While at the WFX Charlotte show in October I had the pleasure of getting a demo of the new Clarity lighting control software at the LSC Lighting/Applied Electronics booth, and what I saw impressed me. So I was very excited Church Production Magazine invited me to do a review of the new control software along with the VX20 wing hardware.
Overview
Clarity is a PC-based lighting control software system that runs under Microsoft Windows (Mac version is currently in beta testing), providing a comprehensive package for controlling theatrical lighting systems. If your lighting system is built upon the ArtNet Ethernet protocol, all you need is the software licensed for the number of DMX universes you want to control. If you have DMX lines, you'll also need either a DMX interface or one of LSC's two models of control wing that include DMX interfaces. The specific configuration I tested was a two-universe Clarity license with the VX20 control wing. As this is a PC-based software system, I used my aging Toshiba Satellite laptop with 1 gig of memory and Windows XP 32-bit for the host computer (64-bit Windows drivers for the option hardware wings and DMX interfaces is under development).
Installing Clarity on my laptop went smoothly, and the optional VX20 control wing ($3,295), which offers hardware controls for manipulating fixtures, programming cues, acting as the controlling PC's mouse, and playing back cue lists, connected without a hitch to my laptop via a USB port.
Getting Started
On firing up Clarity ($1,395), it was pretty intuitive right from the start. Along the top of the window are a series of tabs, labeled "Patch," "Programmer," "Palettes," "Control Booth," "Performance," and "Levels." Selecting the Patch tab changes the interface to show a list of manufacturers and their fixtures on the left, with universes of DMX addresses taking up the remainder of the screen. Dragging a fixture onto the grid of DMX addresses patches that fixture type starting at the targeted address. Under the "generic" manufacturer you find a set of universal device types, including a dimmer. If you have a 24-dimmer box starting at address 1, you drag a generic dimmer onto address 1, and in the dialog box that pops up, change the quantity count to 24. Click the Patch button, and your entire dimming system is patched and ready to go. Patching moving lights, color scrollers, etc... is equally simple as long as you know the starting DMX address.
Have a custom fixture you need to patch? LSC provides a fixture editor (currently in beta testing) that enables you to design a fixture type to meet your needs. Let's say you have an ETC SourceFour with a Wybron color scroller and Rosco iCue attached to it. You don't want to patch this as three independent devices - you really want it to appear as one device with color changing pan/tilt capabilities. Using the Fixture Editor, you create a new fixture with an Intensity parameter; a "split;" a color scrolling parameter; another "split;" and a pan/tilt parameter. Save this as a new fixture type, and then in the Patch window it will appear in the fixture list. When you drag it onto a DMX address, all three "sections" of the DMX parameters appear in consecutive addresses. But the "splits" you entered allow you to drag the dimmer part, the color part, and the pan/tilt parts to different DMX addresses - even across different DMX universes. Very easy to do, and it enables Clarity to support any imaginable fixture configuration.
Working with Your Fixtures
Once patched, you click the "Programmer" tab at the top of the window to start working with your fixtures. Tabs for fixture types appear down the left side, with two additional tabs: "groups" and "sort." Groups of fixture types are automatically created for you as you patch your fixtures; for example, there will be a "Dimmer" group containing all the dimmers you've patched. Want to create some custom fixture groups, such as all your house light dimmers? No problem - just select all the dimmers used for house lights, and click the Add Group button.
To manipulate fixtures, either select individual fixtures, or select a group you've created. The lower portion of the programmer window contains controls for setting intensity, position, color, and other parameters. Or, if you have one of the control wings, you can control and set the parameters via buttons and a track ball - a definite plus in my book. It's worth noting that parameters like color selection are done by clicking the color you want in a color box - no need to manually set red/green/blue or cyan/magenta/yellow. This is a very nice simplification of programming parameters.
Programming Cues
Ready to start recording cues? Set the fixtures the way you want them in the programmer tab, and hit the "record" button. Name a new cue list, and press Record. Subsequent record operations will default to the last cue list used, streamlining the recording process.
