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No frames
Play fps
Scanner kpps
Beam lag µs
Blank latency µs
Free tool
Drop in an image or type some text, and get out an ILDA file you can load into QuickShow or BEYOND. It runs in your browser, it costs nothing, and your artwork never leaves your machine.
Four steps, about a minute.
2Trace
Picking the right one matters far more than fiddling with sliders. Each reads your image in a completely different way, so if the result looks wrong, change this before you change anything else.
3Points
A laser projector has no pixels. There are two mirrors on galvanometers steering a single beam around, and the picture only exists because the beam moves faster than your eye can keep up. Those mirrors are physical objects with mass, and they cannot turn on a sixpence.
Which explains the most common complaint about traced artwork: you ask the beam to turn a sharp corner, the mirrors overshoot slightly, and the corner comes out rounded. The fix is not a tighter angle, it is time. Stack a few extra points at the corner and the beam sits there just long enough for the mirrors to catch up. That is all the corner anchor slider does.
Blanking anchors deal with the same thing at the ends of lines. The beam switches off far quicker than the mirrors can travel, so without a few held points your strokes trail off into the jump toward the next line. A couple of anchors at each end gives the mirrors a moment to settle while the beam is dark.
Points per frame is just scan rate divided by frame rate. A 30k scanner at 24 frames per second gives you roughly 1,250 points. At 20 frames per second, 1,500. Go over and the frame rate drops instead, which you will notice as flicker rather than as missing detail.
One thing that catches people out: scanner ratings are measured on the ILDA test pattern at about 8 degrees optical. A scanner sold as 30k is 30k at that angle and slower when you open it up wider, so a big full-field image has less room than the number on the box suggests.
4Animate
Eight presets will animate whatever is currently on screen, text or uploaded artwork alike. They split into two groups, and the difference matters once you are building an actual show.
Draw on has every line draw itself in, each starting at its own random moment, which looks a lot like handwriting when you use it on text. Trace and erase works down the frame one line at a time, top row first and left to right within a row, then rubs it all out in the same order. Fall into place drops things in, explode throws them apart, and conjure materializes pieces out of nothing and drifts them home from random directions, growing as they arrive rather than flying in along a straight line.
Wave, wiggle and spin loop cleanly with no visible seam at the join, so you can run them as continuous cues instead of one-time transitions.
Spin is worth a special mention. It rotates the artwork in three dimensions with real perspective and writes actual Z values into the file. Export as ILDA format 4 and that depth survives into QuickShow and BEYOND, where you can point color, brightness or Beam Brush at it using the By Z axis option. That means a spun trace turns up as something you can recolor and reshape later without going back and editing frames.
For sequences, select several images at once and they load as frames, sorted by name. In the text generator, Add frame keeps what you have typed and starts a fresh one, so words added one at a time become a build.
5Export
Export gives you an ILDA .ild file: format 5 for 2D, or format 4 if you want to keep Z data. Both import straight into QuickShow and BEYOND. Once it is open, save as native frames and work from those.
It does not write .qsbframes directly, and that is a real limitation rather than something I am glossing over. QS/BEYOND Frames is Pangolin's own format and there is no published spec for writing it outside their software, so ILDA in and native frames out is the honest route. Pangolin themselves treat ILDA as a legacy interchange format rather than something to store a show in, which is exactly how it is being used here: a way in, not a filing cabinet.
Nowhere. Everything happens in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, which also means the whole thing keeps working if your wifi drops out mid-session.
Yes, it is yours, go and use it. Obvious caveat: tracing something does not give you the rights to it, so check the licensing on a client logo or a downloaded image before it ends up in a paid show.
Nine times out of ten it is the point count. Check it against your scan rate and frame rate before touching anything else. The other likely culprit is not enough corner anchors on a shape with sharp turns.
Tell me: bjorn@laserlair.com. The tool has mostly improved because people wrote in about where it fell over, so you would be doing me a favor.
This handles tracing. It does not handle animation with weight and timing, composing for a dome, or building a show that actually runs. That part is the studio work: commissioned shows and sequences, or ready-made content packs if you need something loadable this afternoon. There are free packs in there too.