Lightwright is a proprietary software that manages
theatrical lighting
Stage lighting is the craft of lighting as it applies to the production of theater, dance, opera, and other performance arts. data and paperwork. Developed and maintained by John McKernon, the Lightwright software combines a relational database with a graphical user interface in support of user generated
instrument schedules,
channel hookup
In theatrical productions, the channel hookup is a printout of a lighting database such as Lightwright that organizes all the lighting information for a stage show by the channel number associated with the lighting equipment and limits the inform ...
s, and other lighting paperwork from a single
spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...
/
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...
.
It also provides error-checking and lighting-specific data entry shortcuts.
In the U.S. professional theater, Lightwright is the industry standard lighting database program.
The software is widely used in the production of
Broadway and other live entertainment shows, and across a number of educational and arts institutions.
History
Lightwright 1.0 was written in
QuickBASIC for
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
and released in August 1988. Lightwright 2.0 was released in January 1995 for both
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
MacOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
, and written in
Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to:
* Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET
* Visual Basic (cl ...
and ZBASIC respectively. The subsequent two versions—Lightwright 3.0 (1998) and Lightwright 4.0 (2003)—were maintained using separate code (Visual Basic / ZBASIC) for each operating system. Lightwright 5.0 (2009) was written using
RealStudio (now
Xojo
The Xojo programming environment and programming language is developed and commercially marketed by Xojo, Inc. of Austin, Texas for software development targeting macOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, iOS, the Web and Raspberry Pi. Xojo uses a proprie ...
) for both Windows and Mac, and introduced Data Exchange in support of simplified data sharing between Lightwright and Vectorworks. Lightwright 6.0 (2016) introduced a Consol Link which, through the OSC
nowiki/>Open Sound Control">Open_Sound_Control.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Open Sound Control">nowiki/>Open Sound Controlprotocol, provides integration with ETC Eos lighting consoles. Lightwright 6.0 also introduced an Avery label database, with label design and printing capabilities.
See also
*Lighting Designer
*Stage lighting
References
{{reflist
External links
John McKernon Software
Stage lighting
Stagecraft software