Video Transcript
The Left-Side Pane
6m 49s
00:08
Welcome back!
00:09
Let’s finish up our tour of the different areas of the Q-SYS Designer Software by looking at the left-side pane.
00:15
This pane has several different panels that expand and collapse in an accordion style,
00:21
with only one open at a time.
00:23
You’ve already seen the first one—the Inventory, which contains virtual representations of all the physical
00:30
hardware devices in your design and their corresponding components.
00:33
The most important thing here is the Plus button, which allows you to add new devices from our inventory library.
00:40
The second panel, Schematic Pages, you’ve also already seen.
00:44
If you’re building a larger design
00:46
or you just want to separate different areas of your design onto different pages,
00:50
you can add those pages and rename them here.
00:53
If you close the Schematic window for any page, this is where you would go to open it up again.
00:58
So let’s move on to the User Control Interfaces pane.
01:02
This is where you build the interface that a user will interact with to control your system,
01:08
which could be deployed onto a native Q-SYS touch screen or a networked PC,
01:14
tablet, or smart phone using our Q-SYS Control app.
01:17
Like the Schematic Pages, you can use the Plus button to add new UCIs to your design and rename them,
01:24
but rather than a blank Schematic page you’ll see this: the UCI Editor window.
01:29
We’ll take a deep dive into building UCIs later in this course, but let’s glance at this at a high level.
01:36
The first thing you should do is adjust your UCI’s properties to match the type and orientation
01:42
of the screen that will eventually display it, which will adjust the footprint of your workspace
01:46
to the appropriate pixel dimensions and ratio.
01:49
The navigation bar in the UCI Editor lists all of your pages, layers, and objects.
01:55
You can use the Plus button at the bottom to create a new page or a new layer on an existing page,
02:02
and later you’ll learn some options on different ways to navigate these pages and layers.
02:07
You can add controls to your UCI simply by dragging them
02:11
either from the schematic itself or using the copy and paste tools.
02:15
You can add graphics to the UCI by dragging an image file from any file browser
02:21
and you’ll see these all itemized in your navigation bar,
02:24
where you can lock them, change their visibility, or adjust their order.
02:29
You can get very creative with the design of your UCI, which—again—we’ll explore in later videos.
02:36
The next panel is where you’ll find your Snapshots,
02:39
which is also a topic that’s covered in a video later in this course.
02:42
Snapshots are essentially a recording of the states of one or more controls,
02:48
which allow you to recall those controls to their saved states with a single button.
02:52
You could have many different Snapshot Banks in your design which all manage different sets of controls.
02:57
You also have a Global Snapshot Bank which you should use with extreme caution,
03:01
because it can change every single control in the entire design.
03:05
Even after you learn how to use Snapshots, be careful when using Global Snapshots.
03:11
Next we have Named Controls.
03:13
You can drag any control into the Named Controls Bin,
03:17
which allows it to be accessed by something that’s not wired to your control in the Schematic.
03:22
For instance, you could reference a Named Control from within a Lua script or a Block Controller code.
03:29
You could change a Named Control from within the Administrator tool,
03:33
which lets you schedule events to occur at a particular time of day.
03:36
You could even use a third-party control processor to send commands to your Q-SYS Core over the network,
03:42
which could target your Named Controls.
03:45
Basically, this bin is the window to allow something outside of your Schematic
03:50
to control something inside your Schematic.
03:53
You should also note that if you need to export this list of controls,
03:57
you can select Tools > Extract Named Controls and get an XML file of these available controls.
04:04
It’s also worth noting that a Named Control might have a very ugly name when you drag it in,
04:10
so feel free to rename it; as doing so won’t change its link to your original control.
04:16
And as always, if you forget where a control came from, you can press Control+F to track it to its original source.
04:26
Finally, we have the Inspector, which can check your design for any obvious errors.
04:31
No, it can’t tell you whether you’ve done a good job tuning your audio,
04:36
but it can locate certain undeniable mistakes.
04:39
For instance, if you’re using any scripting components or plugins, it will monitor those for any coding faults,
04:46
and you can track those back to the component that is having an issue.
04:49
The Inspector also searches for Orphaned Controls,
04:53
which is a control that has lost its parent component and now delivers justice at night as a masked vigilante.
05:01
A control might become orphaned if you’ve dragged it out of its control panel onto your UCI, for instance,
05:07
and then later deleted that original component.
05:10
The copy of the control still exists, but it will have a large question mark on it alerting you
05:15
that it is no longer is linked to any component, and the Inspector will warn you of its orphaned status.
05:22
The Inspector will also notify you of any Unterminated Signals,
05:27
which are signals that have not yet been murdered by robots from the future.
05:31
Or, in the world of wiring, a terminated wire is something that is connected to a terminal,
05:37
and thus an unterminated wire is one that has not been completed.
05:41
If you create a signal tag for a wire but you fail to finish that connection somewhere else,
05:47
then that tag will have a jagged edge as a warning,
05:50
and your Inspector will notify you that the connection is incomplete.
05:57
The last thing the Inspector does is keep track of any functions
06:01
in your design that require a Core feature license.
06:05
If you’ve built a UCI, for instance,
06:07
it will remind you that your Core will need a UCI Deployment feature license in order to operate.
06:12
The same is true with any scripting elements or plugins that require a Scripting feature license.
06:18
If these or any other licenses are required,
06:21
you’ll see a yellow lock icon as well as a notification in the top menu bar to remind you to get these licenses
06:28
installed on your Core, or else that design will not be able to run on it.
06:32
Alright, that’s it for the walkthrough of the various areas of the software itself.
06:37
Next we’ll start digging into some specific features and concepts,
06:41
and hopefully you should be familiar enough with navigating the software to follow along.
06:45
Thanks for watching.
Downloads and Links
The Left-Side Pane
6m 49s