Zones let you group your numbered cameras into named, overlapping subsets, for example "Head" and "Body" on a scan rig, so you can trigger and control part of your rig without renumbering anything.

What is a zone?

A zone is a persistent, named list of cameras, managed from the Cameras page. Unlike camera numbering, zone membership does not change a camera's number or its licensing status, it only changes which group of cameras a zone represents.

• Main is a built-in, system zone. It always exists, cannot be renamed or deleted, and starts out containing every numbered camera. It is the direct equivalent of the old "Active" column. Any camera you number, import with a number, re-enable, or restore from a numbering backup is added to Main automatically, the moment it becomes roster-eligible, without you having to open Zones. On an existing install upgrading into the zones module, Main is also backfilled once from the current roster if it was left empty.
• Custom zones (such as "Head" or "Body") are created from the Cameras page and can be renamed, described, reordered, or deleted at any time.
• A single camera can belong to any number of zones at the same time. Adding a camera to "Head" does not remove it from "Main" or any other zone.

Membership vs. the active zone

These are two different settings, and it is important not to confuse them:

• Membership is which zones a camera belongs to. Set with the checkboxes in each zone's column in the Cameras list.
• The active zone is the single zone currently selected as your default target. Set with the radio button in a zone's column header. Exactly one zone is active at any time.

Selecting a zone as active does not change any camera's membership. Removing a camera from a zone does not affect its membership in other zones.

What the active zone controls

The active zone is used everywhere the app needs a default camera target:

• The camera count shown at the top of the Cameras page and in the app header.
• Which cameras actually fire when you trigger from Camera Control, Live View, or Sync from master, without explicitly choosing another target.
• The value of the {zone} naming token (see below).
• What "all cameras" resolves to in a Sequence step, unless that step explicitly targets a specific zone by name instead.

Managing zones

Open Zones next to Import / Export on the Cameras page to:

• Add a new zone by name.
• Edit a custom zone's name, add a short one-line description, or change its position (this controls its column order in the camera list). Main cannot be edited.
• Delete a custom zone. This only removes that zone and its membership list, it never deletes or renumbers any camera. Main cannot be deleted.
• Turn on Show selector on dashboard to add a compact zone switcher under the trigger button on the Camera Control dashboard tile. Each row shows the zone's name, description, and camera count, and can be selected with a click or with Ctrl+Shift+1 through Ctrl+Shift+9, matching the column order.
• Turn on Remember camera settings per zone to have the app save the current Camera Control settings (mode, ISO, aperture, white balance, and so on) each time you leave a zone, and restore that zone's own settings when you come back to it. See the next section for the details and the trade-offs.
• Click Reset all at the bottom of the modal to delete every custom zone, clear all saved per-zone settings profiles, and reactivate every roster-eligible camera under Main in one step. This is the fastest way back to a clean state if your zones have grown tangled, and it is also what a camera numbering reset (roster reset, or a numbering import) does automatically, since zone membership is scoped to the numbered roster. The action asks for confirmation and cannot be undone.

From the Cameras list itself, click a zone's name in its column header to Activate all or Deactivate all of its eligible cameras at once, a fast way to fill or clear a zone's membership.

Remembering camera settings per zone

When Remember camera settings per zone is on, switching the active zone does two things: it snapshots the outgoing zone's current Camera Control settings into that zone's saved profile, and it restores the incoming zone's saved profile by pushing real commands to its cameras. This lets each zone carry its own mode and exposure setup, so "Head" can sit in a different drive mode or ISO than "Body" without you re-dialing it every time.

A few things worth knowing:

• Main is a passthrough. It never restores a saved profile. Whatever values the cameras currently hold when you switch to Main stay as they are, and whatever you change while Main is active becomes the live baseline that other zones can pull from. Switching to Main is therefore the safe way to dial in a starting point and then copy it into a zone.
• Get settings from Main and Push settings to Main, available from the dashboard selector when a non-Main zone is active, let you copy values between the live baseline and a zone's saved profile. "Get from Main" seeds the zone's profile from the current live values and applies them to that zone's cameras. "Push to Main" writes the zone's saved profile back into the live baseline (data only, no camera commands), so the next zone that does a "Get from Main" inherits it.
• Re-push zone settings (the small circular arrow next to the active zone name on the dashboard selector) re-sends the zone's current settings to all its cameras without changing the saved profile. Use it when a camera was offline during the last zone switch, or otherwise missed a commanded-state push, and has drifted out of line with the rest of the zone.
• Applying a zone can take a few seconds, especially for cameras shared between zones (they flip modes on every switch) or right after a capture, when a quiet window deliberately defers settings sends until transfers settle. The dashboard spinner stays up for the full push, and the display stays correct throughout via the app's commanded-state register, so you do not need to wait for the hardware to report back before trusting what the tiles show.
• A camera that belongs to a different zone than the one you have selected will not have its remembered settings pushed at launch or on reconnect, so reconnecting a camera does not silently change settings on a rig where you only meant to drive one zone.

Using zones in Sequences

The Rules and Sequences module can target a step at:

• Active zone, which always resolves to whichever zone is currently selected, exactly like the default trigger behavior described above.
• A specific zone by name, which always resolves to that zone's membership, regardless of which zone happens to be active at the time the sequence runs.

This lets you build a sequence that always fires "Head" and "Body" in a fixed order, for example, independent of whatever zone an operator has selected for manual triggering.

Using the {zone} naming token

The Naming module exposes a {zone} token for folder and file naming templates. When a trigger fires, the app records which zone was active at that moment, and uses that zone's name to resolve {zone} for every file produced by that capture, even if the active zone is changed again before all files finish transferring.

This is useful for keeping datasets organized by rig section, for example a folder template such as {timestamp}-{zone} produces folders like 260722-143000-head and 260722-143512-body as you switch the active zone between shots.

Tips

• Keep zone names short. They appear as column headers in the Cameras list and as row labels in the dashboard selector.
• A camera that is temporarily disconnected keeps its zone membership. It is simply excluded from the active count and from triggering until it reconnects.
• If you delete a zone that a saved sequence step targets by name, that step will report the zone as not found instead of silently falling back to another zone.
• If a camera's settings look wrong after a switch (for example it was unplugged during the last zone change), use the re-push arrow on the dashboard selector before reaching for Reset all. Re-push is non-destructive and only re-sends the current zone's settings.
• Reset all is the clean-slate option: it wipes custom zones and saved profiles but leaves your camera numbering intact, so you can rebuild your zones without renumbering anything.