Lighting

Lighting runs the lights of your show from the same app as your video. Patch your fixtures, send DMX over Art-Net, sACN or a USB DMX interface, build looks, sequences and effects, and play them live or on the timeline with your songs. The fixtures also show on the 3D stage, so you can program a rig before you are in the room.

Open Lighting

• In the Studio toolbar, choose Lighting. Its tooltip reads "Lighting: fixtures, universes and DMX monitor". The key is lit amber while the Lighting output sends.
• Or choose Window > Lighting.

Window > Playback opens the Lighting window with the Playbacks panel in a window of its own, and Window > Live View does the same with the Perspective stage view. Both dock back like any other panel.

Layouts

The Lighting window is a dock of panels, as the Studio window is. Each panel is a card that you can move, resize, fold, close or float into its own window. Four layouts are built in, on the segments at the top of the window and on Command-1 to Command-4:

Each built-in keeps the changes you make to it. The Layouts menu saves your own layouts and resets a built-in. The Panels menu opens any panel, also the ones no built-in places:

On macOS the View menu also lists the panels while the Lighting window is in front.

The toolbar

The trailing end of the toolbar is the same on every layout, so the controls that keep a show safe are always one click away:

A key stays amber while it is on. Reports opens the Reports window.

Every live control acts at once, on every frame of a drag. Live controls are never undo steps: Undo takes back changes to the show, such as patching, groups, presets, sequences and effects.

Blackout and release from the menu

The Studio menu holds two lighting items that work from any window:

Release All Playbacks lets go of every playback but those set to always active.

Lasers (Beta)

Lasers are in Beta. The Lasers panel runs the laser projectors of your patch:

• Zones. Add Zone gives a projector a zone with its Keystone. A zone over people is an Audience zone: it stays dark until you choose Allow audience scanning and confirm Allow audience scanning?: "Laser light will reach people in this zone, held under the zone's power limit (mW/cm²). You are responsible for the audience's safety: watch every beam and stop it at once if anything is wrong. It stops when the show is opened again." Set the zone's Power limit (mW/cm²) and Distance to audience (m). A laser held dark says why, for example "Audience zone: the beam stands still".
• Patterns and clips. A Pattern is Beam, Beams, Fan, Sheet, Tunnel, Wave, Chase or a Clip. Import Laser Clip… reads ILDA laser clips.
• Laser outputs. Find Laser Outputs lists the IDN and Ether Dream devices on the network and Helios on USB; Add Laser Output by Address… adds one by its address. Pick one as a projector's Laser output. Each shows Found, Ready, Sending, Lost or Refused.

Kill lasers in the toolbar turns every laser off at once.

Effects units (Beta)

Effects units are in Beta: flame, CO2, water and spark units fire from their own DMX channels like any fixture, and show on the Stage. The Auto show only fires them, on the drops of a song.

After a crash

If Cliqer did not close properly, the next launch asks Restore the lights?: "Cliqer did not close properly. Restore brings back what was running and turns the Lighting output on. Leave dark keeps the output off." Choose Restore or Leave dark. Nothing goes to the rig before you answer.

External Control

The live Lighting controls can be bound to a key, a MIDI control, an OSC message, a Stream Deck or a DMX channel in External Control: the Lighting output, the grand master, Blackout, Freeze, Kill lasers, Kill all, the playbacks and their faders, the Live page buttons and more. For the toolbar's controls, open Options and choose the control's External Control item, then Add Trigger... to learn one. Setup actions such as patching are not bindable.

On a playback strip, Space is Go and Shift+Space is Back on the strip you picked.

Plans

Lighting is part of Studio, and the Lighting window shows only on a plan that includes it. What your plan decides is how many DMX channels the Lighting output sends: on every plan with Studio you can patch and program a rig of any size, offline too, and only the output is limited.

When a show uses more channels than the plan sends, whole fixtures go out in patch order until the limit is reached; a fixture never goes out in part. The 3D stage, the online part of the fixture library, the AI tools and DMX in have their own plan rules, given on their pages. See Plans and limits.

Windows and macOS

Both apps have the same window, layouts, panels, live controls and words. What differs:

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