Enzyme Essentials

Engine, shell and screen

Enzyme.app is the engine, which renders and drives the outputs, with the shell, where you work, opened beside it. Enzyme Shell.app is the shell alone, for a laptop that controls an engine on another machine. Keep the apps beside their demo-media and demo-generators folders. Closing the shell asks whether to leave the engine running; leave it, and the outputs stay up until you open the shell again. On a picture-only machine, Shift-Option-U on a region window brings the shell back.

A shell on another machine. On the engine machine, Machine › This machine › Shells from: Network (from the next start). The remote shell finds engines on the network by itself, or takes an address and port. A Control key on the same page keeps everything else on the network out. Shell, engine and backup must be the same build.

The band along the top never changes: Edit or Live mode, the show's name (a dot means unsaved changes), the timecode and transport, the current and next cue, the desk, and warnings. A refusal or notice shows there in amber for 30 seconds; nothing pops up over your work. Everything Enzyme has said this run is in Messages (M).

Edit and Live mode. Shift-Cmd-S switches. Live mode is engine-wide: no shell, desk or network command can change the show file while it is on, and anything that tries is refused with its reason. Every editing control is greyed, saying Edits are off in Live mode. Transport, owners, faders, recalls, Locate, Go to cue, Send now and blackout all still work.

The nine workspaces, Cmd-1 to Cmd-9 (Ctrl on Windows, where Option below is Alt):

Right-click a tab for its shortcuts, or choose Open in its own window to put that workspace on another display. A timeline can have a window of its own the same way, from its tab. The Monitor, the DMX and OSC monitors, Messages, the set list and the keyframe editor are windows of their own too. Pin, at the top right of each, keeps it above everything, the Live screen included. Window › Bring all windows here (Shift-Cmd-W) fetches them all to this screen when one is lost on a display that is off.

Layers and their owners

The picture is a stack of layers, layer 1 at the back. Every layer has exactly one owner at a time, and the owner sets everything about it:

• Timeline: a timeline's clips drive it (with several timelines, the badge names which).
• DMX: the lighting desk drives it, through its fixture in the patch.
• Manual: you drive it, from its strip in Layers.

Nobody else can nudge a layer, so a desk fader never fights a cue. Owners change from the buttons at the foot of a strip, from a cue's Ownership tab, from the desk's own channel, or over OSC. Taking a layer by hand never changes the picture: it keeps the same clip at the same frame with the same values, and the manual controls carry on from there. That is why Live mode lets you do it without asking.

Order. Drag a row by its name on the Timeline (up is towards the front), or right-click it for Move row up and Move row down. OSC counts layers by place; the desk patch does not move with them until you press Re-lay patch under Control. Default names (Layer 3) follow their place; a name you type stays with the layer.

Showing only some. The Timeline's Rows, Layers' Strips and the Live screen's Filter menus hide layers from that view only, with one-click filters by owner. Hiding is never saved in the show and stops nothing playing; the menu turns amber when something hidden is on screen. Rows can also be grouped and folded (right-click a row, New group from here) or made tall.

Content

Codecs. HAP (all its kinds) is the performance codec: every frame stands alone, so scrubbing, reverse, speed and timecode lock are free, and 4K is as easy as HD. H.264 and HEVC play too, decoded in hardware, forward, back and at any speed; a 4K H.264 clip that must run backwards fast wants a keyframe a second. DXV and NotchLC are not played. Sound in a movie plays with it, and WAV, AIFF, M4A and MP3 files are clips with no picture. Still pictures (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, TGA, BMP, GIF, WebP, EXR, HDR and SVG) are tiles that show for as long as their clip, transparency and all.

Folders, banks and tiles. Add a content folder under Show › Content folders (a project made with New project has its media folder already). Each subfolder is a bank, each file a tile, read where they are and never copied. A name starting with three digits sets the number: 004 Song A is bank 4, 012 Opening.mov tile 12. Anything unnumbered goes from 1000 up, out of a desk's reach; Put the folder … in bank moves such a folder into a numbered bank and keeps it there. Numbers never change under you: adding a folder renumbers nothing, and a desk or cue list programmed against a number keeps working.

