Good morning. I believe there may be a misunderstanding of what I am looking for. I am trying to create a finale chain in my effects window. I have not been able to locate very much information through the fireworks company libraries of effects. So I want to create my own. I have attached a picture of what effect Im trying to create.

Easy way -- drop shells needed for desired chain on a position, create a sequence of desired duration (Script-->Sequences-->Make into sequence), select all effects in sequence  and create chain (Effects-->Combine as chain effect)   Example of a 3" 10 shot 3 second chain VDL created this way --> 3" 3.0s Chain Of 10 110.0 HTM Red Chrysanthemum

Thank you for responding. The best way I can explain it is for my finale, the first shot in my finale is a string of 10 shells matched together. Per my design, I have over 600 shells for my finale. I have multiple ques with shells matched together of (10) 3 inch, (6) 4 Inch and (5) 5 Inch shells. When I look through the libraries of company products, I have found very few finale strings. So Im curious if creating the finale strings for the end of the show, can be created in create effects where firing 10 3" shell over 3 to 5 seconds can be made? Using VDL, how would I describe what I need?

  TMG Pyro wrote: Good morning everyone. Im curios to find out if there is a quick way to create finale strings for a design, or is it solely based on the info in libraries?   Hi TMG Pyro, can you tell us a little more about what you mean by "finale strings". You mentioned libraries, so I think you may be talking about creating effects using visual descriptive language (VDL), but I'm not sure, can you give a bit more detail?

Good morning everyone. Im curios to find out if there is a quick way to create finale strings for a design, or is it solely based on the info in libraries?

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.   Label templates are saved as blueprints in show (.fin) files. You can easily copy the blueprint representing your label template from one show to another. You can also set a show containing your custom blueprint as the startup template, which means that each time you launch Finale 3D, you'll get a new show with your blueprint instead of the default blank show.   Here are a couple resources for you:   https://finale3d.com/video/copying-blueprints-and-saving-show-as-startup-template/   https://finale3d.com/groups/english/forum/topic/i-customized-my-window-layout-reports-and-labels-where-are-they-saved/