Hi,   I’m looking to adress my show first with the angles by position like 5/10/15/20/25/30/35/40/45/-5/-10/-15/-20/-25etc … except the 0 point. Cause I  want to create 2 rails one for the angles (+ and -) and one for the 90degres. And I want my adress to begin with the angles and finish with the straights lines, so my wires will not be a mess. thanks, Cyril  

Hello, My name is Kris Brown.  I am a pharmacist by trade, but I am a long time fireworks enthusiast.  I’ve had a 4th of July party every year of my adult life.  It started out with myself and a bunch of friends running back and forth lighting cakes.  That got a little exhausting so we started taping fuse together.  Met a guy who told me I could fire them electronically so I bought a low level electronic firing system. Did that for a few years and then stumbled onto Cobra.  I’ve been using Show Creator for a few years now, but decided to upgrade to Finale 3D Hobbyist this year to get more design flexibility.  I’m excited to learn this new software.

Great question. The closest built-in report is the “Size Totals” report. The downside of this report is that it sums “devices”, not “shots”. For example, if you have a show with a quantity of (2) 50 shot cakes, the Size Totals report will list a quantity of 2, not a quantity of 100. If you have the Pro version of Finale 3D, you can easily use the Size Totals report as a starting point to make a custom report that gives you total shot counts. Here are the steps:   1) In the Effects window, unhide the “Tubes” column. Then, enter the number of “shots” for each item in your show. For a description of the Tubes column, see that table in the Effects columns documentation article. You need to populate this column in order for the report to have something to sum. As you populate the quantities in the Tubes column in the Effects window, they will automatically be populated in the Script window.   2) In the Script window, customize Size Totals report template to include the Tubes column. For tutorials on customizing reports, check out the Reports, Lables, and Diagrams playlist in the Help Center.   3) The fun part! Go to File > Reports to generate your custom report and admire your work.

We are progressively getting more reports of this issue, and we are doing our best to prioritize a fix. We have some other time critical development work that we are trying to finish, we will turn our attention to this bug as soon as we can.   Meanwhile, if you can’t see the effect previews, the temporary fix is to roll back to a version of your graphics card driver before October 15, 2022. Here are detailed instructions:   1) Right-click on your Windows desktop and select ‘NVIDIA Control Panel’ 2) From the NVIDIA Control Panel menu, select ‘Help > System Information’ 3) Note the model of your graphics card listed on the left and the Driver version and Driver type listed on the right 4) Go to https://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx 5) Select your graphics card, operating system, driver type and other details and click ‘Search’ 6) Download and install a driver released prior to October 15, 2022           *Will, *Dustin Leary

Hi Dusty, thanks for the insight and video, much appreciated.    

Congratulations to the finalists.   And thank you Tim, Drew and the rest for the opportunity once again!

Awesome, thanks!

Is there a report that will summarize total shot counts in a show by size?  If not, can one be created with a custom report?  This is for the Pro version. Thank you

Congrats to the finalists, and thanks for the opportunity!  Looking forward to next time.

I came to the forum today hoping to find something about this — I lucked onto this thread, since I was searching for thumbnail instead of preview — but I’ve been having the same issue. In case it helps to track this down, I have noticed that the preview is actually rendering, but it appears to not be the top-most item — it’s like the black square forming the backdrop for the preview is layered “higher” than the render itself. You can see this if you click the yellow arrow to play the preview then move your mouse away as it’s rendering, there is a few milliseconds as the preview components are being hidden where you are able to see the in-progress render. I will DM a video that captures this behavior, and I will experiment with nvidia drivers — but I re-installed everything on this machine and still didn’t resolve the issue, just taking the default installs for all drivers, which I think means it will be happening for many/most people very soon if it isn’t already.