On Stage Lighting » Lighting Design Software

Stage Lighting Apps for the iPhone – Updated

Rob Sayer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:59:34 +0000

An up to date look at stage lighting iPhone apps and what they do.

July 2008 saw the start of stage lighting’s entry into the world of Apple’s iPhone apps – lighting themed software that you can use with the iPhone (or iPod Touch) and now, the iPad.

Since the first few iPhone apps became available, the market has become awash with beam calculators, DIP switch thingies (seriously, just read our article on how to work our binary DIPs without all that technology) and other goodies. Luminair were early on the scene with V1 of their iPhone based DMX controller and have continued to develop the product, while tradtional console manufacturers have added remote functionality that can be controlled via your phone.

Image by William Hook on Flickr

Gel and Gobo makers have created catalogues and and references and serial iPhone developer Michael Zinman has launched his Genielux platform, a sort of worldwide lighting equipment hire database.

We can safely say that the market for lighting calculators is well and truly saturated. The addition of hardware like the Seachanger Color Bug, could bring some extra usefullness to the iPhone in your pocket. DMX testers and continuity checkers are things that spring to mind, not so sure about measuring 415v or using the iTouch to clamp meter yer PowerLoks but anything is possible.

Here’s what we know about stage lighting specific iPhone apps, grouped into a few sections with links through to the relevant Apple Apps Store page. You can click on the image and find out more about each app.

DMX Control and Lighting Control Apps

Luminair DMX

Luminair enables you to wirelessly control, view, record and manage intelligent DMX lighting fixtures, dimmers, consoles, other software and media servers straight from your iPhone™ or iPod™ touch. Using Artistic Licence’s Art-Net protocol over your device’s built-in Wi-Fi connection, Luminair communicates with other compatible hardware and software nodes on your network.

A Lighting control interface on your iPhone, the Luminair software boasts the ability to control DMX lighting fixtures. The wireless DMX signal from the iPhone is sent using the open source DMX over Ethernet protocol, Art Net. This can be routed via a Wireless Access Point/Router into your DMX universe / ArtNet node. The app also has file management capabilities and colour mixing control.

“Right, can I have channel 47 @ 50% please”
“Where’s the desk?”
“Hang on – I’ll call it, what’s the number?”

Get Luminair at the iTunes Store

Zinman TCP/IP Remote

For IT professionals, systems integrators, and anyone looking for customizable control of any software or hardware capable of TCP/IP communications.

A general iPhone application that can be used in stage lighting situations. The software enables customisable remote triggerin of TCP/IP and UDP capable software. This includes professional level lighting consoles like the Grand Ma and media servers. Sounds like the kind of thing that developers dream of

Get it at iTunes

Grand MA App

The grandMA consoles are the core of the fully integrated MA system. The grandMA consoles are able to control – in the most elegant manner – moving lights, conventional lights, and effects, as well as LEDs and video. The reliable and proven operational philosophy allows a direct, flexible and intuitive way of working.

The Grand MA app is free at iTunes

Martin Max Remote

MAXRemote is your personal assistant to remotely control lighting devices straight from your iPhone or iPod touch. It is the ultimate remote tool for your Martin Maxxyz™ lighting console and Martin Maxxyz PC™ with a beautiful user interface and original features.

Martin’s Max Remote is free at iTunes

Other lighting consoles

Other desk makers including ChamSys, Avolites (Titan platform) and ETC have their own personal system for remote control of their products, some of which are browser based rather than actual apps.

Lighting Information and Catalogues

Lighting Handbook

Lighting Handbook is a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it provides detailed information about Moving lights, LED fixtures, Scrollers, and more DMX fixtures.

It also provides access to the manual.

Get the Lighting Handbook at iTunes

Wybron iSwatch Gel

The Gel Swatch Library by Wybron, Inc., lets lighting production personnel browse, search, and compare more than 1,000 gel color filters made by the following manufacturers:
- Apollo (included in Version 1.4 release)
- GAM
- Lee
- Rosco

Buy this app at iTunes

GenieLux

Genielux is a user-friendly application that helps you find the exact model of lighting, audio, film, video, or other production gear that you need. It searches local vendors inventory for rent or purchase and returns a list of results based on your current GPS location. You can also provide an alternate location to search for the nearest vendors who can provide your gear.

Genielux is free for users, hire companies pay to list their inventories

The GenieLux app at iTunes

Wybron Moire Gobo Library

The Moiré Gobo Library from Wybron, Inc. lets lighting production personnel browse, search, and experiment with more than 3,600 different A-size gobos from the following manufacturers:
- Apollo
- GAM
- InLight
- Lee

Lighting Calculator Apps

ShowTool LD

Simple. Powerful. Comprehensive suite of Lighting Design and Electrics utilities for theatre and film.

Showtool LD is a bunch of lighting design related calculators : Beam, Gels cuts, Power Law, DIP switches and DMX all one app.

Buy ShowTool LD at iTunes

DMX Color Mixer

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dmx-color-mixer/id349839425?mt=8

Colour mixing app that you can pick colours and cross reference against dmx values.

