Lighting (DMX)

CueStudio 2 sends and receives DMX-512 over the network using Art-Net and sACN E1.31 multicast. Art-Net™ Designed by and Copyright Artistic Licence Holdings Ltd.

#Output: scenes (played by Light cues)

Build a lighting look in the DMX Scene Editor (Lighting ▸ DMX Scene Editor…).
Use the on-screen console keypad to set channel values (0–255) per universe.
Add a Light cue and pick the scene from the SCENE dropdown in its inspector: scenes only play from Light cues.
Set the scene Fade to cross-fade from the current look to the new one over that many seconds (0 = snap). The fade runs at 30 Hz from the last-sent frame.
PANIC and Reset cues send a DMX blackout across every universe. A Light cue can carry a scene, instrument commands, or both: the scene sets the whole frame first, then the commands overlay it.

#Output: Art-Net vs sACN

Configure the protocol and universe numbers in Show Settings. CueStudio 2 can output Art-Net and sACN simultaneously to different universes if needed.

#Choosing the lighting network interface

Most show Macs are on two networks at once: the house or production LAN (internet, session sync, OSC, the web remote) and a separate lighting network — a 2.x.x.x Art-Net segment or an sACN VLAN, usually on a USB or Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. Nothing in a DMX packet says which wire to leave by, so by default the Mac picks using its default route — which is the internet-facing NIC. Art-Net broadcast and sACN multicast then go out the wrong port, the rig never receives a frame, and nothing reports an error, because as far as the Mac is concerned the packet was sent successfully. Set **Show Settings ▸ DMX ▸ Lighting Network** to your lighting adapter. CueStudio 2 then pins all Art-Net and sACN output to that interface, and joins the sACN input multicast group on it as well. Session sync, OSC and the web remote are not affected — they carry on using the default route, so the two networks stay separate.

The picker shows each interface's name and current IP address. Press Rescan after plugging in an adapter.
If the chosen adapter is unplugged, the setting turns red and DMX falls back to the default route until it returns — it warns rather than going silent.
This is saved on the Mac, not in the show file: the lighting adapter is usually a different interface on a backup machine, so each machine keeps its own choice.
Leave it on Automatic if the Mac has only one network, or if DMX and everything else share a network.

#Input: DMX triggers

The DMX Monitor (Lighting ▸ DMX Monitor…) shows incoming Art-Net and sACN. Each cue can be set to fire when a specific DMX channel crosses a threshold: useful when a lighting console drives CueStudio 2 for tight sync. Set the trigger channel in a cue's Trigger tab (DMX section).

#Transport from a console

Combine DMX input triggers (or MIDI/OSC) with cues so an external desk can cue sound and video in sync with lighting. No time-coding needed: the DMX value fires CueStudio 2 directly.

#Light Designer (build looks visually)

Lighting ▸ Light Designer… is the visual programmer: a Stage View of your rig on top, a selection-driven Programmer below, group submaster faders at the left, and a sidebar at the right holding a searchable FIXTURES list and the LOOKS pool.

