Lighting software for schools and community theatres

Is Auto Show the right tool for a school play?

No, and it is worth saying that before anything else. Auto Show listens to the room and invents a look as the music goes — excellent for a disco, wrong for a scripted show, because a production needs the same state at the same line on every performance. For that you program cue lists, and the automatic side of HitLight is a switch you simply leave alone.

The assistant is optional in the same way. It will draft a scene from a plain-English description of a look, but everything it writes is an ordinary scene value you can open in the editor and change by hand. Nothing it does is hidden from you, and nothing in this page's workflow depends on using it.

How does a cue list run on the night?

You chain your scenes into a cue list and step through it live with GO and BACK. Each cue can carry a wait and can auto-advance, so a sequence that always runs the same way — a snap blackout, a two-second hold, then a slow build — is one GO rather than three. BACK exists because sooner or later somebody will jump a cue, and the fix has to be one button.

MIDI learn binds GO to a pad or a footswitch by pressing it once in learn mode. An operator can then follow the book with both hands free, which matters when the person on the desk is fifteen and reading the script for the second time.

What if the show runs to a clock rather than to a script?

Use the multi-track timeline. You lay scenes on parallel tracks against a clock and let the show run itself, which is the right shape for a dance piece, a fashion show, a prize-giving, or anything cued to recorded music where the timings never change from night to night.

Tracks run in parallel over their own fixtures, so a front wash can hold on one track while the cyc changes colour on another. A production can also mix the two approaches — a timeline for the musical numbers and a cue list for the scenes between them.

How do you build the looks in the first place?

In the matrix scene editor: steps down the page, fixtures across it. Every cell is a value you edit by hand — colour, intensity, position, gobo — so you see the whole state at once rather than clicking through fixtures one at a time. This is the manual authoring surface, and it is the answer to "does the AI take my control away?".

The 3D stage runs with no interface attached, so a design can be built and watched on an ordinary laptop in a classroom weeks before anyone gets into the hall — and it is ready to play back the moment the show is opened on the Mac that is wired to the rig.

How do you get the same show out of a different operator every night?

By making the running order data rather than somebody's memory. A volunteer-run production typically has a different person on the desk each night, often with one rehearsal between them, and three features carry that load.

• The cue list holds the running order. The operator needs GO, BACK and the script, not an understanding of the patch.
• The virtual console holds the exceptions. You arrange buttons, faders and XY pads yourself and label them in the show's language — "House lights", "Act 2 preset" — so the panel in front of a new operator is this production, not the whole application.
• Palettes hold the values. Edit a colour or a position once and every scene using it updates, so a note from the director on Wednesday reaches Thursday's operator without anyone re-learning the show.

A teacher or stage manager who is not on the desk can watch from the iOS remote, which follows show status and can issue Stop or Blackout. Those two controls behave differently and the difference is worth teaching:

• 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.

Which channels will automatic control refuse to drive?

All of the following, on every automatic path, in code rather than by policy — so no setting and no assistant request can reach them. This list matters more in a school hall than anywhere else on this site, because the audience did not opt into a nightclub and a proportion of any large group is photosensitive.

• Smoke machines, hazers and fans
• Flame projectors, flame ignition and any pyrotechnic channel
• Lasers
• Flashing strobes and blinders
• UV
• Fixture macros and unverified effect channels

Strobe bursts are capped for photosensitivity, and a native watchdog latches DMX output to an all-zero frame within two seconds if the app stops responding. Read lighting safety before you put anything automatic in front of an audience — particularly if your hall has a hazer, if the production has borrowed a strobe, or if the fixture profile you are using was generated from a manual and has not yet been tested channel by channel.

Will it run on the school's Windows computers?

No. HitLight does not run on Windows, and for a school where every machine is a Windows PC or a Chromebook that is a real constraint rather than a footnote. The app that drives the lights is macOS only and requires macOS 14 or later. In practice that means one Mac, in the box or at the back of the hall, connected to the DMX interface.

Everything upstream of the output is platform-neutral. The browser app runs anywhere and can patch fixtures, build scenes, edit cue lists and show the rig on the 3D stage — it simply cannot output DMX. So a drama class can design on the computers the school already owns, and one Mac plays the result back. HitLight is also public beta software: features, quotas and availability may change, and it ships without an uptime guarantee.

Both constraints are listed in full on what HitLight cannot do, and we would rather you read them before a production week than during one.

Last verified 1 August 2026.