It’s Time To Ditch Your Lighting Board, Lightkey Lets You Control Your DMX Lighting From Your Mac
If, like us, you’ve been upgrading your lighting boards every time you add a new set of lights to your rig that need extra channels or get frustrated with having to input into the memory specific lighting patterns for over 20, 30 or 50 lights – well then we’ve found the application for you.
A piece of software called Lightkey gives you full control over your lighting setup through your Mac. The software works by connecting to your DMX rig via USB. Connect your set up with one of these adapters:
And you are good to go.
Lightkey gives you the ability to individually program the placement of every light in your rig in 3D space and control the RGB values and light intensity. It can then show you how that setup will look virtually in your set editor with virtual light beams.
A feature for live events and music venue lighting technicians enables you to connect Lightkey to Ableton and/or add the beats per minute of the song to sync the lighting pattern to.
One of the features we find most useful is for cueing up different states for our multibeam LED strips and battens. With the click of a button, from the control room, we can completely change the lighting state whilst being editable on the fly too.
Lightkey has a free version for you to test with, the caveat being that it only has 24 channels for you to play with. However, this is more than enough for you to try it out and see if it can work for your setup.
If you find that this piece of software is something that your setup could prosper from then they having tiered pricing brackets depending on how many channels you need:
At DigiProTips we have fully made the switch over to Lightkey and hardly touch our lighting boards these days.
The best part?
You can save you patterns, cues and set ups and take your laptop and USB-to-DMX adapter and plug into any lighting setup anywhere else. No rigging up to massive lighting boards with different settings every time.
We’ll let you be the judges.
DigiProTips
