PC Based Controllers

[Brian]

Is anyone using a control system specifically designed, from the ground up, for lighting control on a PC?

 

By that I mean one which originated on a PC and not one that was designed for a console and has been ported to a PC. So that means not Chamsys, not Avolite, not MA.

[david.elsbury]

I’m a sporadic Lightfactory user. What did you want to know?

[mar]

IIRC Lightfactory was designed for PC and then has wings added later I believe. I had it at my old job back when it was sold as a Zero88 product.

[Robin D]

ShowXpress is another. Works with Chauvet Xpress DMX dongles. It's OK for quick things, but works best with a midi controller in my humble opinion.

[Don Allen]

I have a 1 universe and a 2 universe setup LightFactory laptops and a MyDMX3, as these are commonly used in Perth (WA) schools and community theatres.

[dje]

Playing devil's advocate - Chamsys actually brought out MagicQ and the wings, before they brought out their first consoles.

So arguably, MagicQ is software designed for computers that was adapted to consoles.

 

MA2 and MA3 were also developed with Windows integration so much in mind that arguably it is no more 'designed for console' than it is designed for PC. It's designed as a total system architecture.

You can configure an MA2/3 showfile in such a way that there is no real relevance to control hardware at all. I'd argue that MA2/3 software is designed as software, and the user adapts it to his/her surfaces.

 

The point I'm getting with the MA in particular (as of course MagicQ is still clearly based on a hardware perspective) is that I can't think of any benefit of a software-only system that you couldn't make an MA system function identically to.

[Gerry]

I use PCStage.

Written for a PC and only runs on a PC.

Cheers

Gerry

[Brian]

I guess the difference I'm looking at is the UI. There are systems, like Chamsys, where you could take the UI on the PC's screen and make a physical console which looked the same, and then are systems which use a more 'PC-centric' operating mode where it would be difficult to mimic it on a physical surface.

 

In both cases the destination is the same but the journey will be different.

[Modge]

LimeLIGHT was very much PC first, even if we did have submasters etc. on screen. The planned wings were never actually finished.

 

Sadly it only ever lost money though, so the two of us are now doing other things, which rather limits the amount of support we can provide.

[dbuckley]

Do you mean a lighting control program with a real Windows user interface, as in designed in Windows and uses Windows GUI things?

 

Along with Gerry, I'm still using PCStage, but the only other product I know of that is from the ground up designed for Windows is Showmagic.

[ekul1978]

When I first started with lighting I used Freestyler to control a basic moving head and LED par set up. Wasn't the easiest to use but was sufficient for a small rig.

[J Pearce]

Stretching PC to mac - QLab takes a very non lighting desk approach to lighting control.

[Brian]

Do you mean a lighting control program with a real Windows user interface, as in designed in Windows and uses Windows GUI things?

 

Pretty much.

 

Stretching PC to mac - QLab takes a very non lighting desk approach to lighting control.

 

That's the kind of approach I'm interested in.

 

In PC-land there's things like DASlight and Sunlight which take a different approach. As does D-Pro.

[themadhippy]

One I tinkered with before getting hooked on chamsys was qlc at the time it was one of the very few that played nicely with linux

[indyld]

Stretching PC to mac - QLab takes a very non lighting desk approach to lighting control.

 

That's the kind of approach I'm interested in.

 

This is perhaps a polite way of putting it. There's 'not being a picture of a lighting desk on your screen' and then at the other end of the spectrum there's QLab lighting... And I use and teach QLab!

Others have been mentioned here, my original first response thought was Freestyler. I presume Jands still do Vista, which is very Windowsy away from the desks. There is also really quite off the wall stuff such as LightJams which is great in its own way.

For Mac (or Win/Linux via python) there is LX Console for a fairly simple and functional interface.

 

It does depend a little on what lighting you want to control and for what kind of show. A single cue stack of dimmer channels is a different beast to a multi-dimensional moving light rig with pixel mapping.

Edited November 11, 2020 by indyld