The toolbar is grouped by what each button acts on. LOOK: Record → Pool, Update Look, Add Cue, and a readout naming the look those two act on. EDIT: Undo, Redo, Clear, Save Preset. RIG: Highlight, Reset Rig, Blackout. VIEW: Sidebar, Edit Layout, Strips. Record → Pool is the one prominent button because it is the point of the window.
Stage View: one glyph per patched instrument, lit with the colour and brightness the fixture is actually being driven at (cue fades and effects show in real time). Movers cast a beam wedge: its angle follows pan, its length follows tilt and its spread follows zoom, so you can read where a rig is pointing at a glance. Static fixtures throw a pool instead. These are schematic, not a simulation of your room. An amber dot means the fixture is part of the current look; a violet dot means an effect is modulating it. A coloured ring means the fixture belongs to a colour-coded group.
Select fixtures by clicking, ⇧/⌘-clicking to extend, or dragging a marquee. Clicking a group strip selects its members. ⌘A selects everything; Esc clears the selection (or turns Highlight off first, if it is on).
FIXTURES sidebar: every patched instrument in patch order, with its type, universe and address, plus a dot showing the colour and brightness it is being driven at and its live level. Click a row to select just that fixture, ⇧/⌘-click to add or remove it. The search field matches names, fixture types and universes ("wash", "moving", "u2"), and All / None act on what the search shows. Use it when you know what a fixture is called rather than where it sits.
Set levels on the stage: scroll over a fixture, or ⌥-drag it up and down. If the fixture is part of the selection the whole selection follows. These are ordinary programmer edits, so they undo and record like any other. (A plain drag stays a marquee; that's why levels are on ⌥.)
Hover a fixture to read back its name, intensity, RGB, universe/address and group without selecting it.
Edit Layout (toolbar): drag glyphs to lay the stage out like your real rig; positions snap to a grid and save with the show.
Programmer: shows exactly the controls the selected fixtures share; an intensity fader with level buttons and FLASH, an inline colour wheel (hue around, saturation towards the centre) with quick swatches below, plus white/amber sliders when the fixtures have those channels, a pan/tilt pad with a Centre button, and mini sliders for everything else. Every control writes to ALL selected fixtures that carry that parameter. The intensity, pan and tilt readouts are fields: click one, type a value from 0 to 100 and press Return.
Drag the divider above the Programmer to give it more or less room; the height is remembered.
Live / Blind (toolbar): Live pushes edits straight to the rig. Blind keeps them in the programmer (the Stage View previews them, the rig doesn't change) and flipping back to Live applies the buffered look. Blind is how you build the next look mid-show.
Strips (toolbar): the classic one-strip-per-instrument view is still there behind this toggle; strips always write live.
Fixtures are drawn as real stage-plan symbols — LED PAR, Fresnel, Profile, Moving Head (Spot and Wash), Blinder, Strobe and TV/Studio light — so a rig reads the way it would on a paper plan. Each is drawn at its own proportions, so a strobe bar or a blinder is wide rather than squashed into a square.
The symbol is chosen from what the fixture can actually do: pan and tilt make it a moving head (spot or wash depending on whether it has colour mixing or a gobo wheel), a gobo or colour wheel makes it a profile, colour mixing makes it an LED PAR, and a plain dimmer channel becomes a Fresnel. Right-click ▸ Icon to override any of them.
Backdrop (Edit Layout only): pick a ground plan or stage photo to draw behind the fixtures. It is imported into the show bundle, so it travels with the show.
Right-click the stage to: select a group, copy or paste a look, save the selection as a preset, set the icon, or clear placement (back to the auto grid).
Group colours: give a group a colour in Light Patch ▸ GROUPS and every member gets a matching ring on the stage, with the group's submaster strip tinted to match. Useful for reading a rig by function ("the blue ones are the back light").

#Is it reaching the rig?

The header carries an OUTPUT pill. Green and blinking means CueStudio is transmitting: the protocol and universes are named beside it, and the blink is a real heartbeat, so a stalled stream shows rather than being assumed. Grey means output is off; click the pill to start transmitting without leaving the window. CueStudio streams continuously while output is enabled, the way a lighting desk does, so a look that simply holds stays lit. (Art-Net and sACN receivers drop a source that goes quiet — sACN after 2.5 seconds.) The rate is set in Show Settings ▸ DMX ▸ Output Refresh. On a session backup the pill reads OFF: a backup tracks the universe but stays off the wire so two machines can't drive the rig at once.

#Working faster in the Programmer

Copy / Paste look: copy one fixture's look and paste it onto any selection. Matching is by parameter NAME, so a look copied from an RGB par pastes onto a moving wash: shared parameters land, the rest are left alone.
Fan: with two or more fixtures selected, "Fan ↗" / "Fan ↘" ramp intensity across the selection in patch order, and "Fan Pan" spreads the heads' pan. Fanning is the quick way to build a sweep or a stagger.
Arrow keys nudge the selection's pan and tilt: ⇧ for coarse steps, ⌥ for fine. Typing in a field is never affected.
Keyboard: ⌘A selects every fixture, Esc clears the selection (or ends Highlight), ⌘R is Record → Pool, ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, and the arrow keys nudge pan and tilt. None of these fire while you are typing in a field.
Palettes and saved effects: click applies, right-click offers Delete. (⌥-click still deletes, for anyone used to it.)
Undo / Redo (⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z, or the toolbar buttons) step back through programmer changes — 60 of them. A fader drag undoes as one move, not one per pixel, and undo puts the RIG back as well as the buffer. This is the programmer's own undo, separate from the cue list's.
Highlight (toolbar): latches the selection to full white so you can find it in the rig, and follows the selection as you step through fixtures. It leaves pan/tilt alone (a fixture you're hunting for should stay where it points), never enters the programmer, and drops itself before you Record so it can't be baked into a cue.

Select fixtures on the stage or in the FIXTURES sidebar and shape the look in the Programmer.
"Record → Pool" (⌘R) saves it as a look in the LOOKS pool; "Add Cue" drops a Light cue that fires it into the active list (see The lighting cue pool below).
"Clear" empties the programmer (touched parameters return to their pre-touch values in Live mode). "Reset Rig" takes every touched parameter back to its profile default; "Blackout" zeroes every universe outright. The designer works with DMX output disabled too: build and record looks offline; only the wire output is held.

