Lesson 13. Playlists for pros

In lesson five we built a first playlist: a chain of cues, the GO button — and the evening runs to the script. That covers a lot. But over the past year a whole studio has grown inside the show editor: layers, music as a clip, a bar grid, automatic and AI arrangement, refinement in plain words. Today we go through all of it — not button by button, but task by task. At the end there is a cheat sheet of the tricks people usually only learn after their tenth event.

The lesson is long, and that is on purpose. Read it straight through once, then come back to the section you need.

Fig. 1 — The whole show editor: timeline, waveform, tracks, palette

Three modes — three ways to run an event

The first setting of any playlist is the play mode. It decides who is in charge: you, the timer or the music.

Mode	Who moves the cues on	What it was made for
Manual (GO)	only you, with the GO button	a play, a host, anything that happens “on the action”
Timed	the program, on the time of each step	a “set it and forget it” show; with music — in sync with the track
Hybrid	the program on the timer, but GO can hurry it along	the best compromise: it drives itself while you keep a hand on the pulse

Three things worth knowing:

A cue with a time of 0 (∞) is a pause “until told otherwise” in any mode. Even “Timed” will honestly stop on it and wait for GO. That is handy: the middle of a show can be automatic while the key moment stays manual. But if a show seems “stuck”, the first thing to look for is a stray zero in a step’s time.
Music promotes the mode by itself. Attach a track or drag a cue onto the waveform and “Manual” quietly turns into “Timed” (a hint appears). The logic is simple: placing cues along the waveform is dead without a timer. Music only fails to bother “Manual” in one sense — that mode ignores it.
GO in “Hybrid” does not jerk the music. Press it and the next cue lights up straight away while the song keeps playing evenly; the “rightful” time of the hurried cue is then skipped so the light does not fire twice. You can press several times in a row — the cues follow one after another.

Layers: a sandwich of light

The main trick of playlists is that cues do not have to push each other out. Every step has a layer switch:

⤺ Replaces — the classic: the new cue kills everything before it.
+ On top — the cue is added to whatever is playing.
■ Stop — kills one particular chase or effect and leaves the rest alone.

A working recipe for “scene + chase + effects”:

The “Waltz” scene (⤺) — the base: general light in the room.
The “Heads — circle” chase (+) — the heads start circling, the base stays lit.
The “Sparkle” effect (+) — sparks on top. You can have as many effects as you like.
■ “Sparkle” — the sparks are gone, the scene and the chase carry on.
The “Finale” scene (⤺) — everything is killed and the finale begins.

⚠️ Two limits everybody trips over: two scenes at once do not happen (a scene defines every fixture as a whole — there is always exactly one base) and neither do two chases (there is one slot). Need a “second chase” — layer a couple of effects: technically that is exactly what parallel mini-chases are.

💡 During a show the “Active” row shows the whole sandwich: the scene, the chase, every effect, the playlist. Any layer comes off with its cross without stopping the rest. A stop cue for a layer that has already been removed is simply skipped in silence — that is not an error.

Smoothness: two levels of fade

The overall “Fade” in the playlist header is the smoothness of every transition at once. One or two seconds turn any running order from “jumpy” into “breathing”.
Fade on a step (the “List” view) overrides the overall one for a single cue. Where you want a sharp hit, set 0; where the moment is special, 3–5 seconds.

💡 The “bang on the drop” trick: an overall fade of 1.5 s for softness, and a personal fade of 0 on the cue that lands on the drop. One click, and the transition hits exactly on the beat.

Music is a clip, not a background

Attach a track (“♪ Music” in the timeline header) and a waveform appears under the ruler. The key thing to understand: the waveform is a clip on the show’s strip, and the strip is not the same as the length of the song. Light can work before the music comes in and after it ends.

With the clip you can:

Trim it — drag the amber handles at the edges. What is trimmed is dimmed to a “ghost” — trimming is always undone with the same handle. Cues do not move when you trim.
Move it — drag it by the middle. The music travels along the strip, and the cues that stood inside it travel with it (they are tied to the beats of the song, after all). Cues before and after the music stay where they are. That is how you make a light intro: move the track to the right and the space in front of it frees up, so the room greets the guests with light before the first note.

Three more tools on the waveform:

The start marker. A click on the waveform while the show is stopped sets a blue flag for the start. Rehearsing the finale — do not listen to the whole song every time. Starting from the middle, the light immediately takes on the right picture: the cue the marker sits inside lights up at once, not “from the next one”.
Scrubbing. A click on the waveform during playback jumps to that point; the light is recalculated for that moment of the track.
The end of the show. A dashed line shows where the show will finish: the later of the end of the music and the end of the last cue. Want the light to carry on after the song — give the last cue some time (the right edge of its block) and the line moves out.

Fig. 2 — The music clip: amber trim handles, moving it, the start marker, the end-of-show line

The rhythm under control

A cue dragged onto the waveform snaps to the nearest beat by itself (a green tick shows which beat it caught). Need an upbeat or a smooth run-in between beats — hold Alt and a fine 0.25 s grid switches on.

