UCI Deployment

Welcome back – we’ve shown you a few ways to integrate some simple elements into your UCI,

and now let's take a look at some of the advanced cases.

Now, here we have a simple but effective application – you’ve seen how you can pull a custom image into your

background, but let's take it a step further.

This background is designed to make the UCI look more like a physical mixer deck.

It has some labeled plates around the faders,

and at the bottom of each one there’s a fake masking tape with some hand-drawn labels

that really give it that live show feel.

The functionality of this UCI is pretty simple – just some faders, meters, and mute buttons,

but the style of the design gives it a great feel.

These buttons are actually custom images with a transparency in the text,

and they’ve used custom scripting so that when you click on the image,

the button beneath it is triggered – so it looks like the word Solo is lighting up.

On the next page, we’ve made their own buttons for some simple actions controlling our Audio Player,

which is a pretty easy thing to do and you can keep your buttons in-line with the aesthetics of the rest of the UCI.

Another common use of UCIs is to create a ground plan of your venue that gives quick access to specific areas.

Now, for this we took a line-drawing blueprint of their arena

then built a series of polygons to represent the different sections of it.

We've applied the mute button controls to these polygons,

which means they can quickly mute different sections of their arena just by touching that part of the blueprint,

or by using these presets on the side which are linked to the different Snapshots.

We did the same thing for their Concourse that goes around the Arena,

but this time using simple buttons rather than polygons and then they put the master controls right here in the middle.

You can take this idea even further if you want to by getting even more detailed images.

If you use Google Sketchup, for example, you can build a 3D model of your venue.

For a stadium like this, someone may have already done the work for you and all you have to do is just download it!

And then you can then find an angle that you like, let's say, right here, and then export an image of it,

use some editing software like Photoshop to create some transparencies in the areas you want,

and then use that to create an interactive design. Take a look at this completed one

the underlying buttons are still simple polygons, but with the image on top having the sections already cut out,

you can get some great detail or effects like this shadow from the upper deck.

Now, the last thing I want to show you isn’t necessarily mind-blowing, but I think it's pretty useful.

There’s a component in the layout branch of your Schematic Library called the Popup Button.

This is intended specifically for UCIs, and you can use it to create another window

that expands or collapses when you click the Popup Button.

This gives you quick access to either hide or show some controls without having to navigate to a different page.

Maybe you could use this in one of these sections of the stadium

and you could fill the Popup window with the status information on the amplifiers in that area.

You can make the Popup window as large as you want and pull it on any side of the original button.

You can see that with a little creativity you can create some visually compelling UCIs that are easy

and intuitive for your end user to operate. By putting only select controls into the user’s hand

you can turn pages and pages of complicated schematics into a simple device that anyone can use.

And remember - if you don’t want just anyone to use it,

you can restrict access to certain UCIs using the Q-SYS Administrator.

Check out our Administrator tutorial for more information on that.

Until then, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.