Lighting control for bars, clubs and venues

What happens when the person who programmed the rig leaves?

In most venues, the lighting stops changing. Someone competent sets it up, it looks right for a season, they move on, and the rig settles into whichever look nobody is frightened to touch. The failure is not technical — it is that the show existed on one laptop and in one person's memory, and neither of those was handed over.

HitLight is built around that. The show — patch, scenes, palettes, cue lists and console layout — lives in the account rather than in a file on a desktop. A new starter is invited to the same show, opens it, and sees the same controls the last person used, on their own machine.

Can more than one person control the lights at once?

Yes. A show owner can invite collaborators, and browser or iOS remotes forward control to the elected Mac hardware master. Only the macOS app outputs DMX, so the Mac wired to the rig stays the machine that drives the lights; every other device is issuing control to it. There are no paid Team plans during the beta.

The practical consequence is that nobody needs physical access to the booth machine to change the lights, and the booth machine does not need to be logged into by four different people.

How do you change the house colour without editing every scene?

Use a palette. A palette in HitLight is a named colour or position that scenes reference instead of storing a value of their own, so editing the palette updates every scene that uses it. Change the house amber once and the early-evening wash, the back bar and the late-night look all move with it.

Positions work the same way. When a moving head gets re-hung a metre to the left after a refit, or the DJ booth moves for a season, you correct the position palette rather than reopening every scene that aims at that spot. This is the feature that decides whether a venue's lighting is still maintainable in a year.

Can you hand the laptop to someone who has never used it?

That is what the virtual console is for. You arrange buttons, faders and XY pads yourself and label them in the venue's own language — "Doors", "Dinner", "Live band", "Last orders" — so the person on shift sees the four or five controls this room needs rather than a patch, a matrix of DMX channels and a decision to make.

The same actions can sit on hardware. MIDI learn binds a pad, a knob or a footswitch by pressing it, so the interface behind the bar can be a small physical controller instead of a laptop screen somebody will inevitably close. And three operator controls exist specifically for people who are not lighting operators:

• Stop. Holds the last safe look on the rig. Nothing changes until you act again.
• Fade Out. Takes the rig down over one second.
• Blackout. Immediate. Sits next to the Auto toggle and takes effect at once.

How do you move from a daytime look to an evening one?

Build one scene for each part of the trading day and give each one a button on the console. Someone presses "Afternoon" when the doors open and "Late" when the music comes up. Nobody edits anything, and nobody has to remember which fixture is which. Where the changeovers happen in a fixed order, a cue list steps through them with GO and BACK, with per-cue waits and auto-advance.

For a room that runs to a clock — a venue with a licensed close, or a function with a running order — the multi-track timeline lays scenes on parallel tracks against that clock and runs them without an operator present.

Auto Show is available for the part of the night where the music is the show: it listens through the Mac's microphone and drives the rig live, with no scenes programmed first. Note the constraint before you plan around it — Auto Show uses the Mac's system-default microphone as its only audio source, so where the Mac physically sits in the room is part of how well it performs.

Is it safe to leave running in a public room?

Two mechanisms do most of the work. Automatic control cannot reach hazardous channel types at all: smoke, haze, fans, flame ignition and pyro channels, lasers, flashing strobes, blinders, UV, fixture macros and unverified effect channels are stripped from every automatic path in code rather than left to a setting. And a native watchdog running outside the interface latches DMX output to an all-zero frame within two seconds if the app stops responding, holding it there until an operator explicitly restores it.

Strobe bursts are capped for photosensitivity, and Blackout sits next to the Auto toggle and takes effect immediately. The reasoning, and the full exclusion list, is on lighting safety.

What are the constraints for a venue?

If the room genuinely cannot host a Mac, that is a real disqualifier and we would rather you found it here. The rest of the list is on what HitLight cannot do.

Last verified 1 August 2026.