What is show control?

What is show control?

Show control is the system that decides what happens when in a space. It drives light, sound, video, machinery and anything else that can close a contact, and it makes sure those things land on the same frame instead of shortly after one another.

The difference with separate equipment is in the word system. A lighting desk knows nothing about the media player. The media player knows nothing about the cylinder under the chair. Show control is the layer above that drives all three from a single cue list, and that knows what the home state looks like when something goes wrong.

In practice you recognise it by what does not happen: nobody switching on three devices in the right order at eight o'clock, no show drifting out of sync halfway through, and no morning spent working out why the room is dark.

Why not just use separate equipment?

Because separate equipment works fine right up to the moment something goes wrong. Starting up once a day is something a person can do. Returning a room to an exact home state forty times a day, after a group that touched everything, is not.

There is a second reason: timing. A sound effect that arrives half a second after the movement is no longer an effect, it is a fault the audience cannot name but does feel. Separate devices each following their own clock slowly drift apart. One system driving all of them does not.

The third reason is the day you are not there. A power cut on a Sunday morning has to resolve itself. That only works if something knows what the home state looks like and can get there on its own.

Cues, timelines and state machines

A cue is a single moment: dim this light, start that video, close that contact. A cue list is the order of them. If you have written an experience up properly you can read the cue list out loud and everyone in the room understands what is going to happen, including the set builder.

A timeline is a cue list with time in it: the curtain opens at second twelve, the light comes up at second fourteen. That works beautifully for a show with a fixed duration, and badly for a space where the visitor sets the pace.

For that you use a state machine: the system knows a number of states (empty, running, solved, reset) and knows which transitions are allowed. An escape room is a state machine. So is a bar with day parts. The advantage is that the system never ends up in a state nobody designed, because that transition simply does not exist.

Almost every project we build contains all three: a timeline inside a cue, cues inside a state, and a state machine holding the whole thing together.

Which protocols belong to show control?

DMX512 is the standard for lighting control: 512 channels per universe, over a cable or over the network. Art-Net and sACN are the same DMX data carried over ethernet, so you do not have to pull cable through the entire building.

OSC (Open Sound Control) is the lingua franca between software: media servers, audio software and show control all speak it, and it carries more than a number from zero to 255. MIDI and SMPTE come from the theatre world and are mostly used to run devices on a shared timecode.

For the mechanical side you speak Modbus or Profinet to a PLC, or you simply use 24 V inputs and outputs: a contact that closes is still the most reliable signal there is. Alongside that run TCP, UDP, HTTP and MQTT connections to anything with a network port.

Which ones you use depends on what is already installed. Anything speaking one of these protocols, we can talk to. If there is a closed system in the chain with no control interface, you hear that from us before you order it.

The protocols explained in detail →

What is the difference between show control and home automation?

Home and building automation handles heating, lighting, blinds and access. It is designed for comfort and energy, on a timescale of minutes, and it is allowed to respond a second late.

Show control is designed for the moment. The timescale is a frame, not a minute, and the order is sacred. A building automation system that dims the light while the video is already running is a building automation system doing its job. In an experience it is a fault the audience feels.

The second difference is the home state. Building automation has nothing to return to. Show control has to sit at exactly the same starting point after every group, every show and every power cut, or cue one no longer matches next time.

The comparison in detail →

Where show control runs

In theme park attractions, where a show with hundreds of cues resets itself dozens of times per hour and has to know when the park is open. In dark rides, where scenes trigger on vehicle position instead of a timer that drifts.

In escape rooms, where the reset between two groups is the difference between ten minutes of turnaround and a lap around the room. In immersive rooms, where sensors take over the operator's job and the visitor presses start themselves.

In museums, where the installation follows the building and has to run for ten years without a caretaker. And in bars and social venues, where lunch, evening drinks and late night each have their own light and volume without anyone touching a fader.

What does show control cost?

An escape room or a single themed space usually starts around 8,000 euro in equipment and work. A dark ride or a room with machinery runs into the hundreds of thousands.

The difference is rarely in the software and almost always in the number of driven components and the safety requirements. Driving twenty lights does not cost twenty times what one light costs; a safety chain that has to be certified genuinely does cost more than a cabinet that does not.

After one conversation and a floor plan we give you a range, not three weeks later.

The cost guide with the breakdown behind it →

Build it yourself or have it built?

Building it yourself is possible, and for a first room with a handful of props it is a good education. The limit usually arrives at the third project: that is when the first room's solution turns out not to scale, nobody remembers which wire goes where, and the person who built it works somewhere else now.

If you have it built, the question that matters is not what it costs but what you get handed over. Schematics, source code and credentials should be yours the moment the invoice is paid. You are free to have the system modified by whoever you like. We come back because you want us to, not because you are stuck with us.

Why you should get the source code →