An industry standard on Broadway and in other areas of live entertainment, Lightwright was created to help designers and electricians record and keep track of the vast amount of data needed to install and maintain a lighting installation. Lightwright 6 was launched at USITT 2016 in Salt Lake City.
As the lighting world has increased in complexity due to the proliferation of moving lights and LEDs, the organizational demands on lighting designers, design assistants, and electricians has continued to grow. Lightwright 6, for the first time, fulfils a long-time industry dream of controlling the flow of lighting data from design to console without needing to enter data multiple times by hand, while documenting up to 45,000 universes of data.
Lightwright 5 brought lighting users Data Exchange between Lightwright and Vectorworks, changing the way thousands of designers develop their light plots by allowing Vectorworks lighting data to be brought directly into Lightwright, and allowing design changes to flow back and forth between the two programs. Lightwright 6 brings us Console Link for ETC's Eos family, which changes the way we work in the theatre by allowing console data to flow back and forth between Lightwright and the lighting console, including the ability to control console channels directly from Lightwright.
Lightwright 6 has dozens of other new features for lighting users, including a built-in label maker. To organise their shows and to provide easy identification of gear, production electricians carefully label everything, including lights, cables, breakouts, power supplies, dimmer racks, and data distribution gear - and a busy production electrician can print as many as 60,000 labels per year. Lightwright 6 will cut hours from the time it takes to create and print labels, utilising a built-in Avery label database, say City Theatrical.
Over the last 18 years Lightwright has been used on over 90% of all Broadway and touring productions. Lightwright 6 is distributed exclusively by the City Theatrical network of dealers worldwide.
(Jim Evans)