• Rescan picks up new files. It takes away only automatic tiles (1000 and up) whose files are gone and that nothing uses, and says how many; Undo brings them back. A numbered tile is never taken by a scan, and opening a show takes nothing away: a gone file stays a missing tile. A cloud drive's online-only file is not opened until it is made available offline.
• A file whose name ends in a version (Opening_v02 beside Opening_v01) joins its tile as a new version; take it live from the tile's Versions.
• The Inbox under the banks lists what a scan would not decide alone: number clashes (Make room or Add as version) and moved or renamed files (Relink).
• + Bank makes a numbered bank with its folder on disk. Remove bank…, beside a bank's name, removes it with its tiles; it is greyed, naming them, while a clip, a recall or a pin uses one. A rescan brings back any whose files are still there.
• A tile's inspector moves it (Move to; clips and recalls follow, desk cues dial the number and do not), renames it, pins it for the desk, or sends it to a layer. Cmd-click, Shift-click and Cmd-A pick several tiles to move, pin or clear together.
• Replace with…, in a tile's inspector, swaps it for another tile in every clip that uses it, on the timeline shown on the Timeline tab (This one) or all of them, limited by layer, section or time if you like, recalls included, as one undo step.

Live inputs. Under Video › Inputs: + Camera (anything the Mac sees as a camera), + SDI input (Blackmagic, with Desktop Video installed), + NDI source, + Syphon source and + Web page. Each becomes a tile in an Inputs bank and is played like a clip; the device opens while a layer shows it.

Playing by hand

In Layers, click Manual at the foot of a strip, then pick a Media folder and file (or a Generator). The play modes are Stop, Play, Loop, Pause and To end; Retrigger at 0 restarts the clip whenever opacity comes up from nought, and TC locks it to incoming timecode from a start address. In and Out set the part played. Speed runs negative for reverse. Below come opacity, position, scale, aspect, rotation, colour, mask, key, blur, the generator's and effect's values, the transition and the sound's bus and level.

Colour reads as RGB gains (1 is normal, up to 2), HSI (with a colour wheel to click or drag, and Larger for a bigger one in its own window) or XY (with a chart of the Rec. 709 triangle). The form is only how this machine shows it: what is kept is always the gains.

The picture at the top of a strip is Src, the source as it plays, or Out, the layer's finished picture before any mapping. Copy and Paste under the mapping carry all of a layer's settings, or one group (colour, geometry and so on), between strips, clips and shells; Paste goes only onto a manual layer, and Revert paste stays a minute.

Manual recalls

A recall stores the manual layers' settings, every layer's owner, or both, at a bank and tile, and brings them back from the shell, a cue, the desk or OSC (/recall 3 12). Store recall in Layers opens the store row: what to store, where, and Store, Merge or Replace. Media › Manual Recalls shows them with a picture of what each gives when fired, and Fires them. Firing glides each manual layer to its stored values over the stored transition; a layer that is not Manual is left alone and named in the band. Edit blind changes a recall without touching the screens, with If fired now showing the result. A recall can instead be an OSC script: rows of OSC run in order when it fires.

Getting it on the screens

Five things, from the outside in:

• A canvas is a space things are placed on. Most shows need only the one they start with.
• A raster is a picture at a size you choose (the screen's, or the LED processor's input), placed on a canvas.
• A region is an area of a raster. Regions are the outputs: a region is sent to a display, NDI or Syphon, mapped to LED fixtures, or simply used as an area to land in. A new raster has one region, the whole of it.
• A mapping draws a layer onto a canvas, a raster, each raster, or a content canvas of its own. Layers, clips, the desk and OSC choose a mapping by number. Mapping 1, Default, puts the whole picture on every raster once, and is kept in step for you.
• A rect belongs to a mapping: it takes part of what the mapping draws onto (its Source Rect) and puts it in a region (its Destination Rect).

Everything landing in a region is drawn in layer order. A raster's regions stack, 1 at the bottom, and a region shows what the regions beneath it show unless its Background is Black, so a region sent to a projector can sit above the quadrants it takes.