Get it

Wybron CXI Calculator

The CXI Color Calculator from Wybron helps lighting production personnel find and program colors for the CXI dual-gelstring color changer. Scroll through two overlapping gelstrings of cyan, magenta, and yellow to blend the ideal shade, then plug its numerical values into your lighting control console to have a CXI color changer move to that color. The Color Calculator also gives you the values needed to replicate several colors from the GAM, Lee, and Rosco

Get this app at the iTunes store

Zinman Pocket LD

PocketLD is a photometric database and calculation tool for stage lighting and TV/Film lighting professionals. Simply enter your throw distance, than select manufacturer, fixture and a lamp to calculate beam/field diameter and fc/lux.

MZ brings us another neat little iPhone and iTouch app that does Lighting Designer type calculations with a comprehensive fixture database to make life easier. Free database upgrades, so you can get new fixtures for the software as they are added.

Get the PocketLD app at iTunes

PowerCalc – West Side Sytems

PowerCalc performs basic electrical power calculations with watts, volts, amps, and motor power factor.

A calculator for power law, resistance, inductance and other useful stage lighting stuff. Although you could do these sums on the iPhones standard calculator, this little app makes life easier. Requires the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade and is only a few pennies

Buy it at iTunes

Beam Calc – West Side Systems

Use BeamCalc to calculate the geometry and photometrics of spotlight beams. Position and direct three light sources (chosen from the included library) to determine lighting characteristics: elevation angle, beam and field pool width, illumination, shadow length.

A handy beam calculator to help you choose spotlight angles for your lighting designs. The BeamCalc needs just a few measurements such as trim height and horizontal distance from the subject. It spits out the beam width of a given angle or can reverse the calculations for you, helping you to decide if you spotlights will be wide enough.

Update: The next generation of Beam Calc is now available with improved functionality and is compatible with the iPad. More information at the the application’s iTunes page.

DMX Calc – West Side Sytstems

Entertainment lighting equipment uses a control system called DMX512. DMXCalc is a simple and elegant calculator which does address arithmetic for DMX equipment.

DMX Calc on iTunes

Zinman Gel Calc

GelCalc is an iPhone/iPod touch app for stage lighting designers, electricians, and stage hands.
Quickly calculate number of sheets of gel, best cutting direction to yield the most frames per/sheet and pricing.

Get GelCalc at the apps store

Zinman iSwitch DMX

iSwitch DMX is an easy to use binary DIP switch utility for stage lighting electricians, technicians and programmers. Selecting a DMX address updates the DIP switch graphic with the correct DIP switch settings.

Get the iSwitch DMX app

Zinman ML Finder

For the stage lighting tech addressing a light plot. ML Finder displays the DMX footprint for over 500 moving lights, LED’s and media servers. Know how many DMX channels each device uses, in any mode. Simple to navigate and FREE to download!

Zinmans ML Finder on iTunes

Seachanger Colour Bug

The colorBUG from the SeaChanger group at Ocean Thin Films, Inc. is a wifi enabled, handheld light/color metering device that works with your iPhone or iPod Touch running the colorBUG client app, allowing you to measure:

- Color in CIE 1931 x,y space
- Illuminance in lux
- Color Temperature in degrees Kelvin

This software requires a colorBUG light/color metering device for functionality.

The software is free at iTunes

DMX Ref

DMXRef is designed to take the math out of working with DMX lighting equipment. DMXRef includes DIP switch and auto addressing functions, conversion between local and global addresses, and Dimmer Doubler decoding.

Buy it at iTunes

Rigging with the iPhone / iTouch

OK, so the actual swaggering around wearing a greasy clutch chain like a scarf is still down to you. But rigging calcs are always something that are better made without mathematical errors, so here’s a few rigging calculators for the tricky stuff like bridles and load distribution.

Bridle

Bridle is the innovative bridle creation app for the entertainment rigging industry with a fresh perspective to the ancient craft of calculating bridles.

Get Bridle at the apps store

iBridle

iBridle is for use within the events rigging industry. It can accurately calculate bridle leg lengths, apex angles and load distribution. There are no set measuring units, so regardless of whether you work to metric or imperial standards you will always get the answer you need

Buy iBridle here

JR Clancy iRigging App

Rigging app that provides tools and reference data for many areas of rigging, including wire rope, battens, arbors, sheaves, stage ropes, motors, curtains, and fleet angles. Available in Imperial or Metric Versions.

The Imperial rigging app is free at iTunes

The Metric versions at the apps store

Other useful Apps, not lighting specific

Zinman Portfolio

Portfolio is the perfect app for Photographers, Illustrators, Artists, Designers and anyone looking for an intuitive way to showcase their work on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Includes the same look and functionality as Apple’s Photo app, with improvements relating to an electronic portfolio.

If you’re a lighting designer or have any kind of visual portfolio to organise and display on your iPhone, this takes care of it nicely.

Get Zinmans Portfolio

That’s pretty all the stage lighting iPhone apps we know of. If you own any of these apps, let us know if you like them in the comments. Perhaps you’re wishing for a lighting related iPhone app that you’d like to see the devs working on? Funny or serious, stick it in the box as usual.

