Context: I don’t own Beam for Live yet, but I’m thinking of getting it soon, and I had a question.
When it says on the site: “Perform on a new lighting rig without making changes to your Live Set; your set is decoupled from the lighting patch for maximum flexibility.”, does that mean that Beam is capable of cloning? What I mean by this is, can Beam adapt a pre-programmed lightshow with certain fixtures and translate them to be understood by lights from another model or manufacturer? For example, if I’m coming to a venue that already has its own stage lights, is my lightshow easily and quickly adaptable to this stage?
And if so, how is this done?
I hope my question is clear.
Thank you for your help.
Hello - yes that’s what that means. Beam works by assigning ‘tags’ to fixtures. And in your Live Set, you select which tag you want to control with automation / MIDI notes.
So let’s say you have a Martin Atomic 3000 strobe, you could give it the tag ‘Strobe’ and you program your light show for that tag. If you then arrive somewhere else where they don’t have a Martin Atomic 3000 but a different kind of strobe, the only thing you have to do is change which fixture has the tag ‘Strobe’. This fixture can have a different DMX layout, or maybe you even have two strobes. From the Live Set’s perspective nothing changes - you just change fixture patch that assigns tags to specific lights.
Of course, sometimes lights are so wildly different that just swapping the tag only works partially. In that case, the ranges feature could help. Or you might need to make some changes in your Live Set like using the Scale effect to tweak details.
In general: for lights that are similar enough, like two strobes, changing the tag is enough. For more complex lights like moving heads, it depends on whether they have enough overlapping features.