FirstLight Laser Productions Suggested Showtime Settings

Suggested Showtime settings for playing FirstLight shows.

All of FirstLight's shows are designed to play back on ILDA standard single 30k tuned scan head laser projectors. Many shows will play fine at a variety of settings. However, newer and more advanced shows, especially those that utilitze 3ds Max created frames and rendered for a smooth refresh based speed, are my picky about display settings. The following are the settings FirstLight suggests to maintain accurate timing with its shows.

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Under "Projector Settings" in Showtime, select the "Scan rate" tab.

All three frame scan speed settings should be set to a 30,000 sample rate. With point frames, this will help refresh based animations play back at the proper speed. For abstract frames, this well keep abstracts at the intended frequencies.
The minimum number of points should be set to 100. This will again help timing on refresh based animations correct, though the frame point count rarely gets low enough for this setting to take effect.

Next select the "Color shift" tab.

The color/blanking shift will depend on the speed of your blanking/color device and will vary. Set it to the required speed for your projector (you can determine this using the Color/Blanking shift test frame under "Instant Test Frames" in Lasershow Designer). In most cases this setting won't affect the timing of the show, but if it is set wrong you will have tails on images.
More important to show timing is the "Blanked points at start and end of a track" setting. This should be set to a value of 4 points.

Lastly, select the "Vector Display" tab.

These adjustments allow vector images to display properly at the intended speeds. Changing them shouldn't affect the timing of module playback as vector frames are rarely used in a refresh based animation in our shows. Setting them too low will however cause vector frames to flicker far more than normal or create blanking issues. Start with our suggested settings and then adjust for your projector from there. Remember, these settings only affect vector-oriented frames, which are not used as often as point-oriented frames in our shows. Thus to see these settings have any affect you will need to be displaying a vector-oriented frame.
Under "Line beginnings," "Blanked points" should be set to 3 and "Anchor points" to 2. Under "Line corners" "Anchor points" should be set to 5. Under "Line endings," "Blanked points" should be set to a value of 3 and "Anchor points" set to a value of 2. "Point spacing (density)" should be set to 800 for "Blanked lines" and 500 for "Visible lines."

Once these changes have been made and you are certain you're satisfied with the results, select the "Defaults" tab and under "Showtime startup details" click "Save settings into LD startup file." This will save these settings into your LD2000.ini file so they will load each time Showtime does. If you do not wish these settings to automatically load when Showtime does, do not save them as the default.

When all these changes have been made, click "OK" to close the dialog.