Lasershow Designer QuickShow is the new release from Pangolin Lasers; it is their entry level USB interfaced laser show software. It is a revolution in making laser effects easy to achieve!
I played around with the first release recently after receiving a quick tutorial and program run through at LDI last year from Bill Benner, Pangolin’s president. I found that the features were as advertised – easy and intuitive to use. It is certainly a program that the diesigners have put quite a bit of thought in making laser effects easy to create and access.
The Box
Contents of the Box
Quickshow FB3 USB interface
QuickShow organizes all of the available animations into a grid of thumbnails on the computer screen, and there are many labelled tabs to access other grids for a universe of laser action. Hovering over any thumbnail activates the animation so that you can see it before you show it. clicking on the thumbnail sends it to the laser output, but there is another layer of “show it or not” control. The program will even generate transitions for you when changing from one animation to another. You can also use MIDI devices such as a keyboard to trigger the cues, as well as included hotkeys on the computer keyboard.
QuickShow uses Pangolin’s “projection zones” for organizing the laser output, so that you can use multiple screens or projectors for your output and everything can be sized and offset properly. There is a “QuickBeam” tab to organize your scanner straight beam positions, and set color, brightness, and create and save as many beam sequences as you need.
At this point, I recommend QuickShow only for live control of laser shows. While there is a “QuickTimeline” feature that allows you to import music and drag and drop cues with the music timing, it is not advanced or repeatable enough in this release. We’ll see what future releases have to offer.
