DreamShow on video: the full presentation

In about eight and a half minutes, this video takes you around DreamShow: the simulator, the main screen and the timeline, fades and mixes, aiming and zones for moving heads, the DMX windows, humanoid robots and LED masks, large venues, shows and DMX streams written by an AI, the standalone player, architectural lighting and the cue window on show night. Everything you see in it is an example of what you can do.

Prefer YouTube? The same video is online at youtu.be/vVksXRvi-9I, with its chapters.

Transcript

Here is the full text of the narration, split according to the video's chapters.

0:00 — Introduction

Welcome to DreamShow! Show control software for lighting, sound and video, developed by Polux and put to the test every night in our own venues. Let me show you around.

What you are looking at is DreamShow's simulator, filmed while a demonstration show is playing, at maximum rendering quality. It is only an example of what you can do. Twenty-six fixtures, one cue list, one clock, and everything moves together. The arrows show where each fixture points, even when it is dark.

0:31 — The main screen and the timeline

The main screen: the scenes, the venue plan, the timeline, and the libraries, all in sight.

The timeline is the heart of DreamShow. Each scene has its tracks: light, effects, sound, trajectories, waits. Everything starts on Go and plays in parallel, to the second.

0:51 — Fades and mixes

Two distinct ideas. To see them clearly, only the fixtures concerned are lit: the four Beams in warm red, the four Bee Eyes in blue. The timeline is at the bottom, and playback is started.

A fade is about intensity: the red block rises in one second at the start, and the blue block goes down in one second at the end.

A mix is about overlap: on the same track, two items sit on top of each other, just like in a video editor. At five seconds, the blue block starts while the red one is still there, and for four seconds one melts into the other: the Beams fade away, the Bee Eyes appear. And on the Sound track, the two sounds cross in exactly the same way. No gap, no jolt.

1:35 — Aiming, zones and moving-head trajectories

And now, aiming! The thirteen moving heads of the venue are selected. One click in the room, and they all point at that exact spot. Another click, they follow. And when you sweep across the room, they follow your hand, live.

Then Zone mode. You draw a rectangle on the stage, and DreamShow spreads the thirteen heads over it, evenly, all by itself. Slide the zone to the left, then to the right, and the heads follow it. Turn it by its handle, one way, then the other: every beam keeps its place in the zone and turns with it.

The zone is resized from its corners: the heads spread over the new surface, and each beam opens or closes to fill its own part. And in three dimensions, here is the coverage for real.

Let's create a trajectory. It opens with a single key frame. You aim at a point: the key is updated. You add a key at the end and aim somewhere else. Another one, and another. Four keys, and DreamShow interpolates between them. On playback, the heads travel along the path, smoothly.

Here is a richer trajectory, nine keys on eight moving heads. And the plan shows, at every moment, where each beam actually lands on the stage.

2:53 — Venue, patch and DMX outputs

Everything else is set up in a few windows: the patch and the positions, the Art-Net outputs, manual controls, video screens, humanoid robots, LED masks, follow-spot tablets and backstage displays.

Want to see exactly what goes out? The DMX values window shows the five hundred and twelve channels of a universe, live, as DreamShow computes them, after the blackout and the manual controls. A blue frame marks the channels of one fixture, an orange frame a channel held by a fader. Hover over a channel to see what it drives, and double-click it to open the faders on it.

One fader per channel, with the fixture and the channel name. A fader follows the value being sent until you move it. Then it holds the channel, over the cue list and the blackout, until you release it. Close the window, and every channel goes back to the cue list.

3:49 — Humanoid robots and LED masks

Because show control is not only about light: here is a Booster K1 humanoid robot and a Shining Mask LED mask, both driven by DreamShow from the timeline. The robot gets up, speaks, with the mask syncing its lips to the sound, and then dances.

4:46 — Large venues: 120 fixtures

And for large installations? Here is a venue with one hundred and twenty fixtures on four network universes, seen in plan while the scenes follow one another and every moving head travels: the same software, the same cue list, and the simulation stays smooth.

The same venue in three dimensions, at maximum rendering quality: the beams are computed by the graphics card, volume by volume. One hundred and twenty heads moving, and still smooth.

5:16 — A DMX stream written by an AI (Gemini)

A light show can also be written entirely by an artificial intelligence, from a piece of music, with the AI chat of your choice. DreamShow writes the request: the venue, the chosen fixtures and every one of their channels, and the music, analysed. You paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, add your own ideas, and the AI writes the show as a DMX stream. DreamShow checks it, corrects it, and plays it.

Here is the real window, with the stream Gemini gave back: DreamShow found values it must never send, on a channel that can reset the heads, and set them back to neutral before anything reached a fixture.

And here is the result: the Showtime opening, written by Gemini from DreamShow's request, on the venue with one hundred and twenty fixtures. Nobody programmed a single cue by hand.

6:46 — Standalone player, no computer needed

Once written, a show does not even need a computer any more. DreamShow exports it and sends it over the network to a standalone player: an ESP32, a Raspberry Pi or a Windows mini-PC, with DMX and Art-Net outputs, a weekly schedule that can start the show fifteen minutes before sunset, and a web page to follow it from any phone.

7:09 — Architectural lighting

DreamShow also runs lighting that nobody operates: facades, halls, shop windows, gardens. On the timeline, a Wait block holds the show until an hour, a date in the year, or sunrise or sunset, give or take a few minutes, computed for the venue's latitude and longitude, on the days of the week you choose. Then the engine resumes by itself: no operator, no external scheduler.

Scenes loop and trigger automatically, over Art-Net or sACN. You simulate the place in three dimensions before installing anything, and the standalone player keeps it running without a PC.

7:48 — Show night: the cue window

Back in the theatre, on show night, the operator has this cue window: the current scene, the next one, the big green button, and the blackout. And they keep control of every other window. Simple, clear, reassuring.

8:02 — Languages, price and download

DreamShow speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Chinese. Download it for free at leparadise.ovh/dreamshow. The whole software is free in simulation, and a single licence, €99, drives your real fixtures, for life.

DreamShow, by Polux. Your next show starts here.

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