Glossary¶

The terms Moonshine uses, and what each one means.

Active: Whether a live source is running. An Active NDI, video device or Spout source, or web page, keeps running for the whole project, so a cue on it shows at once. When it's off, the source is closed and uses nothing, and a cue on it shows black. Set it on the source's item, or for NDI, video device and Spout sources, in Settings → Project → Video. A component (.tox) has no Active switch: it loads when playback needs it. See Live sources.
Bake: Saving a surface's sculpted shape as the one the show machine restores whenever the project opens. Sculpting reaches the projectors as you work, but only the bake survives a restart. Revert to Source discards the bake. See Baking and reverting.
Beams: The Scene view mode that shows your media only where a projector's light lands: inside a beam, facing the lens and not blocked by other geometry. Everything else is black. Formerly Projection. See View modes.
Blackout: Taking every projector to black at once while the show keeps running underneath. It fades over half a second unless the project sets another length in Settings → Project → Video → Blackout (0 is a cut). Test patterns and the Syncing screen go dark too; only the license card stays up. End Blackout brings the picture back wherever the show has reached. Use the Blackout button in the top bar, Shift+B or the command palette. A show machine that restarts during a blackout comes back blacked out. Not to be confused with a projector's Shutter, which blacks out one projector. See Blackout.
Check preview: A small live picture of an Active NDI, video device or Spout source, or web page, at the top of its details on the Assets tab. It's the show machine's own view of the source, at two frames a second, and doesn't send the source to any output. See Checking a source.
Control: One button, fader, knob or jog on the Control tab. A control can listen for a message from your desk (OSC, MIDI or timecode) and does one thing, such as a cuelist command, the blackout, a component's parameter, an action in the app, or a projector's, surface's or live input's value. A control with nothing to listen for works only on screen. See The Control tab.
Control surface: The grid of controls on the Control tab: 16 cells by 8 unless you set another size, and always large enough for its controls. Use Play to press the controls, Edit to arrange and set them up, and Learn to build them from your desk. A button is either momentary, on while you hold it, or a toggle, on until the next press. See The Control tab.
Crop: The part of a Material's picture that's shown. Set it with the Map tool's Crop mode, or in pixels under Crop in the Material's Properties. Beyond the crop's edge, the Material's Extend setting applies. Until you set it, the crop is the whole picture. See Cropping the picture.
Cue: In show language, a stored look you trigger on command. In Moonshine, a cue is one item of a cuelist: you can jump to any cue from the transport's item list, in any order, without stopping playback. See Transport and cues.
Cue tab: The tab where you build and play cuelists, with the cuelists and the Asset Browser in its sidebar, the open cuelist's list, the Preview and the transport. Formerly Cues. Not to be confused with a cue, which is one item of a cuelist. See Cuelists.
Cuelist: An ordered list of media items with a transport: play, pause, previous, next, jump to any item, and a loop mode of off, whole cuelist or single item. A cuelist shows nothing until it's connected to a surface. See Playback.
Density: How many segments a built-in surface is divided into, which sets how many points a warp can move. Set it under Density in the surface's properties. You can't change it while the surface has a warp, a baked warp that moves a point, or selection sets, because it changes the surface's points. See Built-in shapes.
Extend: What a Manual Material shows beyond the edge of its picture, or of its crop: Hold continues the edge pixels, Repeat repeats the picture, Black shows black, and Transparent shows the Materials underneath (black where there are none). A Material set to Manual for the first time starts on Transparent. UV and Projector view Materials always hold. See Extend.
Exit Hold: Releases a hold marker the show is looping: the current pass finishes and the show plays on through the marker. It's on the transport while the show is holding, and you can map it to a MIDI or OSC Advance on a control.
Fade: A cue's own ramp up from black at its start (a fade in) or down to black at its end (a fade out), with a length and easing. Only a cuelist that doesn't loop has fades: its first cue fades in when it plays from the top, and its last cue fades out as it ends. Between two cues, the change is always a transition. On a lane above the base, a clip fades to transparent instead. Drag a fade's handle on the timeline to set it. See Fade in and fade out.
