Good morning everyone. My name is Terry from the west coast. My company does pyrotechnics and I’m starting to use Finale 3d for my designs. I am a member of Alliance of Special Effects & Pyrotechnic Operators, (ASEPO), Western Pyrotechnics Association, (WPA) and  International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, (IAAPA). I am a California License Pyrotechnic Operator First Class, Pyrotechnic Operator Theatrical and Pyrotechnic Operator Basic Commercial. I also have my Entertainment Firearms permit, California Flame Thrower permit and I also hold a Federal Explosives License, (FEL). Some of the companies I have worked for are Disneyland Fireworks, Legoland California, Six Flaggs Magic Mountain, Dreamworks and Universal Studios Hollywood. I have been in the industry for over 35 years and want to learn more about the design aspect. I have designed shows over the years, but really want to create spectacular new designs. I wish all of you a safe fireworks season.

I am currently working on the “V2” DMX implementation, which has a number of improvements including ramps, latest-takes-precedence semantics for overlapping effects, and a new paradigm in which the set of standard effects for a fixture is generated from a fixture definition, rather than manually one by one by me or a user, which has been a bottleneck for supporting new fixtures. As I’m writing the function that generates the standard effects for various kinds of fixtures, I am revisiting some design decisions and considering if it is a good time to make any improvements to what is included in “standard effects”. Currently, the flame machine standard effects have multiple variations of the flame effects — short, medium, long, very long, one second — enabling the user to click on whatever duration the user wants without having to fiddle with entering a duration value.  The durations aren’t editable, but if users want to change the duration, they can change the “type” field from “flame” to “sfx” (however I imagine many users don’t realize this is possible). By contrast, light fixture effects and spark machine effects in the standard libraries have “type” = “sfx” and thus have editable durations.  The reason for the difference is that with light fixtures, users commonly adjust durations of everything, in contrast with a flame machines, for which a few standard pre-defined durations is usually convenient. Over time, users have asked, “How can I change the duration of flame effects?”  I tell them the answer (change “type” to “sfx”) but the number of questions causes me to wonder if we would be better off treating standard flame effects the same way we treat light fixture and sparks machine effects — standard effects would include only a single duration flame effect, which would be editable, instead of multiple non-editable options. Do you have any opinion about this change?

Hi dylan.paiva, happy to help!   Here are a couple questions to help us give you the best guidance:   1) What version of Finale 3D do you have (Lite, Hobbyist or Pro)?   2) What firing system are you using for your show?

Hi Brett, yeah, at the moment, to move events automatically when you drag songs you can only drag one song at a time. Since you need to move everything (all songs and events), I would take this approach:   1) Go to Window > Songs window and add exactly one minute to the Start Time for each song. Note that you do not need to unlock the songs to do this.   2) Select the Script window and press Ctrl+A to select all events. Go to Script (menu) > Time adjustments > Shift times and enter 01:00.000 (or 60s or 1m) to move all events exactly one minute.    

Hi Madness Fireworks, you do not need to recreate your label template each time you start a new show.   Report and label templates are saved as blueprints within the show (.fin) file. This means that any custom report you create will only appear when you reopen the specific show in which it was created.   However, you don’t need to recreate your custom report or label template each time you start a new show. You can easily copy the blueprint for your template from one show to another. You can also set a show containing your custom blueprint as your startup template, so that each time you launch Finale 3D, it opens with your custom blueprint instead of the default blank show.   Here are a few resources for you:   https://finale3d.com/video/copying-blueprints-and-saving-show-as-startup-template   https://finale3d.com/documentation/copying-reports   https://finale3d.com/groups/english/forum/topic/i-customized-my-window-layout-reports-and-labels-where-are-they-saved

Hello, I created a label template, but it won’t save. When I close the software and create a new project, it disappears.   I have to recreate it. Do you know how I can save it in the software so I don’t have to recreate it each time?   Thank you very much.

Hello everyone, I am back! I have a show that I am shooting on the third. I started from scratch as I normally do by importing songs and mapping out rounds accordingly. I have racks mapped out and everything set, but I need to get everything set with the timecode before I export the firing system script. That’s the issue I’m having is exporting.   I have exported all of the songs into a .wav file, but I haven’t seen to get past that regardless of reading through the resources. Any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you so much!

I realized I needed to inject a minute of audio at the beginning of my show this year and ran into an issue I wanted to check on. The ability to drag around songs with events has been great in the past as I wanted to rearrange parts of the show. However, This is the first time I’ve just wanted to shift everything back. I selected all the songs (there’s a menu option) but found it did NOT move the events even when I have that option selected. CTRL clicking songs results in the last song’s events moving but nothing else.   Is this a known limitation that you can only move songs with events one at a time or is there a way to do this I’m missing?   -Brett

Hello everyone!   Brad Heitmann from Lake City South Dakota Semi-retired serial entrepreneur Dakota Pier LLC / Ooh Aah Pyro of South Dakota – Boat docks and lifts, repairs and aluminum welding.  I have enjoyed Fireworks for most of my life and joined PGI in 2022, PAT in 2025, WPA in 2025 to gain more knowledge making my own effects. I have set up and launched numerous shows using, hand fired, fused, various firing systems. New to Finale 3D and wanting to learn to script my own shows using software. Thanks for the forum and the information.   Best Regards, Brad

Hi DGHofstee, the Lite version of Finale 3D is limited to manual inventory management and doesn’t support importing effects/inventory from a file. Here’s a screenshot from the full feature comparison.