Reboot Lighting Console

Patch

Every fixture listens to a block of channels starting at its address. If two fixtures are on the same address, they hear every instruction you send — so they do the same thing at the same time, whether you meant it or not.

Playback

A playback holds a list of cues. What it does with them is a mode: one look, a stack you step through with GO, or a chase that steps itself.

Mode

Cues

Test me

Five timed exercises, graded on accuracy and time — accuracy counts for four times what speed does, because a tech who patches fast and wrong is worse than one who is slow and right. Every one of these is something that actually goes wrong on a load-in or a show call.

How this works, and what it is honest about

Four desks, one rig

ETC SmartFade is the one to learn on, and the right place to start. A two-scene preset board: two rows of faders over the same channels, where each fader IS a channel. No programmer, no cues, nothing between your hand and the lamp. One row is live, the other is where you set up the next look, and a pair of crossfaders takes you across — how fast you push them is the fade time. Every idea in the big desks is here in its simplest form.

ETC Eos is the theatre standard, and everywhere in corporate and worship too. You TYPE at it: a command line, a keypad, and a big level wheel that does intensity and nothing else. Cues live in one numbered list and the show runs on a GO button.

grandMA3 is the concert and festival desk. Built around an encoder bar: pick a feature group and the encoders become that group's attributes. Looks live on executor faders.

Avolites Titan is huge in touring and corporate. Three wheels bottom right, and a row of attribute banks — Intensity, Position, Colour, Gobo, Beam, Effect, Special — that decide what the wheels are holding.

Same rig, same visualizer, same engine underneath. Switching desks changes the layout and the words, not the job — which is exactly the thing worth learning.

The same job, three words

This is the real difficulty in moving between desks. Not the concepts — the vocabulary. Where the three disagree is highlighted.

The wheels

Real desks have wheels, not knobs — ribbed drums you roll with a thumb. Drag one to change the value, hold Shift or click it to latch fine mode for the small steps you need on a long pan. On Eos the big level wheel drives intensity for everything selected; on the other two the wheels hold whatever attribute bank you have chosen.

The programming tools

Highlight forces the selected fixtures to full open white so you can find them on a stage full of light. It is a view, not a value — nothing it does can be recorded into a cue.

Fan spreads a value across the selection instead of moving it together: the ends travel furthest and the centre stays put. It is the difference between eight lights doing one thing and a rig that looks alive.

Next / Last (Avolites: Fix +1 / Fix −1) steps through your selection one fixture at a time, so you can fix the single unit that is pointing wrong. Step past the end and you get the whole selection back.

Sneak hands your manual values back to the cue in time rather than snapping.

Park locks a value so nothing can change it — not a cue, not the programmer, not the grand master, not even blackout. It is how you hold a worklight on, and it is the first thing to check when a fixture stubbornly refuses to respond.

Palettes (MA: presets) store colour or position on their own, so you can recolour a whole show in a minute. A palette recorded on four fixtures applies to eight.

The one rule that confuses everybody: HTP and LTP

Intensity is HTP — highest takes precedence. If two playbacks both want a light on, the brighter one wins. If it were "latest wins", pulling a second look up would make the stage darker, which no operator would tolerate.

Everything else is LTP — latest takes precedence. There is no sensible "highest" colour: averaging red and blue gives you a look nobody asked for, so the most recent instruction wins instead. The What is deciding this value box tells you which rule is in charge, live.

Why your console seems stuck

Because the programmer beats every playback, and it keeps beating them until you press CLEAR. This is the single most common beginner panic and it is not a fault. If a light will not respond to a cue, look at the programmer light in the top bar first.

What is real here

Colour is a real spectrum, not an RGB triple. Sixteen bands from 400–700 nm, converted to what your eye sees. That is why R+G+B at full does not give you a decent white, why deep reds go muddy under a cheap fixture, why full blue looks dim, and why full CMY is a dirty brown rather than black. Nobody scripted those — they fall out of the physics.

Brightness is candela, not lumens. Zooming a beam from 27° to 2° squeezes the same light into a cone about two hundred times smaller, so it gets correspondingly blinding. Zoom is a real control here, not a cosmetic one.

The visualizer reads the DMX universe and nothing else. It cannot see the console or what you meant. So when two fixtures share an address they really do move together — the symptom is unavoidable rather than simulated.

What is not real, and you should know it

Channel layouts are representative: real channel counts and real features in conventional order, enough that patching and universe maths behave exactly as on a rig — but not transcribed from every manufacturer's chart. Read the manual before addressing real gear.

The colour rendering score is a teaching index, not the CIE Ra procedure. There is no shadow casting, so a fixture behind a person still lights them. Fixture output figures are nominal. Nothing here outputs real DMX — though the universe underneath is a genuine 512-channel packet, so it could.

Home

Home position centres pan and tilt on the selected fixtures and leaves everything else alone. This is the one you reach for mid-programme when a mover has wandered somewhere silly and you want it back to a known place without losing the colour you just built.

Home everything returns every attribute to its power-up default: pan and tilt centred, shutter open, zoom mid, colour and gobo open. Note that the dimmer's default is zero, so a full Home turns the light off. That surprises people the first time and it is exactly what a real desk does — so this one does it too.

Keyboard

0–9 numbers · T thru · A at · Enter enter · F full · Space GO · C clear · S store · H home position · Shift+H home everything · B blackout · Esc close panels