Opening the Timeline Editor
The Show Timeline lives in DJ Mode. Open the track list, find the track you want to build a show for, and press its timeline button. The editor opens with that track loaded, its waveform ready, and one row for each of your fixture groups.
A saved show belongs to the track, not to a folder. If you later move the audio file somewhere else, DMXDesktop finds its timeline again rather than losing it.
Rows, clips and the inspector
Each row is one of your fixture groups. Choose an effect from the palette on the left, then click and drag across a row to draw a clip. Click any clip to open the inspector on the right, where you set timing, colour, speed and the rest of that effect's properties.
- Waveform shows the audio behind the rows, which is what you time hits against.
- Duration stretches a clip. It stops when it reaches the next clip instead of running over it, the same as dragging has always behaved.
- Versions saves snapshots you can return to. Clear Timeline starts again from empty.
- Save Show stores the timeline against the loaded track. Build compiles it into a playable show. Preview plays the built show so you can watch the rig before anyone else does.
A built show takes priority over the shows DMXDesktop generates automatically in DJ Mode, so once you have built one for a track, that is what plays.
AutoScript: starting from something rather than nothing
AutoScript populates the timeline across all your groups from the track itself. It replaces whatever is currently on the timeline, so treat it as a way to start rather than a way to add. Everything it lays down is an ordinary clip: move it, retime it, recolour it or delete it.
Dropping an effect cue onto the timeline
Effect cues appear in the effects list alongside the built-in effects. Pick one, drag out how long you want it to last, and the timeline fills in clips for every group that cue covers, not only the row you drew on.
- What lands is ordinary clips. Edit or delete any part of it.
- Where a cue applies several effects to one group, they are laid out end to end in equal segments rather than stacked, which is how the cue itself plays them.
- If the drop would overwrite clips you have already placed, DMXDesktop tells you how much it would replace and lets you cancel.
One thing does not come across: a cue's audio-reactive settings, such as dark on silence or strobe on peaks. A timeline show is authored in advance, so there is no live audio for them to respond to.
See Effect Cues for how cues are built in the first place, and Effect Cue Stacks for chaining them outside a timeline.
Using recorded movements and saved positions
Anything you record in Pan/Tilt Finder can be placed on the timeline. There are two kinds:
- Static Positions are one saved aim. Aim a group, press Save Static Position, give it a name.
- Sequences are several aims played one after another, recorded step by step. A sequence needs at least four steps, and the recorder counts them for you as you go.
Both appear in the effects list under their own headings, labelled with the group they were recorded on, and both can only be placed on that group: it is the set of fixtures whose aim was captured. If you add or remove moving fixtures later, record the sequence again.
When you place a sequence, the timeline makes sure the clip is long enough for the heads to physically travel the path. A recording with more steps needs a longer clip.
Recorded movements and positions live together under My Recordings, which is what the old My Sequences tab became, with Static Positions and Sequences on separate tabs. If you want the background on aiming movers in the first place, see the moving head position finder.
Moves and holds
A Static Position clip is a move followed by a hold: the lights travel to the saved aim and stay there for the length of the clip. That gives you two patterns worth knowing:
- Two clips in a row are a move from one position to the next.
- A gap between clips is a hold. The lights stay where the previous clip left them.
Point at the dancefloor for eight bars, then at the bar, then back, without touching a pan value.
A gap on a movement row used to recentre the rig. It no longer does, which is most obvious at the end of a show, where the last movement clip used to swing everything back to the middle when it finished.
Travel Time, Travel In and Travel Out
Travel Time is a setting on a movement clip, in the inspector. It decides how long the heads take to get from wherever they are pointing to that clip's first position. Leave it on Auto and the clip behaves as movement clips always have. Set a value and a sweep across a room can be as slow and deliberate, or as immediate, as you want.
Travel In and Travel Out are set on the recording itself, when you save a Static Position or a Sequence. Travel In is how long the heads take to glide to the saved position from wherever they are pointing, so a recall reads as a move rather than a jump. Travel Out glides them back to the middle of their travel when you stop it. Both apply wherever the recording is played from, including inside an effect cue, and both default to zero, which is the instant behaviour recordings have always had. Anything you saved before these existed is unchanged.
Auxiliary channels: gobos, wheels, lasers and fixture programs
Auxiliary rows cover everything that is not dimmer, colour or position: gobo and colour wheels, prism, frost, iris, zoom, fog, laser modes and pattern selects, barrel rotation, and a fixture's own built-in programs.