1. Mappings (Cmd-4): pick the raster and give it the screen's size and its place on the canvas.
2. Add regions for the areas that matter (an LED panel, a projector's share), or right-click a region for Duplicate… to make a row of them.
3. New from this on a mapping makes one to edit; set Draws onto and Fit, then + Rect for each region it should land in. The Source panel above the canvas shows the source side, with each rect's Source Rect to drag. Position as destination and Size as destination make a picture run on across several regions with nothing typed.
4. Put a layer on the mapping from the mapping list on its strip, or with Apply to.
5. Video (Cmd-5): send each region to a display (Window while setting up, Full screen for the show), and tick Send as NDI or Share as Syphon where wanted.

On the canvas, a click picks the smallest thing under the pointer and a second click the next out; only what is picked moves, so a stray drag moves nothing. Cmd-scroll or a pinch zooms; Shift or Lock aspect keeps a shape. V opens the Monitor, which shows the canvas or, under Outputs, exactly what one region sends.

Projectors. On a region: Keystone by corners or a 3×3 or 4×4 grid, Soft edges for blends (width in pixels and a gamma near 2.2), and a Mask polygon. Line-up pattern puts a grid, circle and bars through all of it. Each region also has a Look (intensity, colour, gamma, colour temperature) that a desk can drive through a Region fixture.

Rates and the output stage. Show › Frame rate is the rate everything renders and sends at; Timecode rate under it is separate. In Video each raster's destinations have a stage: rotation, brightness, gamma, a delay of up to 30 frames, 8 or 10 bit, dither, colour temperature and a Lookup table from any .cube file in a content folder. For genlock, lock the display in the operating system, then set Machine › Render clock to that display.

Sound goes out on the device chosen under Show › Audio out, in eight buses each with its own device and channels; a layer picks its bus. A/V offset lines it up with a late screen.

LED fixtures are mapped from a region in Pixels: add fixtures from a channel order or a GDTF file, place them on the picture, give them universes, and choose raw or calibrated colour. The full guide covers matching by eye, metering and the white ladder.

The timeline and cues

A timeline is a clock with clips laid along it in sections, and cues marking the moments that matter. Go runs it to the next cue, which then does what its Then says. A show can have several timelines running at once, each driving the layers it owns.

Sections

Click the section bar under the ruler to set a section's Start and Length and what happens at its end: hold, continue into the next, restart section until Go, or loop clips until Go (the playhead stops, each clip plays on by its own play mode). A section either runs free or chases timecode. + Section at playhead splits one there; right-click the ruler for Insert time… and Remove time….

Every timecode field takes short entries (10:23 is 10:23:00:00) and units (1m30s, 12f), and a cue's time or a clip's start can be typed against its neighbours: +3s after the one before, -2s before the one after.

Clips

• Put the playhead where the clip starts, click the layer's track, and press + Clip at playhead. If the timeline does not own that layer yet, Enzyme offers a cue that hands it over: take it.
• Or build the look on a manual layer and press Capture manual state; Update from manual state refreshes a clip later.
• Drag a clip's middle to move it (up or down to another layer), its ends to trim; edges snap, Option for none. Fades are drawn on the block, and the handles at its top corners drag their lengths. Overlapping clips cross over the overlap; butted clips use the incoming clip's transition, shaded where it runs.
• The inspector along the bottom has the clip's start, length, in point, fades and mapping, then the same controls as a strip, editing this clip's own settings. At file end says what happens when the file runs out first: Loop, Hold or Release.
• Cmd-click, Shift-click or drag a box to pick several; a change in the inspector then goes to them all. Right-click a clip for fades, cut, copy, paste, Split at playhead, Change media tile from here and Join with next.
• Keyframes… (or a double-click on the clip) opens the keyframe editor for any continuous setting. Keys belong to the clip and move with it.
• Free-running gives a background loop a clock of its own, so a Go never makes it jump. Master and Follows make one look play in several places. A track's Override… holds a setting over every clip on it.

Cues

+ Cue at playhead (C) adds one, numbered between its neighbours (1.5 between 1 and 2). The cue editor's tabs:

• Cue: number, name, time, Blackout on or off, a manual Recall to fire, and Then: continue, hold, reset to the timeline's start, jump to a cue and play, jump to a cue and hold there, loop to a cue until Go, or lock or release timecode.
• Ownership: hand any layers to a timeline, the desk or manual.
• Sends: OSC messages and device commands, each with a Send to try it now, and commands to other timelines: Go, Hold, Pause, Stop, Reset, Start and play (Reset, then Go), Go to time (a time in that timeline's own timecode, then play or hold), or Go to cue. Bring to view turns shells following cues to that timeline.

