Q Light Controller+

I want to give a short shout for QLC+. Last week we had a venue that lasted a few days. That included live shows, theatre, DJ-gigs and stuff like that. For budget reasons, I chose QLC+ to be the primary tool for lighting control after checking a few alternative free options and some of the paid ones as well. I went straight to the deep end, learning everything from scratch in a minimum amount of time, with no prior experience in programming of lights. But someone had to do that, so I decided to bite the bullet!

The set roughly consisted of the following fixtures: 6 moving heads, 8 RGB PAR lights, four moving mirror scanners, two rotating barrel scanners and strobes. In addition to these, there were some other lights, DMX switches and of course, a fog machine. With this set, it was possible to do, I think, pretty fancy dance floor stuff and also decent lighting for theatre. To operate everything, I had a touch-screen and Behringer BCF2000 connected to a dedicated PC.

I have to say that in general, getting "something done" was super easy. There was only one fixture I had to create from scratch, and it was easy as well. Finding good practices to do stuff, both live and pre-programmed (and especially to change programmed things on the fly) was hard though. Programming is where I spent most my time on site, re-programming everything again and again and re-creating the virtual console. Tutorials were excellent and clear but fell short on when it comes to practice. I don't think they were ever intended to provide this kind of information, but it would be nice if they did. I managed to "train" myself a little bit before the venue, by creating the fixture list beforehand and also trying them out using the 3D view of QLC+5. I ended up using QLC+5 just for visualisation purposes, sending Art-Net DMX data via local loopback from QLC+4 to QLC+5.

Another thing that caused many headaches were getting lights sound-activated during DJ-sets, so I wouldn't need to tie myself to lighting console 24h. After much searching, I ended up buying Lightjams and made a bunch of triggers and BPM detection that I again sent via a local loopback to QLC+4. I'm not entirely happy to have to rely on other software, but it was an essential piece of the puzzle at least this time.

I did learn a ton during these few days. Next time I will be better prepared, but there's still a lot to learn to find the best practices.

What USB/Dongle were you using? Ive used QLC a lot now Windows and Linux and only ever experienced a problem when using a very inexpensive Lixada512 USB/DMX dongle. So, for live shows I use the more expensive Enttec DMX USB Pro and never had a problem.

Thank you for that story, I ran into it a couple months ago and that's one of the reasons why I tried QLC, and I'm starting to wrap my head around it now.

In conjunction to Lightjams -> I use 5 rotary knobs on the BCF which influence the amount of 'radiation' Lightjams applies to the music.
5 levels faders so to say which influence Artnet channels going to Lightjams. Now I have control over Lightjams from out QLC+ VC and can influence the amount of bass, low mid, high mid, high hats and 'ambient' sounds influences the processed sound signals LightJams gives me back.
Very nice setup this. Albeit you have to pay for it - it runs on a seperate mini laptop autonom. If music-to-light is required (or I'm too lazy to perform 8h in a row for small productions) I grab the little laptop, power it and give it an audio feed in.

Together with the FUTURE blind mode feature you can prepare your new look and hit GO... We'll have to wait for v5