Follower: A show machine that plays its leader's show: it keeps a copy of the leader's project in step and drives its own projectors. Set its Role in Settings → Cluster → Servers, where Stand alone takes it out of the show. See More than one show machine.
Hold marker: A timeline marker set to Hold. When the playhead reaches it, the show jumps back to the previous marker (or the start) and plays that stretch again until Exit Hold. Not to be confused with Hold in a Material's Extend.
Illuminance: How much light lands on a surface, as opposed to how much a projector emits, measured in lux. It decides whether an image reads in the room, and it falls as the throw gets longer or the image gets wider.
Jog: A control for a wheel or encoder on your desk. It combines a coarse and a fine MIDI controller, usually 32 apart (CC 40 and CC 72 on an Intech Grid), into one value with 16,384 steps, so it sets what it drives 128 times more finely than a fader. Learn makes one when both controllers arrive together, and Merge into a jog on Edit combines two controls into one. A jog can also Scrub the show. Set its Sends to Absolute, 14-bit or a Relative option to match the desk. See Jogs.
Keystone: The trapezoid distortion you get when a projector isn't square to the surface, and the four-corner correction that cancels it. In Moonshine's 4-Corner editor, you drag each corner of the output until the projected rectangle sits where you want it. See 4-corner keystone.
Lane: One row of a cuelist's timeline. A cuelist has its own row of cues, the Base, and up to three more lanes above it, each a row of clips laid over the lanes below at its opacity. Lanes above the base play movies, stills and live inputs, but not components or web pages. An empty stretch on any lane is a gap. See Lanes.
Leader: When several show machines play one show, the machine whose show the others play. You edit the show on the leader, and every other machine in the show is a follower. A network has one leader, chosen with Make leader in Settings → Cluster → Servers. See More than one show machine.
Lens shift: Moving the projected image up, down, left or right without moving or turning the projector. Set it as a percentage for each axis under Lens Shift. Use it before you angle a projector, because shifting keeps the image rectangular and angling doesn't.
Limit to: The part of a surface that a Material after the first covers: Whole surface (the default), a selection set, or one of the model's own materials. It appears in the Material's Properties once the surface has a selection set or a model with two or more materials. Where two limited Materials overlap, the later one wins. It only decides which media a face shows: it isn't a mask, and it doesn't move any points. See Several materials on one surface.
Local and World: How the Scene's gizmo turns and scales things. In World, the default, one gizmo follows the world's axes, and several selected things turn and scale as one group. In Local, each selected thing has its own gizmo and turns and scales around its own pivot. Moving works the same in both. Switch with the globe button beside the tools, or O. See Several at once.
Loop (a cue's): A cue that plays again from its start each time it ends, a set number of times or until you uncheck it, before the cuelist moves on. Set it in the cue's ⋯ menu under Loop ▸. Not to be confused with the cuelist's loop modes (Loop all, Loop one).
Lock: What stops two people editing the same thing at once. When someone else holds a lock, the controls in that area are dimmed and a strip reads (their name) is editing, with a Request access button. Moonshine takes locks automatically as you work and releases them when you move on. See Locks.
Lumens: A projector's rated light output, entered as Lumens (ANSI) in its settings. It's a spec-sheet number, not a measurement. Moonshine uses it, with the throw ratio and distance, to work out the illuminance on your surfaces.
Lunar: The Moonshine test card, chosen under Projectors → Test Pattern. It has labeled cells, a crosshair, diagonals, a circle, corner marks, the raster's edge, focus targets, a strip of levels, and the projector's name and resolution, and you can switch each part on or off. See Test patterns.
Lux: The unit of illuminance: one lumen spread over one square meter. The Lux view mode paints your surfaces as a false-color heatmap of lux and reports Min, Avg and Max, plus Uniformity (minimum divided by average) and Cover (the fraction of the surface reached by at least one projector). See View modes.
