let's talk about how you can control multiple lasers in QuickShow. With QuickShow you can
control as many nine unique outputs, and i say outputs here instead of lasers because if you
daisy-chain ilda from one controller between different lasers, the output from those will be
all the same even if it's more lasers. That type of setup is known as shared control if you have
what is known as independent control where each laser has its own laser controller like our FB3
or FB4 control hardware you can control up to nine of them with QuickShow. If you need more control
you can check out our Beyond software which can go up to 40 controllers with our ultimate version.
To control lasers separately in QuickShow we use several tools that exist inside
QuickShow in conjunction with each other. To learn more about each subject you can watch the related
"quick hints" videos for these topics in the series. First as you can see I have four lasers
connected to QuickShow, down at the bottom in here in the laser controller hardware window. These
are FB4s built into the lasers i'm controlling, since this is the case it's four separate lasers.
First thing you will want to do is go to settings, projector settings, and set them all up.
The average user leaves everything at defaults but makes the image size 100 by 100 for beams
and 50 by 50 for graphics, if you're doing both just use 100 by 100.
next we will want to go to settings, projection zones. If you don't see projection zones you
need to go to the quick start wizard here and change your user mode to "advanced user". Now
in projection zones we have a whole set of default zones designed to work mainly with one projector.
When you're a user with multiple lasers we recommend starting over with the zones
completely and adding zones you will use and removing the ones you won't.
So, I will add a scanner one main zone and delete every zone that isn't a scanner number main
zone, this leaves us with just scanner 1, 2, 3 and 4 main zones for our four lasers.
To move zones around in our list we can hold alt on our keyboard and click and move like so.
On the left of the zone names you'll see projector one, two, three, and four assigned. To the right
we have all of our hardware listed here but we can change which projector a zone will output two
in this case we'll use one for one, two for two, etc. once that is complete we adjust the geometric
correction for each zone in real life to create a safe beam show setup. If you want more information
on how to do this safely and effectively check out our "how to safely set up a laser show" video on
the pangolin youtube channel now we also could set up our preview window so it looks like our setup
in real life. From there you can do inverts if you want by using negative size on both the zones and
the preview values. When you're done with all of that I recommend saving the zone file into a file
you will remember, this could be for your specific show that day or a setup that is permanent,
either way you will have the zone file ready to go and load it up if it ever goes back to default.
Now that we have separate zones for each laser we need to tell our content to go to those zones, due to
safety reasons QuickShow won't automatically output content to zones without being told to
do so by the user first. So what we need to do is go to the page of beam content and reassign the content
that was originally told to go to a zone that was part of our default zone setup and now go to our
four new zones for our four lasers. To do so we can select an entire page by selecting control
and our keyboard which will select them all. From there you can right click on any cue, go to cue
properties, and click destination and add all of our new zones and remove any old zones from the
list like so. Now every cue on this page will go to our new zones and we can see it in real life
and set up in our preview window. It's important to note we just reassigned this page of cues
so you'll need to reassign each page of the workspace when you create a brand new zone file.
As well you'll need to save your workspace file for QuickShow to remember the changes we have
made I recommend naming it based on what you named your zone file before so you can keep those two
files together and that's how you control multiple lasers with QuickShow the same process works for
smaller or larger setups and if you want to mix graphics and beams together just make zones for
the lasers you'll have to assign the content to those zones. Thank you for watching this video
on how to control multiple lasers inside of quick show if you still need help you can contact our
support line by emailing support@pangolin.com and we'll help you as soon as possible