Greetings, I am Kirk and I just moved to Las Vegas few months back from Philadelphia. I specialize in Close Prox and Special FX. We have a full service event production company and FX division. Stay safe and if anyone is in the Vegas area lets connect.

Welcome to the Finale 3D forum!   As you discovered, Finale 3D currently has a hard limit of 120 seconds for cakes.   As a workaround, you’ll need to make the cake in two parts and then put them back-to-back on the timeline. In order to have the cake parts treated as a single effect for addressing purposes, you can select both parts of the cake on the timeline and go to Script > Chains > Combine as chain. This fuses cake parts together and ensures that only one rail and pin will be assigned when you address your show.

So, I am trying to make a cake that is 138s long.   When creating, the program won’t go past 120s.    How do I overcome this?

Hi Ultimate Fireworks, check out this tutorial from the Finale 3D Master Class series by Dirk Enders in Germany:  

The arced cursor is used when dragging effect trajectories in the simulation portion of the design window. I’m not sure what could cause this cursor to be displayed in the timeline. Try restarting Finale 3D and see if that resolves the issue.

I’m eager to hear if you had success by following the instructions in my previous post. Hope to hear from you soon.

Hey EhrlichFire, over the last few months, I’ve been doing video recordings with the hosts of the Pyro Unleashed Podcast. You can find all the episodes that have aired in the Finale 3D Fundamentals – Pyro Unleashed Podcast Series playlist in our Help Center.   In a few weeks, an episode on racking and addressing will go live. I’m really excited about this episode. It’s fairly in-depth, covers many aspects of racking and addressing, and includes good tips, tricks and best practices along the way. Keep your eye out for it and once it comes out let me know what you think!

All right. Tkanks for answer Drew. î’ll try that.

My cursor has gone from an arrow to a curved arc in the timeline.  Not sure what I have done and it’s 930PM and I have some more scripting to do tonight.  No way to reach Drew.  Who can tell me why it’s doing this?  What have I enabled?

Okay, got it — you need four script files that start at 17:30:00:00, and each script needs to have different addresses so all four shows can be prepared in advance using one firing system.   My recommendation is to start by designing the shows back to back as single show in Finale 3D. This will allow you to address the shows together, ensuring that there are no duplicate addresses. After completely finishing the design and addressing, I would make four copies of the Finale 3D show file. In the first copy, I would delete the all but the first show, align it to the correct time on the timeline, then export the script. I would then repeat the same process for the second, third and fourth shows. This end result will be four script files, all starting at the correct time, and with unique addresses in each script.