Stage (Beta)

Stage is a 3D window for Studio. You bring in a model of the venue, place screens, projectors and cameras in it, and your outputs play live on them, so you can see how a show will look in the room before you are there.

An early look to try out. More is coming in the next updates.

Open Stage

In the Studio toolbar, choose Stage. It has a cube icon, and its tooltip reads "Stage: meshes, surfaces, projectors and cameras". Stage opens in its own window, so you can keep it beside the Studio window.

On Windows the same Stage key is in the Studio toolbar.

Draft and Take

Edits you make in Stage wait as a Draft. A Draft capsule shows in the toolbar while a draft is waiting. Choose Take to make the draft the stage in force. Every edit is one undo step.

Import a venue model

Import a 3D model of your venue from the outliner. Stage reads glb and obj files.

• You can choose several files at once.
• A progress bar shows the import stages: Reading, Parsing and Writing.
• Cancel ends the import and removes the file it was writing.
• The model is kept in the show's Library as a model, and the import is a step you can undo.

Stage stops a model file larger than 1 GiB and tells you with the message Model too large.

Screens, projectors and cameras

The room holds the items you place in it: screens, projectors and cameras. The outliner lists them, and you can drag one onto another to move it under it. Select an item in the outliner or click it in the viewport to see its settings in the inspector.

Stage plays your outputs live on the screens and projectors in the room. See Screens and mix and Outputs.

Tag a surface

A surface on the venue model can show a picture. Select the object and set Kind in the inspector to one of:

• None
• LED: an LED screen.
• Projection: a surface a projector throws onto. You can also use Tag as Projection Surface in the outliner menu.

Then choose a Source for the surface: None, or one of your inputs. A surface plays the picture of the input you choose. In the outliner, a tagged surface carries a tooltip: "LED surface: show its source and mapping" or "Projection surface: show its source and mapping".

You can also drop an input from the Library onto an object in the viewport to play it there (Mac). The object under the drop is selected and takes the input as its source.

Mapping

The Mapping group sets how the picture lies on the surface:

Select several surfaces and the inspector edits them all at once. Each surface keeps its own mapping, a setting that differs between them reads Mixed, and the whole edit is one undo step.

Lighting

The Stage Look section of the inspector sets how the room is lit:

Each light also has a Cast Shadows toggle in the inspector.

Move around the room

On the Mac:

In the Top, Front and Right views the orbit gesture pans, on both the Mac and Windows.

Drag a move, rotate or scale gizmo to change the selected object. Hold Shift to snap, or Option for fine steps.

Keys

On Mac, Backspace and Forward Delete also delete.

Views and cameras

Each view has a picker in its corner. Choose Perspective, Top, Front or Right, or choose any camera or projector in the room to look through it. Press C to look through the selected camera.

Press F5, or choose Four Views in the toolbar, to see four views at once. Each pane keeps its own view.

Clean Up Mesh

A dense model can make Stage slow. Clean Up Mesh simplifies a mesh. Open it from the inspector or the outliner with one mesh selected. In the sheet:

• Weld vertices joins points that sit in the same place.
• Keep is a slider from 1% to 100% of the triangles. It shows how many triangles stay, for example "50%, 5,000 of 10,000 triangles".

Choose Clean Up to run it, or Cancel. The work shows in the work bar, and the clean-up is one undo step.

Resize the panes

The dividers between the viewport and the side columns can be dragged to resize them. Show or hide the Object Manager and Attributes column with the Managers button in the toolbar, or with Option-Command-I.

Full screen

On the Mac the Stage window can go full screen. On Windows it can be resized and maximised.

Plans and locks

Stage is in the Studio and Enterprise plans, and in the trial. On those plans a show can hold up to 16 projectors. The Stage button is always there. On a plan without Stage, the action you try is refused and an upgrade notice with an Upgrade button appears. See Plans and limits.

Windows and macOS

Stage does the same on both: import, lighting, surfaces and mapping, views and cameras, and Clean Up Mesh. What differs:

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