Gobo Studios · a DBA of Monterey Skates LLC · Monterey, CA · (831) 264-8797 · gobostudios.com
The lights follow the video. The video follows the beat.
SceneRig reads VirtualDJ directly — tempo, position, per-deck levels — and drives both the screen and the rig off the same clock.
Nineteen generative scenes, an effects chain you can stack three deep, and live DMX out to pars, wash bars, and moving heads. When a video is on screen, the fixtures pick up the colours in it, so the room matches the picture instead of cycling through a stock preset.
Not for sale yet. Running every week.
SceneRig is not a product you can buy today. There is no price, no download, and no waitlist theatre. It is the lighting and visuals engine we built for our own shows, it drives a real rig with real fixtures, and its DMX engine passes 113 of its 113 tests.
We are telling you about it for two reasons. First, if you hire us for lighting, this is what is running the room. Second, if you run a venue or a rig and this sounds like the thing you have been trying to buy, say so — that is how we will decide what to finish first.
Nineteen scenes that move on the beat
The generators are real-time shaders, not video loops, so they react rather than repeat. Every one of them is driven by the beat phase and the audio level coming out of VirtualDJ.
Your own video clips can go in the same rotation, and the auto-rotate picker changes source on a downbeat every 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 bars — with a crossfade you set anywhere from an instant cut to five seconds.
Geometric
Lights and particles
Effects — stack up to three
- Renders at 720p, 1080p, 1440p, or native 4K — switchable while running.
- When nothing has played for three seconds the output settles into a slow Plasma at low reactivity, so the screen between tracks never looks broken.
- Each venue’s logo sits over that idle screen, and can rotate quietly between corners on other sources to dodge burn-in.
Real fixtures, real channels, no guessing
The DMX engine renders a full 512-byte frame every tick and pushes it out over a DMX King UltraDMX MAX. Fixtures are patched from Open Fixture Library profiles, so most commercial units import as-is; you can give them friendly names without touching the profile. The stage editor flags channel conflicts before they cost you a soundcheck.
Patterns
Patterns drive colour over time: blackout, solid, breathe, colour wash, pulse, wave, bar colour, beat colour, alternate, chase, rainbow, energy-reactive, fire, and strobe.
Motions
Motions drive pan and tilt on moving heads: breathe, sweep, opposite, circle, figure-8, cross, wave, scan, stagger, cascade, fan-out, beat-snap, random target, random snap, and piston — fifteen in all.
Guard rails that matter on a real rig
- Every motion respects each fixture’s pan and tilt limits, so heads never sweep into a wall, a ceiling, or the DJ booth.
- Most motions return to home at the end of each cycle, so scene changes hand over cleanly and the motors stop whipping.
- The strobe channel is suppressed below 50% energy and ramps in over 50–65%, so a quiet passage never triggers a strobe nobody asked for.
- Groups with a moving head in them automatically skip chase-family patterns, which read as “broken fixture” on a yoke.
- Any group can be locked to a subset of patterns — the wash bar pointed at somebody’s face stays on solid and breathe while the rest of the rig goes wild.
Stop authoring slow, medium, fast, and insane versions of everything
Six scene parameters can be flipped to dynamic: you set a value at low energy and a value at high energy, and the engine interpolates between them as the tempo climbs. Any of them can also take a boost from audio peaks, so a drop lands harder than the bar before it.
On top of that, each pattern and each motion carries its own tempo gate — mark “solid” and “breathe” as slow-only in a karaoke scene and they drop out of rotation the moment the BPM crosses your threshold. One scene covers the whole night.
The six dynamic parameters
- Groups can run in lockstep, staggered, or picked at random per group per bar.
- When no motion is active, heads can sit at home, scatter, wander, or cycle between the three — rather than all stacking on one point.
Locked to the beat, including when you pitch-bend
VirtualDJ’s first-beat analysis is sometimes wrong, and its grid drifts the moment a DJ touches the platter. So SceneRig runs a phase-locked loop against the audio peaks coming out of VDJ: it measures where each peak actually lands, nudges the offset a fraction of the way toward it, and ignores peaks that arrive too close together or too far off phase once it has locked.
The offset resets on every track change. A small indicator in the control window pulses on each beat so you can confirm the lock with your eyes in about five seconds.
Deck state is polled twenty times a second and interpolated every frame, so motion is smooth at 60fps rather than stepping at the poll rate.
On genuinely syncopated tracks — the kind where the downbeat is ambiguous to a human ear — it can still drift. We would rather write that down than pretend otherwise.
It runs on the laptop already in the booth
| Piece | Detail |
|---|---|
| Application | Electron desktop app, macOS |
| Render engine | regl / WebGL2, ping-pong framebuffer effect chain |
| Windows | Control panel on your display, full-screen output on the second, plus an optional stage visualizer |
| Music source | VirtualDJ, via the VDJ REST API plugin on localhost:8082 |
| Poll rate | 20 Hz deck state, interpolated to every rendered frame |
| DMX output | DMX King UltraDMX MAX (ENTTEC Pro protocol) |
| Fixture profiles | Open Fixture Library format, with import and friendly aliases |
| Output resolution | 720p / 1080p / 1440p / native 4K |
| Engine tests | 113 of 113 passing |
Stage visualizer
A separate window draws every patched fixture in its live DMX output colour: pars as discs with a halo, wash bars as eight-segment gradients, moving heads with a pan/tilt arrow and a projected beam spot, derbies spinning at the commanded speed, strobes flashing at the actual rate. You can build and check a whole show at the kitchen table with no rig plugged in.
The easiest way to see SceneRig is to book the rig
There is nothing to download yet. If you want to watch it work, hire us for the lighting and it will be running your room. If you run a venue or a rig of your own and want to talk about where this goes next, write and tell us what you have patched — fixture types and channel counts are the useful part.