I feel like there should be a small safety feature built into the “alt zones” button. Changing zones in an instant like that could be dangerous.
A couple of days ago, I was starting up liberation to start zoning a gig of mine. As I was zoning, I don’t remember how, but I accidentally mis clicked the “alt zones” button when testing my clips. All of the sudden, my lasers immediately hit the dance floor ( there was nobody but me in the building). But it had me thinking, why is it so easy to accidentally click that button, and so fast for things to go wrong?
I get the idea of the alt zones, however maybe it should disarm the laser output when you click it and need to be rearmed again, or have some sort of countdown timer that is optional.
Or even a simple (Are you sure?) after you click it would work.
I just completely forgot that I had a previous gig in which I had my lasers projecting on the ground, and I used my alt zones for that gig.
I can see why that caught you out, but the ALT Zones system is actually designed to switch instantly, particularly for safety-critical situations.
For example, if you need to suddenly stop projecting into a particular airspace, or a balcony becomes occupied by crew or audience members, ALT Zones let you immediately redirect or disable output without having to edit individual zones. Because of that, I wouldn’t want to add an extra confirmation step or countdown that could slow things down when you genuinely need to react quickly.
As Stijn mentioned, the ALT ZONES button only appears when you actually have ALT Zones configured, so I think the more interesting question is how you ended up with a set of ALT Zones from a previous show without realising they were still there.
One thing I could potentially look at is making it easier to delete all of the ALT Zones when you’re finished with them, so that old alternate layouts don’t accidentally hang around from previous shows.
Out of interest, when this happened were you working in the same project file that you’d used for the previous gig, or had the ALT Zones been copied across from somewhere else?