A cue's sends and commands go when it is reached or fired, never again when the playhead is located back over it. The cue list beside the lanes is a table, its columns dragged wider at their header; a Does column says what each cue does, and chips above it narrow the list by section or by what the cues drive.

Ways to see a timeline

• Cue list view, ticked on the tab's right-click menu, draws the timeline as a list: a row for each cue, section start and clip start, a column per layer, not to time. Drag a clip to another row or column, double-click a name or time to type it. The lanes are still where trims and keyframes are edited.
• Click CUES in the gutter to open the cue band into a lane per thing the cues drive (each other timeline, OSC destination, device, recalls, owners): the way to read a master cue list.
• A timeline that is mostly cues can run cue by cue (tab menu, Runs): then one Go is one cue, and a Continue cue's gap is the wait before the next.

Timecode

A timeline counts from its TC start (the button in its transport bar), and every time on it is in that timecode. It runs on its own clock until a lock takes it: a section set to chase locks inside that section, waiting at its start until the timecode is there (WAIT TC); a Then: lock the whole timeline cue, or the TC lock toggle, follows the timecode anywhere on the timeline. Release cues let go. While waiting, Go runs on the timeline's own clock instead. If timecode stops, When timecode stops (Control) says what a locked timeline does.

More than one timeline

Each timeline is a tab above the transport (▶ running, ⏸ halted mid-show, ★ the master). Right-click a tab to rename, duplicate, move, make the master, give it its own window, or Detach it: a detached timeline is yours to edit during the show, with your own playhead and the engine peeking at what it would show, until Rejoin puts it back as one change. The master is the one the band reports and timecode out sends; the Live screen runs whichever is picked there.

In Show each timeline either plays when the show opens or waits for Go.

Running the show

Shift-Cmd-S enters Live mode. The Live screen has the show's state on the left (timecode, sections, a Layers or Timelines tab, and the rasters' pictures at the foot), the operator's column in the middle (the current cue, the next one, a picture of what each screen will show when it fires, GO, the transport, the master and blackout, and the cue list) and the engine's health on the right. The middle column stays still: long cue names are cut to a line, and the space for the next-cue pictures is kept when there is none.

• Go (Tab or G) is the one button that moves the timeline on: from a hold, a pause or a stop, and on from a loop or a wait for timecode. There is no separate Play.
• Hold stands by for the next Go (a Hold cue, Stop, a skip). Pause (P) freezes a run in the middle. They look alike; at a loop-until-Go end, or on a cue-by-cue timeline, clips keep looping while held and freeze when paused.
• Stop goes to the start of the section and holds; double-click it for Reset, the start of the timeline with its starting owners put back.
• ← → skip to the previous or next cue and hold, the cue standing by for Go; Option-, and Option-. skip by section.
• B or the Blackout button is blackout and back, for every output. It is on the Live screen, the Timeline's transport bar and the Layers bar.
• With several timelines, the Live screen runs the one picked on its Timelines tab, and GO names it.
• The set list (S, and the Live screen's Set list tab) is the night's running order: a row per timeline, with its start cue, its own transport, notes and Skip, and note rows between. It is a file of its own, changed in Live mode too, with its own undo. A cue's + Timeline line can name Next in set list or Previous in set list, found from the current row when the cue fires, so skipping or moving a row changes the order without touching a cue. Option-drag a row's ≡ to move it; Delete fires at once and Cmd-Z brings it back.
• Double-click a layer's tile for its values and owner buttons, to take it by hand if the desk goes away.

Space does nothing unless Machine › Transport keys says Space and Tab, so a knocked keyboard is safe. Leaving Live mode asks first.

A backup engine

Under Machine › Backup, set the show machine to Leads with the backup's address and the backup to Follows with the leader's. The backup mirrors the show, playhead and owners within a frame, and goes live by itself if the leader is lost; shells turn to it, and the leader stands down so the desk gets each cue once. The picture path is switched outside Enzyme (NDI fails over by itself). Follow the leader again on the backup hands back at a quiet moment.

