The Right-Side Pane

Let's continue our walkthrough of the designer software.

We've poked around at the audio components branch of the schematic elements library.

Now let's look at some of the other components.

We're not going to dig deep into the functions of any of these components here.

I just wanna show you where they can all be found.

Some of these

we'll cover later in Q-SYS level one training,

and others are covered in some of our additional advanced courses, so I'll be sure to point those ones out as we get to them.

Let's start by looking at all of our available categories in this version of the software.

In addition to audio components, I also have control components.

Monitor components, scripting components, video components, layouts, and UCI buttons, and you never know.

Future versions might have more categories as well.

So if you see something in your software that you don't see in this video, just dig into the help file for information about it.

The control components provide a number of objects that affect the flow of your control wires.

In much the same way that audio components affected the channels of your audio wires,

you've already briefly seen that nearly every control inside a components can have its control pin exposed,

allowing that control to have an effect on something beyond its original purpose.

Some of these are fairly obvious, a control delay for.

Will delay the passage of a control signal by a specific length of time.

I could use a gain ramp to fade out my audio player and then use the control delay to stop the audio player three seconds later to reset its file.

For instance, some of the other components, however, like the LFO or low frequency oscillator, might not have such obvious applications.

If you are interested in this branch of components, I'd highly recommend that you take a brief look at our online control 1 0 1 course.

Now, while a lot of that course deals with some advanced scripting that might not really interest you right now,

there's one early lesson in it that just focuses on these control components, then that can be really valuable to anyone who wants to accomplish some simple control tasks

beyond what's already possible in any given control panel.

The monitor components have some components that are specifically useful if you need to monitor the health of non-native devices in your network,

especially if you're sending that information along to the Q-SYS.

Reflect enterprise manager for remote monitoring.

You can find more information on these in our enterprise manager technician training, which is also available online.

At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, the same is gonna be true for the scripting components branch.

The block controller, control script and text controller provide you methods of building more complicated programming to create custom coding or two-way communication.

With third party devices,

you can get your feet wet in both of these languages by completing the entirety of the control 1 0 1 online course I mentioned earlier, and advanced classroom control sessions as well.

Next is video components.

Well, in this particular version of the software, this title is a little misleading, as it should say, video component singular as it only contains the camera router.

This is used to route any of our networked P-T-Z-I-P cameras to A USB video bridge to be used by your teleconferencing soft Kodak.

However, as I've said several

times before, the Q-SYS platform is always

growing, so you may find new components in here as new devices are offered.

In fact, oh, I You knew.

You knew I was gonna say it, didn't you yet?

You knew this was coming.

We offer an online training course called Video Training 1 0 1, which will get you up to speed on our networked video endpoint devices for HTMI distribution.

The layout branch has some tools to help keep your design organized.

The container, for instance, is sort of like having a new schematic page hidden inside of components.

You can wire something to the container's, inputs, and then through any number of components inside this new workspace,

and then to the outputs, again, allowing it to come out the other side of the container.

This is a great way to hide away a lot of EQ blocks so that they, they don't clutter up your design,

especially considering that you can put a password on that container to make sure nobody makes any changes.

Access denied.

The channel group performs a similar function, but it will apply the signal path of this workspace to every one of its input channels.

So rather than repeating the same adjustments to eight different EQ channels,

you could choose to use a channel group and only make that adjustment once, which will be applied to every input.

In addition, you still retain the ability to make specific changes to individual channels rather than all of them by selecting which channels are affected by a change.

Next is the pop-up button, which works very much like the container except on a user control interface or a UCI.

This is a simple way to hide a bunch of buttons away and have them appear or disappear when you press the button.

We'll see a lot more tools for building ucis in later sections of this course.

Also, here you see the signal snake inputs and output, which we saw earlier as easy ways of grouping multiple wires together.

Moving on to the UCI buttons branch.

These are buttons that are only able to be added onto your UCI and are used for things like navigating to a different UCI page or launching a web browser to a specific URL.

If you're on a phone, tablet, or a pc, you can also log the user off of that UCI or temporarily deactivate the UCI, allowing you to physically clean the screen.

Without accidentally hitting any buttons.

There are a few other categories and tools here in the right side pane to explore.

Plugins can be installed by using the Q-SYS Library, which is an online repository of amongst other things plugins that have been developed to let you easily control common third-party devices without any scripting.

It ís always a good idea to see if we have a plugin for a device youíre integrating, which will make your programming time much easier.

You'll also see user components here, which can store components or groups of components that you would essentially like to save for later.

If you have a series of EQ components for a common microphone that you've tuned just right.

For instance, you could add those components to your user components,

and designer will create a new object that you can then recall at any time in any design that's already wired and configured exactly as you saved it.

Whether you use this for common functions that you use frequently or rare functions to save yourself the trouble of hunting down something from an old design,

using user components can save you a lot of time.

User components are stored in the user

components folder where your Q-SYS designer software is

installed,

letting you easily share these files with other engineers or add others to your own library.

Finally, let's end with some really simple features.

The graphic tools, these create visual elements to either your schematic or your UCI to help keep you organized.

The text block lets you add some text along with some visual options on the box that surrounds that text.

You could change your fonts, change the color.

You can add alignment here in the properties, as well as the blocks color.

It's corner radius and uh, border or stroke properties.

If you don't see any color, be sure to adjust that color's transparency to make it visible.

The header is a similar tool, but rather than putting a box around your words, it builds a horizontal line surrounding your text to create some visual separation.

The group box is just another variation of this in which your text will be contained to a tab at the top of the box,

which is a very handy way to label a bunch of components,

and once again, create some visual distinction between different areas of your design or UCI.

The last tool here is the Polygon tool, which lets you build a custom shape just by clicking the vertices of your shape and then double clicking to close it off.

You could then drag a control onto this polygon and hold the control key to give the polygon the power of that original control.

This can be particularly useful on UCIs with ground plans,

letting you select a room to mute it or send a page, or combine it with another room, et cetera.

All right, so you've seen everything that's in the right side pain now.

So in the next video we'll check out all the features that are available in the left side pain.

Take a quick break and move along whenever you're ready.