Isolation Day 23: More Fun with WYSIWYG

I Finally Got a Lighting Desk Connected!

Now that I have my laptop back full-time (Abi got her new one yesterday!), I thought I’d take a shot at connecting my offline lighting desk to WYSIWYG to see what I could come up with.

As always, I chose to connect the ChamSys MagicQ PC to WYSIWYG. I like ChamSys desks because they are incredibly easy to use, have almost no learning curve, and are great for busking a show. I love how the interface is designed around a touchscreen, making it super easy to set up the desk and light a show on the fly.

The most time-consuming aspect of the process is programming the positions of each moving light. This is particularly tedious without using the built-in visualizer, but I don’t have much experience with that—mostly because you can't import your lighting layout from WYSIWYG, which would save so much time.

Before anyone asks why I don’t just use the MagicQ Visualizer: WYSIWYG is far more powerful and has a superior rendering quality, even in live mode, even if it is pretty resource-intensive.

As you can see, I still haven’t added any floor lights, but I have added a color effect to the LED battens and bars (though you can only see them on the left-hand side). I haven’t really played with the settings of the effects yet, as I spent so long setting the focus points for the moving lights. Now that the hard work is out of the way, I’ll be spending the next couple of days tweaking the settings to get the best effects out of the LEDs.

Next on my list is to add floor lights; I’m thinking of a mix of moving heads and par cans to provide uplighting for the performers. I’m also planning to add custom graphics to the screens at the back so I'm not just looking at test patterns.

I’m still undecided on what music I’m going to light to, so any suggestions are more than welcome.

What do you think of the design so far? What could I do to make it even better? Let me know in the comments below!