Position Finder
Tame 540° of pan and 200°+ of tilt - point every mover exactly where you want, and nowhere you don't.
Your mover can aim almost anywhere. That's the problem.
A moving head is built to point in nearly every direction. The pan motor spins it round by up to 540° - that's one and a half full turns. The tilt motor nods the head up and down through anywhere from 180° to 270°, depending on the fixture. Put those together and a single mover can throw its beam almost anywhere in the room.
Out of the box, DMXDesktop maps your fader's full 0–100% straight onto that entire physical range. So the moment you run an effect - a wave, a circle, a fan - the head will happily sling its beam backwards over the stage, straight up into the truss and rigging, or down into your audience's eyes. Technically correct. Useless in practice.
The Position Finder fixes this once, per fixture. You tell the head two things: how much of its range it's allowed to use, and where the middle is. From then on, every effect and every cue stays inside the box you drew - pointed where the crowd is, never where they aren't.
Pan and tilt, made simple
Pan = swivel left and right (the base rotates). Tilt = nod up and down (the head pivots). That's the whole vocabulary, and the video shows one fixture doing both.
The catch: you set this up on a flat screen, using a square box - and a flat square is a clumsy way to describe a whole sphere of movement. The next section is the trick that makes it click.
The box is a map of where your light can point
Think of the box as a map of the room, drawn from the fixture's point of view:
- Left ↔ right across the box = pan (swivel).
- Up ↕ down the box = tilt (nod).
- The dot in the middle = where the head rests when nothing's happening - its home aim.
- The red dashed rectangle = the fence. The beam is only ever allowed to roam inside it.
Drag the dot to one corner and the head points one way; drag it to the opposite corner and it points the other way. You're not editing numbers - you're aiming the light by hand, on a map.
Two dials: Width and Offset
Each axis - pan and tilt - has just two controls:
- Width = how big the box is: how much of the head's full range you'll allow. A smaller width means tighter, controlled movement that never strays. A common starting point is ~40% pan and ~50% tilt, which keeps beams pointing forwards and never behind the fixture.
- Offset = where the box sits: it slides the centre, or home, point. Same width, different aim.
Width keeps the light off the back wall and out of the rig. Offset points the whole controlled zone at your dancefloor.
Standing on the floor, or hanging from a truss?
How you mount the fixture flips its sense of "up". A mover standing on the floor tilts up and away from its base. The same mover hung upside-down from a truss is now inverted, so it needs the opposite tilt offset to aim at the same spot.
That's why you'll often see a negative tilt offset - it simply means "this one's hanging". Set it once to match how the fixture is rigged, and forget it.
How to do it in DMXDesktop
On the Stage, any fixture with Pan or Tilt shows a target icon - click it to open the Position Finder.
- On the Stage, open a fixture's channels. Any fixture with Pan or Tilt shows a small target icon - click it to open the Position Finder. It works from either Pan or Tilt; the finder handles both together.
- Set your Pan and Tilt Width first, to shrink the box to a sensible range.
- Grab the dot and drag it to set the Offset, until the home aim looks right.
- Turn on Send Live DMX to watch the real fixture move as you adjust it.
- Turn on Test Limits and drag inside the box to confirm the beam never points anywhere bad.
- Save - and if you have other fixtures of the same type, choose whether to copy these limits to them too.
Fixed in v1.0.52. On lasers, position sweeps no longer stray outside the range the fixture allows.
Save an aim, and use it anywhere
Aiming a group is one thing. Keeping the aim is another. Press Save Static Position in the Recorder and the aim you have set becomes a named look: point at the dancefloor for eight bars, then at the bar, then back.
Recall it at any time from My Recordings, use it inside an Effect Cue, or place it on a Show Timeline. If you would rather not go near a timeline, you never have to.
- My Sequences is now My Recordings, with Static Positions and Sequences on separate tabs instead of stacked, so neither hides below the other.
- See the shape before you save it. Recorded steps show as small pictures of where the lights are pointing rather than a list of numbers, so a figure of eight looks like one. Hover a step and the lights go back to it, which makes fixing one you fluffed possible without starting over.
- The four-step minimum counts as you record instead of refusing the save afterwards. And if what you wanted was one position rather than a movement, that is now a button of its own.
- Travel In and Travel Out let a recall glide to the position and back rather than snap to it. Both default to zero, so everything you have already saved behaves exactly as before.
- Recorded movements reach the timeline. They appear in the effects list under "Sequences", each labelled with the group it was recorded on, and can be placed like any other movement effect. See the Show Timeline guide.
One thing to know: the Pan/Tilt Finder is a live control, so an aim you set by hand overrides a recalled position. Press Reset in the finder before you recall a saved position, or nothing will appear to happen.
Why bother?
Five minutes per fixture buys you: effects that stay on the crowd, circles that actually draw circles instead of lopsided ovals, no accidental audience-blinding or truss-bashing, and a tidy idle position that looks intentional instead of random. Set it once - every cue you build afterwards inherits it.
