Hi everyone, my name is Nicola and I’m from Palermo, like all of you, I’m a fan of fireworks.

Thanks! I’ll try this, looks great! 🙂

Hello, regarding the need for displaying the event time in frames, I don’t have a schedule estimate yet.  We are in the middle of a large project right now for improving reports and diagrams.  This project will extend into Q2 of next year.  The project candidate that is likely to be next is adding a whole lot of new functionality around SMPTE.  There is some possibility that this frames request could fold into the SMPTE project; and if that happens then the frames representation fixes may come in late Q2 next year.

Welcome to the Finale 3D forum! Yes, the Pro version of Finale 3D can generate site layouts with safety circles, and we’re working on other complimentary features right now. Check out this forum topic to learn more: https://finale3d.com/groups/english/forum/topic/new-feature-awesome-site-plans/

Hi Does Finale 3D make reports like this? It could be really nice to have reports like this based on the biggest effects/ the effects with longest safety zones.  

I’m excited to see this too

Welcome to the Finale 3D forum! Here are the steps to change or “replace” items in your script:   1) In the Script window, select the row of script that contains the effect you would like to replace. 2) In the Effects window, right click on the row for the new effect and select ‘Replace with this effect’. Alternatively, instead of right clicking, you can select the new effect and press ‘Y’ on your keyboard.   Tip: You don’t have to replace the effect in each row of script one by one; you can select multiple rows of script and replace the effect in all of them simultaneously. For example, if your script has ten 35mm Red Comets and you want them to be 40mm Blue Comets, you can select all ten red comets and replace them with blue comets with a single click. If you make a mistake, just go to ‘Edit > Undo’ or press Ctrl+Z on your keyboard to Undo.

I create a show using the generic effects catalogue, but now I have picked my supplier. How can I change each of the effects used to the new supplier?

Got the MTC show file, thank you. The length of the VDL after combining your custom sims into a cake is over 24,000 characters – that’s definitely the problem. There’s really no workaround, hang in there for a new release that improves the custom sim compression. For context, we in the middle of a massive project to improve effects, and new effects, and significantly level up supplier catalogs. The project is running behind schedule but we’re pushing as hard as possible to get to goal.   P.S. You can customize your display name on the forum from your Profile page.

Thanks for the warm welcome and especially for the detailed reply! As soon as I read “character limit”, I felt a little like an idiot for not recognizing that as a very reasonable explanation for the issues I was seeing (albeit, I hadn’t even looked at the raw VDL data at all yet, but my quick mental debugging had already cornered the problem to something in this realm of issues, yet a character limit never crossed my mind, even though it should have been the most obvious. My brain just jumped way past that, ha). Learning about this known character limit issue makes me pretty confident that’s the issue as well, even without knowing more about the system. I should probably add that I’m a software developer so feel free to be as technical as you want. As a funny coincidence, a while before I looked at your response, I finally looked at the full VDL field text from a random effect just out of curiosity and my first thought was “Wow, this is a lot of text. Why aren’t they using some better compression or better encoding for this? Huh, maybe these super long strings are a pretty new problem from recent additions or something. Yeah, they’re surely already thinking about and working on this.”   I appreciate the response and valuable information, but you really don’t need to waste your time messing with my effects unless you want to for your own curiosity. I’ll send a show with a couple known-problematic ones your way anyway (feel free to completely ignore it if you want), but I’ll just work around the problem. I’m just happy to see that there is a likely answer for this and that someone knows what it is, ha. The effects causing the issues have all been complex effects, some unnecessarily inefficient on purpose (ie. using 2–4 launches in a single effect, with 1–3 breaks on each, etc) just to test and familiarize myself with the range and limits of the system.   I’m relatively new to the whole Finale 3D world (large pyro shows in general), so I didn’t realize that I’ve come in right after so many significant improvements, but a lot of things make perfect sense now. It’s exciting to see the progress and I’m very interested to see what the future of Finale 3D looks like. Thanks again, Drew!