If you think we’ve missed some, just add them below and we’ll update the list.

If this has helped you, consider buying me a beer and CLICK HERE to donate a few bucks to On Stage Lighting (why should I donate?). Thanks, - Rob

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Stage Lighting Design Software – Choose Your CAD Weapon

Rob Sayer — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:08:38 +0000

As your lighting designs get more complex, you will want to present your ideas and technical information in a clear way and using a computer to help the lighting design process is an advantage. If you can manage your equipment lists, gel cuts and cable specifications while drawing a lighting plan, even better. Stage lighting design software packages come in all shapes, sizes and costs and choosing the right one is easier if you have an idea of the features you might use. On Stage Lighting gives you the inside track on some of the popular CAD software used in the lighting design process.

2D and Plan Drawing Software

To generate schematics and lighting design layouts so that your crew can rig and set up correctly is the minimum software requirement by any Lighting Designer using CAD. You can actually draw a lighting plan using MS Word if you need to (I’ve seen it done!) but life is too short. Any mainstream vector drawing software will produce a nice lighting plan with annotations showing colours, circuits and focus information. The downside to using these non-lighting specific CAD packages is their lack of scaled lighting symbols to drag and drop into your plan. Any drawing software that can cope with the AutoCAD standard .DWG and .DXF formats can be used with lighting symbols that are available from equipment manufacturers (Note: Watch out for scaling errors when importing symbols this way). Small, cheaper stage lighting design software can save you the trouble of importing loads of different lighting symbols with their own dedicated library. These tools also usually come with some kind of functionality that enable you to generate some useful lists such as fixture quantities and gel cuts.

Verdict : If you need to draw 2D plans and are on a budget, get the extra usefullness of one of the cheaper lighting design software packages. Don’t fiddle around with CorelDraw 2.0.

Design, Draw and Specify

If you would like to get your software to provide extra features such as sectional and elevational drawings, basic 3D views and organise information, then more robust lighting design software is a better option. These packages can often “model” your theatre space or venue, including your set and lighting rig and take the effort out of creating section plans. Using using different views of a 3D space are vital in lighting design, particularly for a theatre show, to help you make decisions of angle, light positions and flying heights (and it sure beats doing lots of different drawings!). Some these CAD packages can be used in either a drawing mode and / or equiment list mode, depending on the way you like to work as an LD. Equipment lists, lighting accessories, gels and control channels can often be generated by the lighting plan drawing process which saves time and effort on your part while electrical power calculations can be easily viewed. Some software packages also give you the ability to view 3D visualisations of your stage, set and lighting rig.

Verdict: If you are progressing in theatre lighting design and do a lot of shows but do not need to pre-plot or see fancy visualisations of your show, you will now have to look hard for such a software package. The use of 3D visualisation in stage lighting has brought a lot of the providers of stage lighting software to move up in the market to include some form of real time lighting control programming capability. Cast Lighting’s WYSIWYG Report software is a good way to learn the basics of the WYSIWYG suite and can be upgraded but the downside is that lighting fixture updates only continue with a subscription.

Visualisation and Pre-Programming

At the top end of theatrical lighting design software, real time plotting of your rig is the name of the game. Alongside full 3D CAD and paperwork features, the software enables you to set up your virtual lighting rig with control systems, plug in a compatible lighting desk and plot your show before even committing lantern to pipe. This facility is most useful with large moving light rigs and helps the Lighting Designer and Operator build up some of the elements of a show before setting foot in the theatre. Conventional lighting dimmer circuits can also be programmed although the light intensity levels cannot really be accurately depicted.

The different software packages available to do this vary in cost, with the cheaper ones often trading off CAD or paperwork cababilities against the facility for real time programming of your light show. All require you to also have a fairly decent PC to run them on plus the hardware to input a lighting control signal (DMX or Ethernet) that will control the virtual lights. Each software package also has the ability to produce fairly good quality images of your show (called renderings) although for really photo realistic renderings, a professional CGI modelling package such as Alias Maya or Discreet 3D MAX is better.

Verdict: Lighting visualisation software such as Capture is good value and produces quick results for pre-programming as well as allowing the user to edit lighting fixture personalities as new models are brought to the market. Cast Lighting’s WYSIWYG Perform is all singing and dancing with 3D CAD, good paperwork creation and comprehensive programming and rendering. It is used by a large number of professional lighting companies and designers on the biggest theatre shows and events but all these features come at a price and a subscription service keep the fixture library up to date.

Update: Lighting designer Jim Hutchison has started posting Cast Lighting WYSIWYG tutorials on his blog Jim On Light.

Have you got any thoughts on stage lighting design software? Tell us which is your favourite and why in the comments section below.

PS. Which ever lighting design software you choose, make sure that you get one that is compatible with other companies and departments that you collaborate with. It is no good if you all have to draw the same plan more than once. Common CAD formats still centre around AutoCAD DWG and DXF (don’t get me started on those standards).