Gradient: a Colour per Fixture

The ordinary palette (03.02) paints every selected fixture the same. A gradient does the opposite: each fixture gets its own colour, chosen by where it stands on the plan. A rainbow across the front truss, a sunset running from the edge to the centre, a warm side and a cold side of the stage — all of it is one button instead of half an hour of colouring fixtures one by one.

The fastest way

1. Select the fixtures (marquee in 2D, clicks, or a group).
2. Press the “Gradient” button — the coloured bar.
3. The window with the palettes opens. Click any of them and it is laid across the fixtures at once.

The direction is chosen by the program from the placement. Don’t like it — Ctrl+Z, it is a single undo step.

There is a second way in: the “Gradient across fixtures…” button at the bottom of the Palette window — for when you came there for a colour and want to spread it across the rig.

The settings window

The “Gradient” button opens the “Gradient” window (pressing it again closes it). It opens near the right edge of the screen so it does not cover the visualiser, and it does not block your work: drag it by the title bar, it does not dim the screen, and Esc closes it. Every knob applies at once — the visualiser itself is the preview.

The controls are grouped into titled blocks: palette, spread direction, motion and what you get. The main action is the large “Apply” button at the bottom.

The window sizes itself to the monitor: the wider the screen, the wider the window (it steps up at 1600 and at 2000 pixels), and vertically it takes up almost the whole screen, leaving a margin at the top and bottom.

Ready-made palettes

Sixteen sets for every occasion:

Your own palette

Below the ready-made sets are the stops of the current palette. A stop is a colour plus its position:

• click a square — select the stop;
• the eyedropper on the left — change its colour;
• the slider — move the stop along the palette (closer to the start or to the end);
• “+” adds a stop, the bin removes it (there are never fewer than two).

Transition — how the colours flow

Direction — how the colours land on the fixtures

Auto works like this: fixtures in a wide row — colours run left to right; fixtures in depth — into the stage; fixtures in a ring around the dance floor — around the circle. Only a genuine ring counts as one: at least five fixtures, roughly the same distance from the centre and no empty third of the circle, otherwise an ordinary row would be mistaken for a circle.

Mirror, Reverse, Repeats, Steps

• Mirror — the palette runs to the middle of the row and comes back: the ends match, the centre holds the far colour. A symmetrical picture on a symmetrical truss.
• Reverse — flips the direction.
• Repeats ×1…6 — how many times the palette is laid across the selection. A rainbow ×3 on a long front is three rainbows in a row.
• Steps 0…8 — turns the smooth ramp into a given number of distinct colours. “smooth” (0) is the normal gradient; 3 is three colours in blocks, like a flag.

Result

The strip at the bottom of the window is not decoration. It shows the colour a fixture can really produce, and the fixtures in it are ordered the way the audience will see them, not the way the list is ordered. A fixture with a colour wheel snaps to its nearest available slot — the strip shows that before you apply, not on stage during the show. If some fixtures have no place on the plan, the window says so on a separate line: they cannot take part in the geometry and receive the start of the palette.

Apply and Save

• Apply — lay the palette across the current selection again (handy if you selected different fixtures without closing the window).
• Save — put the current palette into the project. A “My palettes” section appears; the selected palette there has a cross for deleting it.

Your palettes travel inside the project file (12.01), so they open together with the show on another computer. A new project has none — they belong to a particular show, not to the program’s settings.

The “Parameter” tab — a fan of brightness, beams and more

There are two tabs at the top of the window. “Colour” spreads a palette across the fixtures, “Parameter” spreads a number: brightness, pan, tilt, zoom, focus, strobe. The layout, the motion and the save buttons are shared, so everything you already know about direction, mirror, repeats and steps works here too.

• What to spread — the list is built from the channels the selected fixtures actually have. Pick PARs and you get brightness and strobe; pick heads and you also get pan, tilt, zoom and focus if the profile describes them. Colour channels are not in the list: the “Colour” tab handles those.
• From … to — the ends of the range. Percent for brightness, pan, tilt and strobe; 0–255 for other channels. You can also set them the other way round (“from 100 to 20”) and the fan runs downhill.
• Curve — how the value changes along the row:

Ready-made moves:

Motion — the gradient comes alive

The “Motion” block and the “Start” button at the bottom of the window put the gradient to work. Pressing again (“Stop”) halts it.

