Hello, and welcome to the Soundcraft Video Manual Series. My name is Austin, and today I will be exploring how the Shows, Snapshots, and Cues functionalities of our Ui-series mixers work, showing how you can use these to create repeatable mix configurations and efficient workflows for truly dynamic mix presentation. Let’s get started. We’ll start by accessing our Shows menu from the settings, which you can pull up by selecting the “gear” icon at the top of your mixer screen at any given time. Here we can see three columns, one for Shows, one for Snapshots, and one for Cues. Each one of them plays a distinct role in the organization and management of your mix. The show, or “show file”, as it’s commonly referred to, is the overarching file that manages your entire mix. When you launch the mixer for the first time, you’ll only see a “default” show file here in this column, because there always must be a show fille running so that there’s a mix that can be saved to the mixer. We typically recommend that you go ahead and take a moment to create a new show file that is different than the default, so in case you need to go back and have a blank template to work with, you can. You do so by clicking the “New” button next to the Shows column, and then by giving your new show file a name. After doing so, you’ll see it highlighted in red in the column, indicating that it is now the currently active show file. Snapshots are a subset of your show file, meaning that you can have multiple snapshots for one show file, but not the other way around – multiple show files for one snapshot. You can think of it like files in your “My Documents” folder on your computer – the show file is the folder containing all your files, or in this case, your snapshots. Snapshots were designed to give you the ability to adjust your entire mix on a quickly recallable basis. A common example is to utilize them for different songs in a performance by a band. Maybe you want to have a different mix on a per-song basis, with totally different FX or multiple changes that would just take too long to do by hand during the transition from one to another. These are ideal for when you have a few seconds to initiate the change in-between songs, so that the adjustment to the DSP processing and audio wouldn’t be audible to the audience. Let’s give an example. I’ll make some quick fader level changes to the mix, here, then go back, hit the “save” button here and give this one a name. Now that we have our default snapshot, we can make a change to it, and then save another one. I’ll just adjust the fader level of these two channels, save the new snapshot, switch the snapshot back to the default...and now we can see that the change took place after swapping to the other. Lastly, we have Cues. Cues were introduced in the version 3.0 firmware update for the Ui-series mixers and are another way to further organize your mix. Cues, unlike Shows and Snapshots, specifically only control the parameters that don’t require DSP processing to change. This means that the changes are instant, with no delay or noticeable handoff in between them, but the flipside is that this limits the controllable parameters to only a handful, such as the level, pan, or mute functions for your input, Aux, and FX channels. Now, this could be useful in a situation where the mix is totally established but might change dramatically in an instant, such as in a traditional Broadway-style play where multiple actors or actresses are speaking at different times, coming on and off stage in waves. As one could imagine, that’s a lot of fader adjustments that would need to happen at one time, and so using Cues for something like this could simplify the process and take a lot of the guesswork out of which microphones are active. To demonstrate, let’s set up a new Cue really quick, give it a name, and then let’s make our way back to the main mix page. Now, let’s mute a big group of channels, maybe for a bunch of vocalists that are only on stage for one part of the performance. Once we switch back to the previous cue, we can see that our channels are now unmuted again. As you can see, each of the three columns has a “Load”, “Save”, “Rename”, and “Delete” button, so that you can configure them as individual elements in your show file. The Shows column also features an “Isolate” button, which allows you to exclude certain channels or functions from the Show and Snapshot files. If you have channels or microphones that you always want to be unaffected or configured in a specific way no matter what, you could use this menu to do that. I hope this helps clear up any mystery as to what this menu is used for and how powerful of a tool it could be for you when setting up your show. For more news, product information, and troubleshooting tips, visit us at soundcraft.com or our Anytime Help Center at help.harmanpro.com.