Main: A surface's first Material, which sits under every other Material on it and covers the whole surface. It's the one Material you can't remove, so its node and its Properties show a small lock. See Several materials on one surface.
Manual: The Mapping that places a Material's picture wherever you put it, even past the surface's edge. Place it with the Map tool, with Fit to an area, or by its Frame numbers. Beyond the picture's edge, its Extend setting applies. Dragging with the Map tool on a UV or Projector view Material makes it Manual. See Manual.
Map: The Scene tool (U) that places a Material's picture on its surface. Press U or its button to switch between Resize, with a white border to scale, stretch and move the picture; Crop, with an amber border to crop the picture or slide it under the crop; and off. It works on the selected Material, or several at once, and is grayed out until a Material is selected. A drag makes a UV or Projector view Material Manual. See The Map tool.
Mapping: How a Material's picture lies on its surface, set first in its Properties: UV (where every Material starts), Projector view or Manual. See A Material's mapping.
Mask: A stencil that controls where a projector's light can land, used to keep light off a doorway, a performer's position or the edge of a set piece. Paint it with the Brush, or draw editable paths with the Pen, in Paint or Erase mode. What you paint is held out of that projector's output. See Masking.
Material: What a surface shows: the image, video, live source or cuelist linked to it, and how its picture lies on the surface, its Mapping. Every surface has at least one, shown as a Material node in the scene graph; drop or wire media onto it, and Unlink empties it. A surface can have up to eight Materials, each covering the whole surface or limited to part of it with Limit to, and later ones are drawn over earlier ones. Until you rename them, they're called Main, Material 2 and so on. Formerly split into a Material node and a Texture node. See Putting media on a surface, A Material's mapping and Several materials on one surface.
Mesh: The Scene view mode that draws each surface as plain geometry, with no media and no projectors. From the menu under the ▾ beside the button, show its vertices as Points, its triangle edges as Lines and its surface as a shaded Fill, and turn on X-ray to make the fill see-through. Formerly Outlines and Solid. See View modes.
Next cuelist: The cuelist that starts automatically, from its first cue, when another cuelist ends. Wire it in the scene graph from the first cuelist's Finish handle to this one's Start. A cuelist can have one next cuelist, and a ring of them plays round and round. A cuelist that loops never ends, so its next cuelist waits until Loop is off. See One cuelist after another.
Opacity: How strongly a lane shows over the lanes below it, from 0 to 100%, set with the slider beside the lane's name on the timeline. A muted lane keeps its opacity. Not to be confused with a clip's sound, which is its Volume.
Pinned: A control marked to appear in the Control drawer, the part of the bottom panel beside the Scene Graph and the Timeline. With nothing pinned, the drawer shows every control; once you pin one, it shows only the pinned ones. Pins belong to the project, so the drawer is the same on every device. Pin a control with the pin at its corner on Edit, or with Pinned in the Inspector. See The Control drawer.
Pivot: The point a projector or surface turns and scales around, at its own origin until you move it. The pivot tool (L) moves the pivot without moving the thing itself. See Pivots.
Point Select: The Scene tool (E) that picks the points of a surface you want to warp, for the selected projector, into a selection set. Formerly Select. It's grayed out until the scene has a surface and a projector. See 3D surface warping.
Presence: Seeing who else is in the project: the avatars in the top bar, the colored cursors moving across the scene, and the option to follow another operator's view. See Working together.
Project: Everything that makes up one show: the projectors and their settings, the models, warps, masks, cuelists and the media library. Create, open, rename and delete projects in the project browser.
Projection mapping: Lining up projected images with real objects, so the light lands exactly where each object is. In Moonshine, you build a virtual scene that matches the room, place your projectors in it, align each one to the real surface, mask what should stay dark, then play media through it.