Motions available to everyone

Motions from the PRO add-on

These five carry the PRO badge. The buttons are visible and clickable for everyone — without the PRO add-on the program says so in a hint. Scenes and chases you have already built with such motions always play, even once the PRO term has ended.

Run and variant

Two knobs appear under the motion buttons — exactly when they have something to change:

• Run (→ / ← / ⇄) — for “Sweep”, “Comet” and “Tide”. ⇄ drives the picture to the end and brings it back: the comet turns around and flies the other way.
• The die — for “Kaleidoscope”, “Sparks”, “Flame” and “Mirage”. It gives another random pattern of the same motion: don’t like where the sparks land — click the die and get a new layout. The pattern is not “live random”: a saved chase plays exactly the variant you picked on every pass.

Character — one slider, six meanings

The Character slider appears for the new motions and means something different in each: for Comet it is the tail length, for Sparks the density of flares, for Flame how wildly it burns, for Sweep the softness of the border, for Tide the softness of the waterline, for Mirage how far the fixtures drift along the palette. The middle is how the motion plays by default; the reset button next to it puts it back.

“More” — four fine knobs

The More button under the motions opens four knobs that work on any motion, the free ones included. In the neutral position each gives exactly what you had without it, and the reset button next to them returns all four at once.

How to play it

• Speed ÷4 … ×4 — how fast the steps change relative to the show tempo. ÷4 is very slow (a step every four bars), ×4 is four times faster than the beat.
• Smoothness — to the left a hard snap between blocks, to the right a continuous flow. When you pick a motion the program sets a suitable smoothness by itself (hard for “Sparks” and “Sweep”, soft for “Flame”) — after that the knob is yours.
• Sound — the steps follow the beats of the music instead of an even tempo. It uses the same sound source as the other effects. With “Sparks” and “Sweep” that gives flashes exactly on the beat.

While the motion plays the knobs keep working: change the palette, the direction or the steps and the picture rebuilds at once, without stopping.

Preview: what it looks like before you run it

The “What you get” strip at the bottom of the window does not just show colours — it plays the selected motion. It shows both the colour and the brightness of every fixture, so Comet, Sparks and Tide read there just as they will on stage. The button next to the label pauses and resumes the playback.

Where to save it

• “Save” — the set of colours into the project (see above).
• “To scene” — a snapshot of the whole rig. If the motion is playing, the scene remembers it too — not as ready-made frames but as a recipe: what it was built from. So once you move a fixture on the plan, the next recall of the scene re-flows the layout to its new place.
• “To chase” — the movement as an ordinary chase. It is a layer over the scenes: it plays only on the selected fixtures and does not touch the rest of the light. Inside it are ready-made steps you can see and edit in the chase editor. The chase goes into the library, the project file, playlists and Live.
• Clearing the programmer (C) stops the motion along with everything else.

How it maps onto real fixtures

A gradient does not invent a new way to control anything — it simply hands each fixture its own colour, and from there the usual colour mechanics apply (03.02):

• RGB / RGBW — the colour is mixed on the LEDs;
• CMY — it is converted into filter positions;
• colour wheel — the wheel moves to the nearest slot, so the transition comes out stepped;
• a fixture with no colour control — stays as it was.

The selection may be mixed: PARs, heads with a wheel and CMY fixtures live together in one gradient, each taking what it can.

A gradient inside a scene

There is nothing extra to save: a gradient lives as ordinary fixture colours. Save a scene and the gradient is saved with it and plays back on recall. The same goes for presets, chases (as a step) and the project file.

Ready-made recipes

Useful nearby

• Quick save to a scene — the button by the visualiser: lay out a gradient and turn it into a scene right away.
• Highlight (H) — check which fixtures are selected before applying.
• Clear the programmer (C) — go back to a clean slate.