Video Transcript
Snapshots
6m 51s
0:08
Welcome to the Snapshot tutorial. Snapshots are a simple but powerful feature
0:13
that let you quickly switch between saved presets in your design.
0:17
Now setup of a snapshot is a snap, so let’s take a look. First we need something in our design,
0:23
and so I’ve added a Matrix Mixer from the Schematic Library.
0:27
Now over here in our Properties panel I’m going to go ahead and change our 2-D Matrix Panner to Yes,
0:34
because it’s a more visual way to represent this tutorial.
0:37
Now if we double-click this Control Panel, enter Emulation Mode, we’ll be able to test this out.
0:43
Let’s say we wanted to make some changes to the mixer like so, let’s move this over here,
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and this over here, but we wanted to be able to swap between this setup
0:52
and another setup just by clicking a single button. Well we can do that by using Snapshots.
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Let’s exit Emulation Mode by pressing F7 and go over to the Left-Side Pane and we’ll look at the Snapshot panel.
1:05
Now by default you’ll see that we have the Global Snapshot Bank available.
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Now what this means is that any Snapshot that we make with this bank will save the value
1:13
of every control in our entire design – it’s global. Alright,
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let’s grab our Global Bank component and drag it into our Schematic,
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and you’ll notice that once I do that the component disappears from the Left-Side Pane).
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Now let’s double-click this component. Here is our Control Panel and you’ll see that we’ve got Load
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and Save Buttons for our 4 snapshots, and we also have this Load Previous
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and Load Next button if you want to cycle through any snapshots that you have.
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Now if you come over here to our Properties pane, you’ll notice that you really only have one option,
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and that’s Snapshot Count. You can have as many as 24 Snapshots in a single bank,
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but for our intents and purposes we’re only going to use four of them.
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Now let’s go back into Emulation Mode and we’ll try this thing out. Let’s save this setup as Snapshot 1.
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Now as you can see, when I do that, the Load button glows a bit now,
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so that tells you that our Snapshot is saved. Now let’s move around a couple of these components
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and save that and let’s save one more, and we’ll hit the save button.
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Now if we want to toggle through them all we have to do is click the Load Snapshot 1, or Load Snapshot 2.
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Or we can use the Load Previous and Load Next to just toggle between our choices. It’s really that simple.
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But in a realistic setting, you probably won’t need to change every single control in your system,
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you’re going to want a Snapshots that only controls certain parts of your design.
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So let’s create a User-Defined Snapshot Bank.
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We’ll start by exiting Emulation Mode, and let’s remove the Global Snapshot component,
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and come over here and press the plus icon in our snapshot panel and we’re going to choose
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“Create new Snapshot Bank." And now we have Snapshot Bank 1 listed right over here.
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Let’s drag this Component into the Schematic.
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Now we need to tell this Snapshot what we want it to control. There’s two methods to do this.
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One method is to just grab the component, like our Mixer, and drag it over to the Snapshot Bank.
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And when you hover over it you should get a hover over that says
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Add Selected Controls and Components to Bank. When we release the button, you can see that the Mixer
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and all of its controls are now recordable by our bank. Now if you want to remove this from the bank,
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all you have to do is click on it and press the delete key.
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You could also drag specific controls instead of the whole component
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let’s just drag our Gain fader into our Snapshot bank like so. And voila, it shows up down here.
3:53
Now the second method is to start by selecting what you want to control
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for instance let’s select the entire mixer, and then come over to the Snapshot plus icon
4:03
and then choose Create new Snapshot from selection.
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And now you have a new Snapshot Bank with that component loaded into it.
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Let’s rename our Snapshot Banks, shall we – I’ll call this one Gain Only,
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and we’ll call this one Entire Mixer. Let’s drag that one into our Schematic.
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You can see here in the Properties panel that we have a new option – and it’s called the Mode select.
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Now you’re familiar with Normal Mode since that’s the default,
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Scene Mode will automatically save the Snapshot you’re in when you load a new one,
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and Write Protect will give you a button that will lock out your Save buttons.
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Now for the sake of this demonstration let’s set both of our Snapshot Counts to four
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Let’s go ahead and emulate. Let’s save a couple presets for our Gain faders.
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First let’s double-click here to open up the control panel, unclick our Write Protect,
5:03
and then we’ll save this setting, and we’ll move it, save another one, and we’ll move it one more time.
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Now as you can see, I can use these load buttons to toggle in between these presets.
5:17
Now if we make other adjustments to the mixer, let’s say if we move a few of these gain faders,
5:23
and if we were to load another snapshot, you can see that our first gain fader is moving,
5:30
but the other ones that we’ve changed are not. So it’s only controlling what we’ve selected it to control.
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Now let’s make a few snapshots for the entire mixer. Let’s move this down here, and open this up.
5:46
Let’s unclick the Write Protect, save this setting right here, and we’ll move a couple of these around.
5:53
Alright let’s fast-forward a bit while I save a couple snapshots in our design.
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One final feature of the User-Defined Snapshot Bank is the Ramp knob.
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The Ramp will adjust the amount of time it takes to move the controls from one snapshot to another.
6:05
Let’s set this to about three seconds. Okay we can toggle between these snapshots
6:11
and adjust every control including our gain fader.
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And we can still use our gain snapshot to change our gain fader,
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but the entire mixer snapshot will change these as well.
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The great thing about the snapshots is that you can automate them by using the Q-SYS Admin tool.
6:31
If you’re interested to see how this works, check out our Admin tutorial on the website.
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And that’s the snapshot feature.
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You can use it as much as you like to create some very simple presets for some very complicated designs.
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Thank you and we’ll see you next time.
Lesson Description
Snapshots
6m 51s
Save a preset snapshot of a particular component, or use snapshots to control your entire design.
Tips and Definitions
Snapshots
6m 51s
Keep in mind: Trigger buttons like the play and stop button can’t be initiated with a Snapshot because they don't have recordable states. Instead, a Control Change Command can be created after adding these trigger buttons to the Named Controls bin.
Downloads and Links
Snapshots
6m 51s