The timeline offers every auxiliary channel the clip's group actually has, and nothing it does not. Before v1.0.52 it filtered your patch through its own list of roughly ten channel types and skipped anything outside it without a word, which is why a laser could look as though it had no auxiliary channels at all.
- Options come from the fixture profile. A clip's dropdown reads the profile's own ranges, named through the same table the Channel Editor uses, so the two screens agree. Existing channels read differently as a result: Rotation used to offer Off, Position, CW and CCW, and now offers the profile's own wording.
- Speeds and amounts get a slider. An option covering a rate, a position or an amount, such as Clockwise (Slow to Fast) or Manual Rolling, carries a slider named for what the value means. A plain slot selection correctly gets none.
- Clips release their channels. When a clip ends, its channels return to the fixture's resting value rather than holding the last value written for the rest of the song.
- Overlaps are per channel. A gobo clip and a frost clip can occupy the same span; two frost clips cannot. Overlapping clips stack into separate lanes and are coloured by channel type.
- Clips are checked against the target group. Dragging, pasting or retyping a clip onto a group without that channel is refused rather than accepted and quietly ignored.
Quick Show and the effect cue editor gained the same catalogue. They offer slightly more than the timeline does: a value inside an option range is something you can aim at while dragging an encoder against real output, so those surfaces expose it, while a timeline clip can only pick a point in advance. That difference is deliberate.
Gobo and Prism rotation controls have been removed from timeline clips. They wrote settings the compiler never read, so they did nothing at all.
Running to timecode, and following a deck
There are two ways a timeline keeps time, and which one you use depends on which mode of the editor you are in.
The Cue Timeline chases MIDI Time Code. In cue mode the editor lays your Programmer cue stacks along the ruler and takes MTC over MIDI. Press MTC and it waits for code. When code arrives it locks, the SMPTE readout starts counting, and the cue triggers fire against the incoming time rather than a clock of its own. It reads 24, 25, 29.97 and 30 frame timecode, re-anchors if you seek or restart the transport, recognises a pre-roll countdown as pre-roll rather than firing the top of the show during it, and tells you when it has lost sync instead of carrying on regardless. If you have more than one MIDI device connected, MTC Source chooses which one it listens to, separately from your MIDI Clock source.
A DJ Mode show timeline follows the deck. With the track playing, Follow tracks the deck position so the timeline moves with it. That is the sync a show built against a track wants, and the MTC control is not part of that mode.
DJ timecode is a separate thing. MIDI Time Code from a console, a DAW or a show controller is native. Timecode vinyl is not, and there is no direct hook into a rekordbox or CDJ playhead. For timecode-grade cue sync with rekordbox, an external bridge such as TimecodeSync or the open-source Beat Link Trigger can send OSC or MTC into DMXDesktop.
Timeline or Live Wire?
They solve opposite problems and both ship in the same application.
- Show Timeline is for when you know exactly what should happen and when. It plays back what you programmed, identically, at every performance.
- Live Wire is for when you do not. It reacts to whatever audio is in the room, with nothing prepared in advance.
A venue with a scripted evening show and an unscripted late night can use both on the same rig.
What changed in v1.0.52
- Effect cues can be dropped straight onto the timeline, filling in the clips for every group the cue covers.
- Recorded Sequences and Static Positions appear in the effects list and can be placed on the group they were recorded on.
- Movement clips gained a Travel Time setting. Saved recordings gained Travel In and Travel Out times.
- A gap on a movement row holds instead of recentring the rig.
- My Sequences became My Recordings, with Static Positions and Sequences on separate tabs.
- Stretching a clip with the Duration slider stops at its neighbour rather than overlapping it.
- Dropping a cue over existing clips asks first, and says how much it would replace.
- Timelines stay attached to their songs when a track moves to a different folder.
- Hybrid Pulse and Emergency now run in timeline shows.
- Every auxiliary channel your fixtures have can be placed on the timeline, with option lists read from the fixture's own profile and sliders on options that cover a speed or an amount.
- Auxiliary clips release their channels when they end, own them while they run, stack into visible lanes when they overlap, and are refused on a group that has no such channel.
- Gobo and Prism rotation controls have been removed from timeline clips. They never did anything.
- Groups can have a colour, shown on the timeline swimlane.
- Fixed: the inspector could show the wrong clip or refuse to open, the editor window could refuse to close, and setting a shutter or strobe state could wipe brightness that had already been set.
