Hi DB, the “e-match hint” tells you the number of e-matches on the same firing system pin and at the same position. Looking at the position names in the upper right corner of your labels, I can see that all four of the items on address 01-14 on different positions. This is why the e-match hint says 1/1 e-match for each item. By contrast, two of the items on address 01-10 are at the same position. This is why they say 1/2 e-matches and 2/2 ematches.   What I can’t say from looking at your labels is how you got to this point. By asking about your blueprint, I think NEC is more generally asking about your addressing configuration, which is a great question. The standard way to assign firing system addresses is to go to ‘Addressing > Address show’. Did you do this, or did you manually hand key addresses in to the Script window, or something else?   Your labels are slightly unusual if you addressed you show using the standard approach. I say this because to get this result, not only would you have had to increase the max. ematches per pin setting, but you also would have had to remove the constraint that restricts each module to a single position. How do I know? Because if you addressed the standard way, and didn’t remove the constraint, you wouldn’t have module 01 being used at all these different positions. This might be something to look at closely, because when you don’t restrict modules in any way, then any item (at any position, anywhere on your shoot site), may end up needing to plug into any module. This could make wiring your show almost impossible unless your entire show is set up from a single spot where any wire can reach any module.    

Hi Brett, great question. At the moment, we don’t have a dedicated system or process in place for bug reports. But we greatly appreciate you and anyone who takes the time to send feedback. Sending an email to support@finale3d.com is a great way to report bugs, especially when a file attachment is needed. The forum is also a good way to report bugs and has the added benefit of being accessible and searchable by all.   Tips on submitting actionable bug reports: 1) To make a bug report actionable, we generally need a way to reproduce the issue. If we can reproduce the issue, there’s a substantially greater chance we can fix it. 2) The most useful bug reports are ones that include specific, detailed steps to reproduce the bug (a reproduction path). 3) Screenshots, and especially a Finale 3D Show (FIN) file are also extremely helpful. A show (FIN) file is also substantially more helpful if it contains only what’s needed to reproduce the issue. We call this a Minimal Test Case (MTC).     Can you tell me the steps to reproduce each of the issues you described?   For example, I wasn’t able to reproduce the first issue with these steps: 1) Go to Effects > Create effect… 2) In the Create Effect dialog, in the ‘Visual description field (full VDL)’ field, enter 1″ Silver Comet, and then click Enter to save. 3) Add two 1″ Silver Comets to the timeline and then go to Effects > Combine as cake effect..   When I tried this, the height of the individual comets was 58.1m and the height of the cake was also 58.1m. I tried changing the Description of the cake in the Effects window and the height remained 58.1m. Where am I going wrong?     For the second issue, can you tell me a VDL phrase that I can use to create an effect that should have a whistle sound but doesn’t?

I didn’t set up a blueprint, but maybe there is one set by default? I’ll have to take a look. I didn’t specify slats or anything else.

The two purple mines on 01-10 are in the same rack and shooting at the same time, it looks like you’re allowing more than one ematch per pin when addressing, hence the 1/2 and 2/2 (matches 1 and 2 of two on the same pin in the same rack).  What does your addressing blueprint look like?  Are you using slats or duplicating module IDs?

As I’m playing with the beta version, I occasionally run across things I suspect the Finale3D developers would like to know about. Is there a preferred way to pass on the things I’m seeing? None of them are showstopper things, but may be nice to have a QA ticket for. Two examples: 1) I can pretty easily recreate some steps of building a simple comet, stamping it out multiple times, building a cake and then when I tab off the description field, the height of the cake jumps to 100m even though each individual shot is 35m. Oddly, doesn’t seem to break the actual visualization. 2) Whistling comets have a nice sound, but when I try to mix that with something else (e.g. a small crackle break), the sound of the whistle disappears. The node appears to be entirely gone in the effect editor ‘XML’ (for lack of a better description).   -Brett

This is my first year using Finale and I’m trying to understand the labels I just printed (labels by address). Address 1-14 has three mines and one slice all shooting at the same time, but it just says 1/1 e-match. Address 1-10 has two purple mines and two white mines shooting at the same time and it says 1/1 e-matches and 1/2 e-matches. Can someone explain the difference between address 1-10 and 1-14 when it comes to the e-match count on the bottom right corner?  

Hello, I’m the engineer working on effect times.  Did Drew’s suggestion fix what you didn’t like?  If not, could you give a detailed explanation of how you would like it to work?   If you set the timeline “snap-to resolution” with the menu item, “Show > Show settings > Set timeline snap-to resolution” to be the same as the frame rate of the effect time (Show > Show settings > Set effect time format) then the playhead, and the time counter during playback, will generally NOT show the +ms.  They will look nice and clean.  But if the timeline snap-to resolution is different from the effect time format, the time counter during playback WILL show the +ms.   Will  

Hey Scott, the report for set up/loading is the “Wiring Script”. Check out that report out and let me know what you think.

Thanks Drew!

Hey Drew,   Thanks for the quick reply. Currently I am running the Hobbyist version. The sheet I am printing is for product loading purposes.  So instead of exporting csv then opening excel and moving things around, I will look at the other reports. it would be nice to be able to preview the report before saving. Then I could see if what I’m seeing is what I want to save. I’m sure the more I use it I’ll become familiar with what it does. thanks again, Scott.