#The lighting cue pool

The Light Designer is the lighting console: it is the only place looks are built. A Light cue is a TRIGGER — it names a look in the pool and fires it, and carries no lighting programming of its own. That split is the point. Re-programming a look is a lighting edit, so it never means opening the cue list, and every cue using that look changes with it.

Build the look in the Light Designer and press "Record → Pool". Give it a name; it gets the next pool number.
Press "Add Cue" to drop a Light cue into the active list that fires it. Or add a Light cue the usual way and choose the look in the cue's POOL LOOK section.
To change it later: select the look in the LOOKS sidebar and press Load (or double-click it) to bring it back into the programmer, re-shape it, and press "Update Look". Every cue pointing at it follows — no cue edits at all. The toolbar's LOOK readout always names the look Update Look and Add Cue will act on.

A single click in the LOOKS sidebar only SELECTS a look; loading is a separate step, so browsing the pool never rewrites the rig mid-show.
Right-click a look for Load, Add Cue, Rename, a colour tag and Delete. Renaming changes the pool entry only; cues keep the names they were given.
The LOOKS sidebar shows how many cues use each look, so you know what a re-record or a delete will affect before you do it. Deleting a look that cues still use asks first.
The cue list's FILE column shows ◆ and the look's name for a pool-backed cue, so you can see at a glance which cues share a look.
The cue keeps its OWN timing. Fade, pre-wait, follow and triggers are cue-list concerns; the pool owns what the rig does, not when it does it.
The Light cue's options panel holds only what belongs to the CUE: which look to fire, its own fade and trigger timing, tracking, and the optional raw DMX scene. All of that sits on the PLAYBACK tab; the Control tab carries nothing but the cue's MIDI sends. There is no command editor, effects editor or instrument list on the cue — all of that lives in the Light Designer.
Shows made before the pool existed may have Light cues carrying their own commands. They still fire exactly as before, and the cue shows them read-only under INLINE COMMANDS (LEGACY) with a "Move to Pool…" button that turns them into a pool look and points the cue at it.
Renaming an instrument, group or preset rewrites pool looks as well as cues, so references never go stale. A cue whose look has been deleted shows a ⚠ in the cue list and in Status ▸ Warnings.

#Presets (reusable building blocks)

"Save Preset…" stores the programmer look as a named, fixture-agnostic preset: a colour, a position, a beam state. Cues reference presets in command text:

@warm-amber: applies the preset to its own fixture scope
wash*.@warm-amber; the glob picks the fixtures, the preset supplies the values Presets resolve when the cue FIRES, so editing a preset (build the new look, Save Preset… under the same name) updates every cue that references it: no cue rewrites. The Programmer shows them as a palette grouped by kind: a colour preset is drawn as its colour, a position preset as a dot where the heads point. Click a tile to apply it to the selection; ⌥-click deletes it. Renames rewrite every cue's references automatically. A cue pointing at a preset that no longer exists shows a ⚠ in the cue list and in Status ▸ Warnings, so a deleted preset never hides until showtime.

#Effect templates

The Programmer's EFFECTS section stages canned dynamic looks on the selection: Chase, Swell, Strobe, Twinkle, plus Rainbow (colour fixtures) and Ballyhoo (movers). Templates audition live immediately and are written into the cue when you Record, where they become ordinary effects you can fine-tune in the cue inspector. You can shape them while they run, without recording first:

Rate, Size and Spread apply across the whole staged set. That is the right grain: a template stages layers that differ only in phase (Rainbow is three sines on red/green/blue), so they should move together.
Each layer gets a row underneath. Click its waveform to cycle it, or press the minus to drop that one layer without clearing the rest.
Changing the rate speeds the effect up rather than restarting it, so you can dial in a speed against music while it plays. The ✕ next to "staged" drops everything and stops the audition.

Save… stores the staged effect in the show's library under a name. Saved effects are stored WITHOUT fixtures: recalling one applies it to whatever you have selected, so a shape you like works on any rig. Saved effects appear under SAVED in the EFFECTS section — click to stage one, ⌥-click to delete it.

#Editing an existing look

Select a Light cue in the cue list, then click "Load Cue Look" in the designer: its commands land in the programmer and its fixtures select on the stage (parameters the cue doesn't name are left alone). Tweak, then "Record → Selected" writes it back. The Light cue inspector also has a "Preview Look" button that applies the cue's commands to the rig over its Fade In time without firing the cue through the transport.