Projector view: The Mapping that makes a Material one projector's own content. That projector shows it across its whole picture, right to its edge and through the blend zone, and no other projector shows it. The picture is fitted to what the projector lights on the surface, and fitted again whenever the projector or the surface moves. See Projector view.
Region: A former setting that chose which part of a surface a further Material covered. It's now the Material's Limit to (a selection set or a model material) and the Projector view Mapping (a projector's view). Older projects open as they looked. See Several materials on one surface.
Scrub: Moving the show's playhead by hand, with the picture following it. Drag along the timeline's ruler, or turn a Jog set to the cuelist command Scrub. When you let go, the show carries on from there, playing or paused as it was. See The timeline and Scrub with a jog.
Selection set: A named group of points on one model, for one projector, that you warp: select the misaligned part of the surface, save it as a set, then move only those points. Sets are saved, so you can come back to the same points later. A set can also limit a further Material to that part of the surface. Add Selection Set starts a set with every point its projector lights, named after the projector; New in Point Select starts an empty one. See 3D surface warping.
Show: What a show machine plays: its open project. Servers that play together, a leader and its followers, share one show, and a standalone server plays its own. An administrator chooses it in the Show column of Settings → Cluster → Servers. The Sync channel (formerly Show name) under Settings → Cluster → Advanced isn't a show: it names the servers' sync traffic.
Soft selection: The falloff that makes a warp look like a smooth bend rather than a spike. Points inside the Radius move fully, points near its edge move partly, and Softness sets how gradual that change is. Turn on Show soft selection to see the affected area shaded before you drag.
Snap: Making the Scene's gizmo move, turn and scale in whole steps, and making moves, pivots and warp points land on a surface's nearby points or edges. The steps are a tenth of a meter, 15° and a tenth of scale unless you set your own. Turn it on with the magnet beside the Move, Rotate, Scale and pivot buttons, and choose Step, Points or Edges from the ▾ beside it. See Snapping.
Snapshot: A copy of a project's setup that the show machine takes automatically every 15 minutes: projectors, surfaces, cuelists, settings, masks, warps and blend layers, but not media. Settings → Project → Snapshots lists the open project's snapshots and restores one. See Snapshots.
Standalone: A show machine that neither leads nor follows, and plays its own show. Every server is standalone while no server leads. A server an administrator took out of the show with Stand alone stays standalone until Follow on its row makes it follow the leader again. Formerly Off or Left out.
Surface: The physical thing you project onto, such as a wall, a set piece or a vehicle, represented in the scene by a model. Add surfaces with the Scene's +, or with Add in the right-click menu of the Scene or the scene graph. See Adding projectors and surfaces and Surfaces and models.
Throw ratio: Throw distance divided by image width. With a 1.5 throw ratio, a projector 15 m away produces an image 10 m wide. It tells you whether a projector can fill your surface from where it's rigged, and Moonshine uses it to draw the projector's frustum in the scene.
Transition: How playback changes from one cue to the next, such as a cut or a dissolve. Set it for each cuelist and adjust it cue by cue. See Transitions.
UV: A surface's own coordinates for placing a picture on it, from 0 to 1 across and up. UV is also the Mapping every Material starts with (the whole picture across the whole surface by those coordinates), and the Scene view mode that shows the media on the surfaces. See UV.
Volume: How loud one cue plays, from 0 to 100%, set beside the speaker on the cue's row in the cuelist or in its properties in the scene graph. The show machine's overall output level is set in Audio. Not to be confused with a lane's Opacity.
Warp: Reshaping the projected image so it lands correctly on geometry that isn't a flat rectangle square to the lens. Moonshine has two kinds: surface warping on the Scene tab, where you move the 3D model's points to match the real object, and output warping on the Warp tab, where you correct the projector's 2D output with four corners or a bezier grid. See Alignment.
Whole surface: Every face of a surface. It's the default for a Material's Limit to, and the first area Fit to offers. See Several materials on one surface.