Desk, timecode and OSC

The desk drives layers over Art-Net or sACN as fixtures. The patch is in Control: each layer's universe, address and mode (Full 144 channels, Standard 102, Basic 39, and Extended versions of the first two for generator values 9 to 16 and a colour block). Export GDTF gives the desk programmer the personality; Re-lay patch… lays the fixtures out again in layer order. There is a Show fixture, a Transport fixture per timeline, and optional Recall, Region and Group fixtures. A layer follows the desk only while its owner is DMX; if the desk stops, the last values hold. Clips are dialled by bank and tile, which is why the numbers matter. The DMX monitor (D) shows what the desk sends to the selected layer, and what a pixel map puts on the wire.

Timecode in, under Control: tick Read timecode, then LTC from an audio input and channel, or Art-Net timecode on the network, following one sender and one Stream (0, the master stream, unless set). Timecode out sends the master timeline's position as LTC on an audio output or a bus, and as Art-Net timecode with its own stream number; it is silent while the timeline is stopped. When timecode stops chooses whether a locked timeline holds or runs on.

OSC arrives on UDP port 9000 unless the engine was started on another, and is shown under Control and in the OSC monitor (O), which lists every message received and sent. Transport addresses act on the master, or on another with /timeline/N/ in front; layer values act on manual layers; /show/blackout 1 and 0 black out and restore. Every address is in the full guide's appendix. Cues send OSC to the destinations named under Cue send destinations.

A MIDI surface. A fader box, pad controller or Mackie-style surface drives Enzyme through Enzyme MIDI.app, in the build folder: learn a control, type the OSC it sends, and its lights and motor faders follow what Enzyme reports. It can send to the show's other devices too. The Enzyme MIDI Guide, in docs, covers it.

Outboard devices (Control › Devices) are matrices, switchers and processors a cue can command: Lightware LW3, Videohub, tvONE CORIOmaster and CORIO2, RossTalk, Extron SIS, Kramer, or raw text. Add common commands fills in a starter set; Send tries one now.

Generators, effects and transitions

Generators are pictures Enzyme draws: bars, solids, gradients, shaders, and text, timecode, clock, countdown and pixel-ID readouts. They are tiles in Media › Generators, picked on a strip or clip like clips, with up to sixteen values each (sweepable). Any ISF shader dropped in a generator folder becomes one, and a saved file reloads within a second or two (in Live mode, once Live mode ends).

An effect is a second generator run on the layer's finished picture; the shipped vidvox-isf bank (bank 11) has sixteen filters. A shader input that takes a picture shows as a tile picker, which can take another layer's or a region's picture from bank 0: tiles 1 to 50 are layers' sources, 51 to 100 their outputs, 110 and up regions. Keying is on the strip: luma, or chroma with a hue and Green screen and Blue screen buttons.

Transitions are set per layer and per clip: cut, dissolve, dip to black, or a transition shader, over a Time typed as 2s, 12f, 1m 30s or a timecode. Overlapping clips cross over the overlap; butted clips use the incoming clip's transition from the join; a manual or desk change of file uses the layer's.

Shows, projects and saving

• Cmd-N makes a project folder on the engine's disk, with media, generators, backups and fixtures folders and a saved show. Folders inside it are saved relative to the show, so the whole folder can be copied to another drive or machine. Shift-Cmd-O opens a project folder.
• Cmd-S saves and Cmd-O opens; the last show reopens at launch (if its file is missing or unreadable, an empty show opens and the band says why). With a backups folder, each save keeps the file it replaces (the last 50), Autosave writes there while there are unsaved changes, and File › Revert to backup… opens one.
• A content folder moved or renamed: Change location… beside it on the Show page, or the Inbox's suggestion. Nothing renumbers.
• Cmd-Z undoes, Shift-Cmd-Z redoes; a drag is one step. Number boxes take sums (1920/2). The full change log is in Show.
• Cmd-Q asks whether to leave the engine running. Closing a region window sends that region to no display; it never stops the engine.
• In Show, each timeline plays or waits for Go when the show opens. Wait is the safer choice for a live show.

When something is wrong

Start with Messages (M): every notice, refusal and fault this run, with where it came from, and the engine's and shell's logs. A red errors unread count in the band opens it.

Keys worth knowing

On Windows, Cmd is Ctrl and Option is Alt. Help › Keyboard shortcuts… has the full list.