#Groups (submasters)

Make groups in the Light Patch window (GROUPS section): add a group, name it (e.g. stage-left), and tick instruments into it. A group's name works in command text exactly like an instrument name ("stage-left.intensity = 80" sets every member) and the Light Designer shows a master fader per group. Renaming a group rewrites references in every Light cue, same as renaming an instrument.

#Effects (chases and modulation)

A Light cue can carry EFFECTS (middle column of its inspector): each effect oscillates the parameters its target matches around the cue's look.

Target: instrument-glob.parameter-glob; wash*.intensity, stage-left.red, head?.pan. Group names work here too.
Waveform: Sine (smooth), Ramp (sawtooth), Square (on/off), Random (new level each cycle).
Hz: cycles per second. Size: peak-to-peak depth around the base value.
Spread: phase offset across the matched instruments; Square at 100 spread across a group is a classic chase. Effects start when the cue fires (after its commands land) and keep running until the cue is stopped (a Stop cue targeting it, Panic, or Blackout) or a later Light cue / designer edit writes the parameter statically.

#Tracking

By default a Light cue only touches the parameters it names, everything else holds (latest-takes-precedence). Turn on "Track preceding cues" (TRACKING section of the inspector) to have the cue first re-assert the accumulated look of every earlier Light cue in the list, so jumping straight to it (GOTO, a Start cue) lands on the same stage picture as playing the show in order. "Block" makes a cue a tracking barrier: tracked cues after it accumulate from the Block onward.

#Importing fixtures from GDTF

Two ways to bring in real fixture definitions (General Device Type Format), both in the Light Patch window's FIXTURE PROFILES section:

"Browse Online…" searches GDTF Share (the official fixture exchange run by MA Lighting, Robe and Vectorworks) right inside CueStudio 2. Sign in once with a free gdtf-share.com account (kept in your Mac's Keychain, a rig setting, never show data), type a fixture or manufacturer name, and click Import. The sheet stays open so you can pull in several fixtures in a row.
"Import GDTF…" reads a .gdtf file you already have on disk. Either way, fixtures with several DMX modes show a mode picker; choose the mode your fixture is set to and it lands as a custom profile: fully editable, saved with the show, and synced over sessions like any other profile. Import the same fixture again to add another mode as a separate profile. Attribute names are normalised to CueStudio 2's conventions (Dimmer → intensity, Pan/Tilt → 16-bit pan/tilt, ColorAdd_R → red, Shutter strobe → strobe, …) so the designer's colour well, XY pad, and group submasters work automatically. Channels without a DMX address (virtual dimmers) and channels on DMX break 2+ (multi-break fixtures) are skipped.

#Patch helpers

Add Multiple…: patch a run of the same fixture in one go. Pick the profile and how many, give them a name prefix (wash → wash-1, wash-2 …; numbering starts one past whatever is already patched with that prefix), set the universe and start address, and choose Packed (each fixture right after the last) or Every N channels (the way rigs are often labelled: every 10, every 20). The run can spill onto the next universe when this one fills, and can land in a new or existing group so CueStudio 2 knows the whole run as one name. The preview lists every name and address before you press Add, and flags any that would overlap fixtures already patched.
Universe map: a 512-channel picture of each patched universe under the instrument table, coloured by fixture, red where two fixtures overlap, grey where the channels are free. Hover a channel to read the address, the fixture and which of its channels it is (pan, green, strobe…). Click a fixture on the map or in its legend to highlight its row in the table. The legend also lists the free ranges and spells out every conflict.
Re-patch by dragging: press on a fixture's cells and drag them to a new address. The block follows the pointer a whole channel at a time, turns red while it would overlap something, and can't be dropped past channel 512. The universe chips above the map are drop targets too: release the fixture on one to move it to that universe (it keeps its address when that fits, otherwise it takes the next free slot), or hold it over a chip for a moment and the map switches to that universe so you can drop it at an exact address there. While dragging, a "+ U" chip appears for moving the fixture onto a brand-new universe. Each drop is one patch edit, so it undoes as one step and syncs to session peers.
A warning triangle on an instrument row means its channels overlap another instrument on the same universe (the tooltip names the clash; deliberate multi-patching is fine, the warning is just a heads-up). A red octagon means the fixture's footprint runs past channel 512 and it will not work where it is.
The duplicate button copies an instrument to the next free address with a numbered name, so glob commands like wash*.intensity pick the whole set up.
Highlight (header button): while it is on, the fixture you select (click its row, or its cells or legend entry on the universe map) opens to full white on the rig, so you can check that the address you typed is the light you meant. Select the next fixture and the previous one goes back to what it was showing. It needs DMX output on. It is never remembered: it switches itself off when you close the window, so a fixture can't be left stuck at full by accident.