The green vertical lines on the waveform are the starts of bars. The program follows the rhythm along the whole track: the grid “breathes” with live music instead of being stretched as one rigid ruler. Even if the drummer wanders a little, the bars follow them.
The » button — shifting the downbeat. The program catches the pulse reliably, but guessing which of the four beats is “one” is not always possible in dance music — every hit sounds the same. Can you hear that “one” is not where the green lines are? Press » next to the magnifiers: each click shifts the bars by one beat, four clicks make a full circle. The choice is remembered in the playlist and every arrangement takes it into account.

Auto-arrange: the character is adjustable

The “Auto-arrange” button lays your existing scenes and chases out along the track, free of charge. It recently stopped behaving like a metronome and started listening to the music:

changes land exactly on the bars;
in quiet interludes a picture is held twice as long as usual, and in loud, building passages it changes twice as often;
every transition between parts of the song (verse → chorus) gets a change exactly on the boundary;
the tail of the track is never left dark.

Your lever is the “change step” selector next to the button: 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 bars. That is the base tempo of the pictures’ lives:

Step	How it feels	What it suits
1–2 bars	a video clip, fast cutting, flicker	an energetic club track, a show number
4 bars	the pictures live in phrases (~7–14 s)	the universal default
8 bars	slow, ceremonial	a wedding, background, a ceremony

The working cycle is simple: pick a step → press → listen → do not like it → another step and press again (the program asks for confirmation before replacing). The result is ordinary cues: move them by hand, delete them, Ctrl+Z undoes everything. The “Reset” button returns the steps to a plain sequence with no ties to the waveform.

⚠️ Auto-arrange takes the scenes and chases you already have. Rubbish in, rubbish out: before arranging, delete the failed pictures or put together a separate “concert only” project.

AI arrange and “Refine” in plain words

“AI arrange” uses requests from the PRO package and is noticeably smarter than plain auto-arrange:

the AI receives the structure of the track in bar numbers — so the changes land exactly on the strong beats and keep the same step from the selector as auto does;
the AI can do accent effects: short stretches on top of the pictures — a strobe going into the drop, sparks for the finale. The effect switches itself on and off on the right bar;
the Lite/Pro switch is the same one as in the AI chat: Pro is smarter but spends about three standard requests.

And then there is the “Refine” button (it appears once the cues are laid out). You write in an ordinary sentence what is wrong, and the AI returns an updated arrangement, keeping everything your wish does not contradict. Phrases that work well:

“fewer changes in the verses, leave the choruses alone”
“add a strobe on the accents”
“brighter and more aggressive on the drops, calmer in the interludes”
“take the effects out of the quiet places”
“make the finale ceremonial and long”

You can refine as many times as you like — each one costs the same as an ordinary AI arrangement and takes the current picture as its starting point.

Fig. 3 — The “Refine” window: the wish in plain words and the price before sending

💡 Save once you have a result you like (Ctrl+S). The arrangement lives in the editor; if it works, fix it into the project so an accidental restart does not carry your work away.

The light does not land on the beat?

A classic: the arrangement is perfect but the flashes come slightly before the hits. Sound does not leave the speakers instantly — Bluetooth adds up to a third of a second. It is cured once: the small clock button next to “Play show” (or ⚙ Settings → “Audio delay”) — start a show with a clear rhythm and move the slider until the flashes line up by ear. For Bluetooth it is usually 150–300 ms. The setting belongs to the computer, not to the project — check it again on a new laptop.

Important: the show’s chases follow the track’s beat by themselves — the movement inside a chase steps on the same beats the cues are placed on. No microphone and no “SOUND” button are needed for that.

Hyperlists: an event made of playlists

When there is more than one song, do not glue them into one giant playlist. Every song gets its own playlist with its own music and arrangement, and the event is assembled into a hyperlist: a queue of playlists where one finishes and the next starts at once. The event’s running sheet shows the real timing, and after a manual “Stop” the queue can carry on from where it stopped. The details are in the “Hyperlists” article of the manual.

A cheat sheet of tricks

A wedding: blocks of 3–5 minutes (arrival → dinner → dancing → the slow one), “Hybrid” mode, looping. It drives itself, and GO hurries the change along for the host.
Theatre: “Manual (GO)”, time 0 everywhere the change happens “on the action”. In Live — “Quiet scene” and the “Now / Next” display: the performance is run from one button.
A DJ: a hyperlist of song playlists plus your own plan B: favourite chases at hand in Live in case the evening takes a different turn.
“Version B” in one click: duplicate the playlist (right-click its card) before experimenting with the AI — there is always something to fall back on, even without Ctrl+Z.
Rehearsing the finale: put the start marker 20 seconds from the end and stop listening to the whole song a hundred times.
Light before the music: move the track clip to the right — the guests come in to light and the music enters when you are ready.
Light after the music: give the last cue some time with its right edge — the “end of show” line moves out and the finale does not get cut off.
One effect, many points: the same “Sparkle” can be placed at five spots in the track; on the effects track each stretch lives on its own.
Edits on the fly: cues can be moved while the show is playing — the new position takes effect at once and the music does not break.
Two run-throughs before the room: one from the beginning (watch the transitions), one in pieces via the start marker (check the key moments). Then Ctrl+S and a copy of the project on a flash drive.

Playlists are where SvetoMaster stops being a “console” and becomes a director. Put one event together properly and you will not want to go back to running everything by hand.