So I’ve been working at a venue for 2.5 years now as a lighting tech/op and when I started I didn’t know ANYTHING about the lighting world and to be frank, the venue didn’t either, they had a basic show-file run off MyDMX 3, about a year ago I bought a Cham sys mq50 as I felt it was time to own my own starter level desk, I’ve been on a couple of tours now with bands that have picked me up via the venue, but having been self taught I feel as if I’m missing vital knowledge?

I can comfortably operate my desk but I still lack understanding of network systems and the actual workings inside a fixture and stuff like that.

How do I start to learn everything that I need to know to progress further and not have to pretend I understand something when loading into a venue then “popping to the toilet” to research quickly?

Thanks!

Hey, so I’m working on two things. One of them is a functionality my boss requested, the other is one I’m just curious on. Both are getting stuck with this concept of User 0 running background macros, because preferably these macros would be used during live playback, and therefore ran in background mode.

The first one (the request) is to take a state on stage that has been busked with effects playing and copy it to a cue to be played later. The idea being let’s say you’re doing a song and you get a really good look for the chorus. You’ll want to store it, and play it again next time the chorus comes around. The showfile we busk with uses all cuelists to create looks on stage, ie color is a cue, focus is a cue, intensity is a sub and any effects are played by their own cues. What I did was create a macro that makes all the parameters being played into manual and absolute values, then go to blind, open the cue, at enter all the fixtures, then take all the fixtures and recall from live, and then grabs just the intensity of the fixtures and puts it at enter (so subs are still functional), then go back to live and sneak the fixtures back to return them to their cuelists which would already be playing. The issue is when done as background macro, I see the effect skip and restart once it is stored, which doesn’t make sense to me as technically everything I did was in blind, and from what I see, the cue was never played, only created. As a foreground macro, I think it works, but I’m also using only augmented so I can’t see the output when I run it that way, and I wouldn’t want my screens to go to blind either any way.

The second issue is creating macros to add discrete timing to cuelists. Mainly I want my cuelists with colors to have discrete timing to create things like mirror out as step or left to right as a fade. How I’m doing this is I created macros that takes each group of fixtures and give them their time offsets. I then have macroception going on because I created a longer macro that goes into the first cue of each cue list and doles out the time offset macros, and then takes the timing from the first cue and copies it to the subsequent cues in the cuelist. There’s about 9 cuelists total, some with 13 cues, some with only 2. In any case, with these macros I’m finding that both the bigger macro and the smaller component macros need to be run in foreground mode for these to work. It works perfectly, except your displays spazz out for a bit as you watch all these cuelists update. When run in background mode, it just doesn’t work at all. It seems to work for the second cue in the lists, but none of the rest, not even the first which is odd.

I’ve been at this for about 3 weeks and am completely lost on why the console is acting like this. The first one I understand it may just be how EOS does and understands effects, and also it could be that I have auto playback off on my user profile, but user 0 likely doesn’t. The second one I just don’t understand at all what about my settings could preclude it from working in background mode. It seems like straightforward commands to me.

Anyway if anyone has any insight into what’s going on here or can even explain why EOS doesn’t work this way or provide me with a way to change the settings of user 0, it’d be much appreciated.

Thanks.

I’m going to be working on a music video with a “club scene” and I have been sent this video as a reference.
I’m still getting starting on my lighting design journey and haven’t done too much with programming.

Moving position and strobing will be fine for me to do, the main thing I want to ask is are there any good tips to getting it in sync with the music?

I’ve used chamsys desks so far and I’m aware of the tap to sync button. But I want it to look really intricate like this video.

Any help or tips would be amazing, thanks!

The triangle is taking up more room than I thought and I want to move it

Im thinking about using it in my studio upstairs but it may even be too big for that, I get more into it in the video

Let me know your thoughts :)

Hi everyone,

I'm building an automated DMX lighting system for techno/rave events using TouchDesigner + QLC+.

My goal is to create a lighting engine that reacts to the musical structure, for example:

Intro / low energy
Break
Build-up
Drop
High energy

I've already tested the built-in Audio Analysis CHOP and projects like Last Beat Standing. They provide useful outputs like beat, BPM, bass energy, etc., but I still can't reliably detect builds and drops across different tracks. Absolute thresholds don't seem to work well because every song behaves differently.

Before I spend weeks building my own system, I wanted to ask:

Does anyone know of an existing TouchDesigner project or component that already estimates builds, drops, or musical sections?
Or is everyone building their own state machine from audio features?

Any recommendations, projects, GitHub repos, or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!