Cake duration inconsistencies

[Zap85]

So I'm quick fusing 4 cakes along with several racks of shells into this years finale and I'm trying to figure out the delays in order to get them to all finish at roughly the same time. I've visited the manufacturers website (couldn't find any published durations) and I've watched videos on YouTube and I noticed 1 cake out of the 4 cake set was drastically longer than the other three. I decided to look up a second video of the same cake it was 20 seconds longer than the first video. Any suggestions other than to remove that one cake from the finale and just shoot it during the body of the show?

[Berserker23]

I’ve had the same problem in the past but at the end of the day no one will notice except for you so I say go for it

[AxeElf]

I hate that.

There have been a couple cakes over the past few years that I couldn't get a good handle on the time from the videos. Just Hanging was one of the 200g cakes; videos showed it lasting anywhere from 25-50 seconds. Fireworks Fiesta was depicted anywhere from 55-75 seconds. And at the 500g level, I found videos of Big Opportunity lasting all the way from 20 seconds to 60 seconds! I finally just had to do a test run on one of each (and a few others) to find out for myself.

In those test runs, Just Hanging ran about 25 seconds, Fireworks Fiesta went 55 seconds, and Big Opportunity lasted 25 seconds--so from my experience, the lower end of the range has more often turned out to be the more accurate. Some posters might be slowing their videos down to make the effects look more impressive--but I guess nobody ever speeds their videos up. lol

So that would be my advice, if possible...

1. Time a test run yourself if you have an extra piece to spare. This is the best method, but obviously the most costly.

2. If not, my experience would lead me to believe that the shorter videos are often the more accurate. I would also suspect (though I have not substantiated this through research) that the "home videos" of fireworks are probably less likely to have been altered than the ones from people trying to sell them--manufacturers and wholesalers/retailers. If you can find a couple of people getting 30 seconds out of a piece in their own back yards, I'd take that run time over a retailer video of the piece lasting 45 seconds.

EDIT to say that I would also trust more recent videos over older videos in general, because there are sometimes changes in the way a given piece is manufactured over the course of several years.

3. And then of course for each particular circumstance, you have to determine if it would be more acceptable to err on the side of running short or running long--which will help determine if you shade your fusing toward the shorter or the longer runtime.

4. And finally, as you suggested, you could simply remove the piece(s) in question from a sensitively-timed section altogether in favor of pieces with more reliable runtimes.

[Scotty Rockets]

This is the reality the it comes to 1.4, that being said 1.4 pro definitely has better consistency. Only remedy is to get technical and shoot rows or singles within the cake instead of the entire cake.

[Zap85]

Thanks for the additional ideas, running short is definitely preferable over running long. I had a single cake in last years finale that just... would... not... stop. Ended up being the only cake firing for probably 10 seconds after everything else ended.

[tmwjr]

When in doubt fast fuse a rack of shells and puke them up when that straggler finally stops.

[Rick_In_Tampa]

For what it's worth, my recommendation is, don't worry about it. Last year was the one and ONLY time I actually got the last effect to dissipate at the exact moment the last note of the song ended. It was pure perfection. (Check out the link below and skip to the finale to see for yourself). Know how I did it? Blind luck! If you watch the 3rd song of my show (Frozen) you'll see plenty of black sky moments because the pro-line peony cakes I was using went up 2-3 times as fast as advertised. When I spoke to the company rep at PGI last year, she told me "Yeah... we had a problem with some batches running too fast." Well no kidding!

Like you, I watch hours and hours of videos and I use the burn times in the videos as the duration times in my show script. But who knows when that video was taken? Have they changed the pace of the cake since that video was taken? Or maybe they just screwed up a few batches and used the wrong fuse. You're not going to know until you light the cake and watch what happens. The idea I liked the most was the idea about having a rack of shells ready to go in case a cake runs long. You could also set up a few slices as kind of a punctuation mark at the end of the show that you can manually fire. Or, you can just say the hell with it and take what comes.

[Scotty Rockets]

Some more advice use cakes for middle and end with single shots that way you don’t have to worry about over run or to short on a cake.

[Zap85]

So the cake set I was originally considering is the street fighter set from cutting edge. This case has 4 different cakes, each with 36 shots that go off in roughly 22 seconds, except for the Out Cold cake which is the slow one. I was leaning towards this set because they are pretty fast paced with several different effects unique to each cake for an all out sky puke.

That said I'm reconsidering just using a cheaper case of plain 9 shot cakes since I think the uniqueness of each cake will be lost in the barrage. The body of the show is pretty much all 1.75 mortars which IMO is pretty boring. If I mix the street fighter set into the body I think it'll cut down on the monotony. Plus using the exact same cakes from a single case in the finale "should" all finish together. Thanks again for the advice - Adam

[Jay_]

I had some dominator PFX-lt4 cakes last year that were supposed to shoot 8 seconds...they shot 20+. Most dom pro cakes are pretty close on time, but these were the exception. Could have been old inventory and a different revision.

The SO76 cakes....especially zipper cakes that i have used seem to be pretty erratic. The 300 shot 8 shape gm654's that i had last year were way...i mean way fast. The label said 8 seconds, the videos had it at around 5 seconds, mine shot somewhere around 3 seconds.

I dont know that ive ever had any pro cakes that were perfect. When you always shoot them in pairs, the accuracy of fusing gets exposed.

Its funny, on my new years shoot i had several different products from Powder Keg. Don't really even know who makes them...may be a winco product. Anyway, the timing on every one that i shot was absolutely perfect. When shot in pairs they were dead on with each other throughout the entire cake. In my experience, i don't know if i have ever seen that before.

[PyroGyro]

Lots of good recommendations above. For me I watch as many videos as I can and note the dates of the videos, with the thought that a newer video is going to be the more accurate time. However, keep in mind that doesn't mean that the piece you bought is from the same production year so there's that. If the timing is important and firing time of the piece varies wildly (more than a couple of seconds) from year to year in the videos I'll stay away from it. Btw, even if you do your due diligence and find the latest videos and multiples of them proving that a piece fires for a certain amount of time, it can still be off when you shoot them.