When recording cues containing intelligent light parameters, you do need to think about when you want the light to move, or the color to change, in relation to the intensity coming up. For example, if in cue 10 you want to change the pan and tilt of a fixture and also bring up the intensity, you're going to see the light move, which may not be what you want. However, Clarity provides a few options to help with this. You can set separate delay and fade times for the position of the fixture and the intensity, so that the position change occurs instantly at the start of the cue, and the intensity comes up after a short delay to allow the light to move into position first. Or, you can simply be thinking ahead and program the move into the previous cue. But, especially when time is tight, thinking ahead doesn't always work well.
In this case, Clarity has some cue editing features that significantly help.. The best option is to right-click on the cue where fixtures are moving at the same time the intensity is coming up from 0%, and pick the "Insert Mark Cue" option. This creates a new cue before the selected cue that will run automatically to move the fixtures while they are dark at the end of the previous cue. If you want to be more particular about what fixtures are moved in the dark, you could also edit that cue, select the fixtures that you want moved in the previous cue, and save all parameters except intensity into the previous cue, merging the new information with that existing cue - issue solved with just a few simple clicks of the mouse.
Playing back cues is also easy, and there are several methods to use. You can go to the Control Booth tab, select a cue list, and click the play button to advance that list to the next cue. Or, also in the Control Booth tab, you can drag cue lists down to the bottom section of the window, and a playback box will get created for that cue list. And multiple playback boxes can be created - you could have one for a cue list that controls your house lights, and another for stage lighting, so that they can be run independently. Or, if you have a control wing, you can use the mouse to drag a cue onto one of the hardware playback controls, and run it from the wing. The wing even has LCD readouts for each playback control group that gives the name of the cue list, and its current status. And lastly, Clarity has a "Performance" view, with compressed playback controls arranged in a grid, onto which cue lists can be assigned. The latter is designed for environments that require more flexibility in playback, where the order of events in the service (and thus the order in which cues are needed) might be unpredictable.
Palettes and Freesets
Clarity also fully supports palettes - the ability to set all the lights to point to the podium (for instance), and program that position into a palette entry. When you later select and number these lights and click the Podium palette entry, all those lights instantly move to those pre-recorded positions. Sweet! It's definitely worth taking time up front and recording palette entries for commonly used lighting positions.
Clarity also provides a mechanism, called Freesets, by which if you program a color palette (for example) for one type of fixture, and then apply it to another type of feature, it calculates what that fixture's parameters should be in order to render that color.Other parameters are likewise interpolated to reduce programming overhead.
Wrapping Up
With a control system like Clarity, it's impossible to evaluate and describe all the features in one article - Clarity offers many more features than I've described here. In summary, I found Clarity to be an intuitive control interface, easy to set up and run, and well-suited for a church environment. I ran into only two issues during testing. The lack of 64-bit drivers for the control wing hardware meant I wasn't able to access VX20 hardware and DM interface on my newest laptop, which runs Vista 64-bit. I also noted in initial testing that ETC Selador fixtures weren't supported fully in the color selection control (due to there being no published information on how to translate from a CMY or RGB code to Selador's seven-color LED system). Other than this, Clarity worked reliably and flawlessly - something I don't usually get to say in my reviews. And with an entry-level price of $1,395 for an ArtNet-controlled lighting system, it's hard to beat the feature/cost ratio. But you don't have to simply take my word for it - a fully functional 30-day unlimited trial version is available at LSC's website.
Special thanks to Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, N.C., and C3 Church in Clayton, N.C. for use of their lighting rigs in evaluating Clarity.
Pricing Table
SOFTWARELSC Clarity Ltg Control Software Licensed For 1 DMX Universe $1,395LSC Clarity Ltg Control Software Licensed For 2 DMX Universes $2,395LSC Clarity Ltg Control Software Licensed For 4 DMX Universes $4,695LSC Clarity Ltg Control Software Licensed For Unlimited DMX Universes $8,995
HARDWARELSC Clarity QX2 USB to 2 Port DMX Adapter $595LSC Clarity QX4 USB to 4 Port DMX Adapter $995LSC Clarity VX10 Control Wing $1,695LSC Clarity VX20 Control Wing $3,295
