Event and venue lighting

Event lighting programmed and saved before doors open

DCMM designs, installs, and programs event and venue lighting: the plot, the fixtures, the rigging, the DMX networking, and the cue stack that runs the show. If you manage a venue or produce live events, we build the rig and save every scene before the audience arrives, so show night runs from a file instead of an operator’s memory.

Rooms that skip that step run one wash all night, because nothing else was ever programmed. When the emcee calls for a color shift, the operator rides the faders live and guesses at the timing, and the change lands a beat behind the video.

The cue stack that lands on the beat

Every scene and every color shift gets programmed and saved to a numbered stack days before load-in, so the operator calls a cue instead of composing one live. On show night the operator knows exactly which cue comes next, and the scene change lands on the beat, the same beat it hit in rehearsal.

Design and planning

• A lighting plot drawn to the venue’s rigging points before a fixture ships
• Renderings that show the color and the wash before load-in day
• A fixture count and DMX universe count sized to the room and confirmed against its power drops

Equipment and control

• Moving heads and wash fixtures, with haze where the room needs depth
• LED fixtures patched to hold color through a full rehearsal and the show, no drift by curtain
• The console loaded with the show file before the crew walks in

Installation and integration

• Rigging points load tested for fixture weight before a truss goes up
• Power distributed so a haze machine and a moving head aren’t fighting the same circuit
• DMX universes networked into whatever audio and video system already runs the room

Programming and live operation

• Every cue built and saved to the stack before doors, numbered in the order the show calls them
• A board operator on headset, calling cues from the stack instead of memory
• Timecode locking the lighting to the music and video so a scene change lands on the beat

Next week the venue changes and the show changes with it. The stack still gets built before the truck backs in.