing decision. It’s great for some basic things, but for precision control like you probably want in Finale 3D, I would not recommend going out of your way to use a touchscreen.   If you can, maybe try one out for some actual work like this and see what you think before making a significant purchase decision. You might find that it’s just not as useful as you’d hoped (like me). You might also find that you love it for some other reason(s) (they can be great for simple things like watching videos, etc), but I think it’s unlikely that you’ll find it to be a great tool for Finale 3D.

1、Can you add multiple hosts to the same choreography? 2、Can the description in the label be larger than the font size?

Does anyone have any experience using a touchscreen monitor in finale3d? If so. Are there any pros or cons to using one? I have been contemplating getting one but wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on using one.   thanks  

Thanks Drew, that makes sense, smart design. For some reason it looked like they were randomized relative to each other but I must have misinterpreted what I was seeing. Thanks again for setting me straight. -Chris

Hi Chris, great question. By default (with the effect represented by VDL), the orientation of the Ring and Ear will always be the same with respect to each other, and the shell as a whole will have a random orientation.   If you go into the effect editor, you can change the orientation of the Ring or Ear independently in each effect’s ‘break’ node. When you do this, the two effect will continue to have the same orientation with respect to each other as long as the have the same ‘random-group-id’. And, the overall shell will continue to have a random orientation as long as ‘randomize-break-orientation’ remains enabled.

Hi all – Below is the VDL I’ve created to sim Racoon’s Migraine (single shot for now). The effects are pretty close but I am curious if there is a way to link the orientation of the ring with the horsetail but allow them to be randomized together. I see that I can hard code the orientation of both in the effect editor to get them aligned but then each shot would be identical.   Any options for this?   VDL = 2.5″ 65.0m Red Ring w/ Brocade Ear   Thanks,   -Chris

This is my attempt to match TK2025CB (RKM-25X-RWBTK or RA143045 from Raccoon)   0.75″ 23.00s 25 Shot Cake (a) Red Flashing Pearl To Titanium Salute + (b) White Flashing Pearl To Titanium Salute + (c) Blue Flashing Pearl To Titanium Salute, 5 Rows, Rows 1,4 (abcab), Row 2 (cabca), Row 3 (bcabc), Row 5 (cabca/0.25)   Shout with suggested improvements or if these are helpful to share.   -Chris

Hi All – I noticed the VDL in Winda’s catalog for Criss Cross wasn’t accurate so I tweaked the VDL to better match the performance (Single rising crossette vs. shell of crossettes):   0.75″ 16 Shot Cake (a) Red Crossette + (b) Pink Crossette + (c) Orange Crossette + (d) Green Crossette, 8 Rows, Row 1 (ab/STR/0.52), Row 2 (2.21/cd/STR/0.86), Row 3 (1.72/ab/STR/0.91), Row 4 (2.0/cd/STR/1.6), Row 5 (2.55/ab/STR/0.36), Row 6 (0.75/cd/STR/0.42), Row 7 (1.6/ab/STR/0.07), Row 8 (0.2/cd/STR/0.1)   Shout with any suggested improvements.   I’ll post a few other consumer cakes as I work on them.   -Chris

Thanks Drew. I realize most of your users may not be extensively using consumer cakes but as a backyard hobbyist I’m excited for a broader catalog of sims to help plan my shows.   For now I’ll play around building some of the key effects and when I get something close I’ll post the VDL in the forum for peer review, suggestions, and in case it helps anyone else save some time.

Great question! Check out “Octopus” in the Glossary of VDL Effect Terms.   I should note, there is only one break pattern for this kind of a effect at the moment and it has a fixed number of “arms”. This just mean that for now, you can’t specify 6 versus 8, etc.