When the install crew leaves, the console stays.
A full professional console your programmer carries, so there is nothing to rent, truck or park beside the camera.
An installed show should not depend on one contractor’s laptop. Leave behind a console anyone can buy, a showfile anyone can open and a plot that says what is actually hanging out there. Program it once, run it sixty nights, and open it again next November. Budget honestly for the one thing it is not: something has to start the show, and that is a clock or a person.
- check_circleTheme parks and attractions
- check_circleArchitainment and façades
- check_circleSeasonal and holiday runs
Sample “We reopened last year’s file in an afternoon. Nobody had to be flown in.”
Things you've paid extra for before.
Every one of these is a line on somebody's invoice or an hour on somebody's clock. This is how they go in installations.
Designed on a big board, then baked into recorders.add
The seasonal walkthrough gets designed on an expensive desk, then handed to hardware recorders: one per zone, roughly a thousand dollars each, and each one a trip to change anything. A Blackout subscription costs less than a day of that programming, so each zone can just run the console that made the show.
check_circleZones you can change, not replay.Every zone needs its own brain.add
Ten locations means ten boxes to buy, hide, power and revisit. At this price you can run a console per zone, or one uncapped console across the site, and route universes to nodes wherever the run lands.
check_circleA console per zone, not a recorder.It has to run for three months without you.add
Long-period effects and stored looks keep the site moving; auto-backup and cloud copies mean the season survives a device swap. When the exhibit changes, you edit the showfile, not the hardware.
check_circleOne showfile, all season.The line items that go away.
- 01The rentalConsole rental + the cart
The console is already in your programmer's bag
A month of Core costs less than the first hour of your day. Month-to-month or annual.
- 02The cable runTwo days of pre-rig before anyone walks in
The pre-rig was two days. Now it's the walk to set.
A wired rig gets built days early: DMX up the block, Ethernet runs to every floor, wireless hops bridging the gaps you could not pull cable through. Then someone wants the other direction and all of it comes back out. Blackout plus a Cerise puts the rig on CRMX: patch in minutes, from wherever you are standing, and when the shot flips you just shoot it. sACN and Art-Net over Wi-Fi or Ethernet when you do want the wire.
- 03The ramp-upSix months before anyone trusts you on the desk
Months on a big desk. One afternoon on Blackout.
Full-size consoles are built to be mastered, not learned. Programmers count that ramp in months, and the syntax doesn't transfer to the next brand anyway. Blackout's layout never moves, and every verified profile has been driven against its DMX chart before it ships, so patch takes minutes and the surprises don't show up at 2am.
- 04The note round-tripHow a note used to landDP: Can we take the practical down a hair? Gaffer: Copy. (into walkie) Jim, go down 10 points on the left practical. Board op (two blocks away, in a truck): Say again? Gaffer: Ten points! Left practical! Board op: …Which one's the left practical? (the unit stands by)How it lands nowDP: Can we take the practical down a hair… (it's already down)
Your programmer is at the monitor with the console in hand. Free LivePlot viewers put the rig on the DP's and gaffer's own screens: live data, not a plot, every fixture showing the intensity, color and position it is at right now, changing as it changes. Half those notes never get said in the first place.
Argue with the numbers.
Every field is editable. Put in what your production actually pays and see what an iPad console changes.
Your production
Pays for itself before day one, on the pre-rig alone.
- Console rental avoided$500 × 45 days$22,500
- Pre-rig days avoided2 days × 2 crew × $650$2,600
- Setup & patch time saved67 min/day × 45 = 50.3 h at $50/h$2,513
- Tweak time saved on set10 min × 3 setups/day × 45 = 22.5 h$1,125
- Your Command subscription12 months × $124.99, annual rate−$1,500
Send it to yourself, or to whoever signs off on the budget. Start with a free 14-day trial on any plan.
calculateHow we calculate this expand_more
Console rental avoided: rental per day × production days. The one line nobody argues with.
Pre-rig days avoided: pre-rig days × crew × crew day rate. Wireless DMX means the cable run doesn't get built, so the days spent building it don't get worked.
Setup & patch time saved: (90 − 23) min per production day, valued at the day rate over a 10-hour day.
Tweak time saved on set: the minutes per lighting setup, the round trip from note to desk to unit, at the same hourly.
Subscription: your plan's effective monthly: one month at the monthly rate, twelve at the annual rate.
90 to 23 min and the per-setup minutes are placeholders until the timed head-to-head demos set them.
Estimate, not a quote. Every input is a fader and every line has a checkbox: turn off anything you don't buy and the total recalculates without it.
A console is only as good as its profiles.
Every cue, every color, every effect is built on the assumption that channel 14 does what the chart says it does. Get that wrong and nothing above it can be right.
On most consoles, fixing a bad profile lands on your programmer’s clock before a single cue exists.
The libraries you can license are built once, at scale, from paperwork, and the mistakes ship with them: wrong channel counts, missing modes, a profile that doesn’t match the light in front of you. The shared formats don’t rescue it either. A GDTF file only carries what the manufacturer put into it, errors included.
We tried to buy one. We licensed an industry library, went through it, and found too much of it wrong to patch. So we threw it out and rebuilt every profile by hand.
40,000+ profiles, human-verified. Built in-house, not licensed, updated daily, and new ones typically land within hours of a spec sheet. It is the largest human-verified fixture library in lighting and it lives inside the console.
Verified profiles.
A verified profile has been tested working on the fixture itself, not just checked against the manufacturer’s chart. Patch one and every channel does what it says.
Missing a profile? Ask for it.
Request it in the help center. New profiles are built by hand and typically land within hours of a spec sheet.
Request a profilearrow_forwardUsed by professionals in 90+ countries.
Designed by a Local 52 lighting programmer, from the ground up, for the fixtures crews use every day.
Hire someone who already knows it.
The Lighting Pro Directory lists verified Blackout programmers, local gear, and trainers for your team.
Deploying across a fleet?
Per-device licensing on Advanced, Pro or Command with a 3-device minimum: central admin, central billing, instant org-wide revocation, priority support.
