Help Center / Fixture profiles

If you can’t find your fixtures in the built-in library, we recommend the following:

1. Some simple fixtures work with one of the generic profiles in the library. This includes conventional lights with a single dimmer channel, dimmer and switch packs, many LED strips, and single-channel fog machines. An overview of the generic profiles can be found in the appendix of the Lightkey User Guide.

   Open User Guide

2. Search our online fixture library, which contains high-quality profiles in Lightkey’s native format and is updated more often than the application.

   Go to fixture library

3. We can create a profile for your fixture if you send us the necessary information. We need the fixture’s DMX chart (usually part of the fixture manual and/or available for download from the manufacturer website) and the manufacturer and model name.

   Request a fixture profile

4. Create a profile using Lightkey’s built-in fixture editor or import a profile in the formats SSL2 (Sunlite) or PFF/FXT (DMX FreeStyler). There are thousands of profiles available on the Internet. Imported fixture profiles may need a bit of editing in the fixture editor before they work correctly with Lightkey.

When you connect conventional lights through a dimmer or switch pack, you should patch several of the generic one-channel profiles—e.g. PAR Wash, PAR Spot, Bulb, Switch, depending on what you connect to the dimmer pack—to consecutive DMX channels. This way each light appears as an individual fixture in the Preview and you don’t need a custom fixture profile for the dimmer pack. The DMX address of the first light should match the address of the dimmer pack.

Most decoders for LED strips work with one of the generic fixture profiles in the built-in library, so you do not need a custom profile. You can find an overview of the generic profiles in the appendix of the Lightkey User Guide. See the documentation of your LED decoder to find out which channel layout it uses.

Example: A decoder with eight outputs and an RGBW channel layout occupies 8 × 4 = 32 DMX channels. Patch the generic profile “LED Strip (RGBW)” eight times to consecutive channels. The DMX address of the first LED strip must match the address of the decoder.

Absolutely. Lightkey includes a powerful, easy-to-use fixture editor built right in the application. This way you can quickly jump to a fixture’s profile and don’t need to restart the app after making changes. We recommend that you look at profiles for similar lights to learn about the fixture editor.

Lightkey comes with a library of over 5000 native fixture profiles, and you can find more in our growing online fixture library. Lightkey can also import any profile in the popular formats SSL2 (Sunlite) and PFF/FXT (DMX FreeStyler), of which thousands can be found on the Internet. In total, Lightkey can read more fixture profiles than any other DMX app!

In addition, we’ve built a powerful, easy-to-use fixture editor right into the application so you can create custom profiles or make changes to the imported or built-in profiles.