From unboxing to your first light show in one evening

Most people who buy stage lights end up running them in whatever self-contained mode they came out of the box in — sound-active, auto-programme, or a colour that seemed fine at the time. The gap between that and a rig you control is one evening of work, and almost all of the difficulty is doing things in the wrong order. This is the right order.

What do you need on the table before you start?

You need the lights, a Mac on macOS 14 or later, one DMX interface, one DMX cable per fixture plus a spare, and a 120Ω terminator for the end of the chain. Nothing else. Set the lights up roughly where they will live, on stands or a bar, and plug them into mains power before you think about data — a fixture with no power looks exactly like a fixture with a bad address.

• A DMX interface. HitLight supports ENTTEC Open DMX USB (around $70), the ENTTEC DMX USB Pro (around $190), and any Art-Net or sACN network node. It does not sell an adapter and never charges per universe, so an interface you already own very likely works. The full list is on supported hardware.
• Proper DMX cable. Microphone cable is not DMX cable. It usually works, and then one evening it does not, and the symptom looks like a software fault.
• The manual for each fixture, or a photo of its DMX chart. You will want the channel list, and if a fixture is missing from the library you will need that document.
• Somewhere to write down addresses. Paper is fine. You will change your mind twice.

How do you patch your fixtures?

Patching is telling the software which fixture sits at which DMX address, in which DMX mode, on which universe. Those four facts have to match what the fixture itself believes, or the light will respond to somebody else's channels. Patch every fixture in HitLight first, then walk the rig and set each unit to agree with the patch. Do it in that order and you only have to walk the rig once.

If a fixture is not in the library, point HitLight at the PDF that came with the light — or a photo of the DMX chart printed on the back — and it drafts a working profile in seconds. That profile stays marked as a draft until you test the channels on the real fixture and confirm them, which is deliberate: a confidently wrong profile is worse than no profile. How the fixture library works covers this in full.

Can you rehearse before you own a DMX interface?

Yes, and this is the step most guides skip. HitLight's 3D stage runs on its own with no hardware attached, so the whole patching, positioning and scene-building exercise happens before you spend anything on an interface. Place the fixtures where they will physically hang, build a look, watch it play back on the stage, and only then decide which interface to buy.

This also means the evening is not blocked by shipping. If your interface is still in the post, you can do everything except the last twenty minutes. The browser app does the same authoring and visualisation work on any platform, including Windows and Linux — it simply cannot output DMX. Whatever you build there is ready to go live the moment you open the same show on the Mac.

Set the stage dimensions to roughly match the room while you are here. The 3D preview is only useful if the geometry is honest, and a moving head aimed at the front of a 12-metre stage points somewhere quite different on an 8-metre one.

How do you describe the look you want?

In plain English, to the assistant, in the same words you would use to a person: "warm sunset wash on the back bar, nothing moving", or "colorful and punchy". HitLight builds the scene from the fixture profiles you actually patched and the values actually on the wire, rather than guessing at your rig's channels — which is why patching first matters so much.

Everything it produces is editable. Scenes live in a matrix editor with steps down the side and fixtures across the top, and any cell can be changed by hand — colour, intensity, position, gobo. Treat the first description as a rough draft you argue with, not an oracle. Ask for one specific change at a time and you will get where you are going faster than by rewriting the whole request.

Auto Show is a different thing and worth leaving until later in the evening. It listens to the room through the Mac's microphone and runs the rig live from the music, with no scenes programmed first. It drives colour, intensity, a steady open shutter and eligible movement. It will not drive lasers, strobes, blinders, UV, smoke, haze, fans or flame — those channel types are removed from every automatic path in code. See lighting safety before you run anything automatic in front of people.

How do you connect the output and check it worked?

Plug the interface into the Mac, connect DMX out to the first fixture, daisy-chain the rest, terminate the last one, and bring a single channel up slowly. A USB DMX interface is driverless on macOS. A network node needs to be on the same network as the Mac — wired if you have the choice.

1. 1

   Bring one channel up, at a low value

   Not a scene. One channel, on one fixture, at maybe a quarter. You are testing the chain, not the design, and a low value tells you as much as a full one without startling anyone in the flat.

2. 2

   Walk the rig fixture by fixture

   Light each unit in turn and confirm the right physical light responds. This is the moment addressing errors become obvious, and it takes about ninety seconds for a small rig.

3. 3

   Check colour and movement separately

   Set a saturated colour on each fixture and confirm it matches what you asked for. If red comes out green, you have the wrong DMX mode or the wrong profile, not a broken light.

4. 4

   Test Blackout before anyone else is in the room

   Press it and watch the rig go dark. Do this at every venue, every time. It is the control you will need in a hurry, and using it is the only way to know it is wired correctly.

For a deeper walk through interfaces, cabling and network setup, read how to connect DMX lights to a Mac.

What are the controls you need to know before a room fills up?

Three, and they behave differently on purpose. Blackout is immediate and takes the rig to zero at once. Stop holds the last safe look on the rig and changes nothing until you act again. Fade Out takes the rig down over one second, which is the one to use when a blackout would be more dramatic than the moment deserves.

Underneath all three, a native watchdog running outside the interface latches DMX output to an all-zero frame within two seconds if the app stops responding, and output stays down until an operator explicitly restores it. You do not have to configure it. It is worth knowing it exists the first time you leave a rig running unattended.

Something is not working. What do you check first?

Work down this list in order. It is roughly the order of likelihood for a first evening, and every item on it is something people hit on their first evening rather than an exotic fault.

• The fixture is not in DMX mode. Sound-active and auto-programme modes ignore incoming DMX completely. Check the unit's own menu before you check anything else.
• You are in the browser app. The HitLight browser app cannot output DMX on any platform. Hardware output happens only in the macOS app.
• The DMX mode does not match. Compare the mode on the fixture's display against the mode you patched, character for character. This is the single most common cause of a light doing something almost right.
• The dimmer or shutter is closed. Many fixtures have a shutter or strobe channel that must be open before the dimmer does anything at all, and a master dimmer channel that has to come up before the colour channels matter.
• The universe is wrong. A fixture listening on universe 2 will never respond to an interface outputting universe 1, however correct the address is.
• The chain is not terminated. A 120Ω terminator on the last fixture is not optional folklore. Without one, long runs flicker in a way that looks exactly like a software bug.
• Blackout is still engaged from your own testing. It happens to everyone at least once.

What should you expect to have at the end of the evening?

A rig that answers to you: every fixture patched, addressed, confirmed on the unit, responding to the right controls, with Blackout tested and one or two scenes saved. That is the honest finish line for one evening. It is not a designed show, and anyone promising you a designed show in an evening is selling you something.

Design is the next several evenings, and it is the enjoyable part now that the plumbing works. Cue lists chain scenes so you can step through them live with GO and BACK, with per-cue waits and auto-advance. Palettes let you edit a colour or a position once and update every scene using it. The multi-track timeline runs a show against a clock. A footswitch bound through MIDI learn puts "next cue" under your foot. None of it is needed tonight.

If the vocabulary is still unfamiliar — universe, patch, cue, gobo, palette — the DMX glossary defines each term in a sentence, and the download page has the Mac app, the browser app and the iOS remote.