Documentation

LaserBridge is an effect you drop on a Resolume clip, exactly like any other video effect. It looks at the pixels the clip is actually rendering, turns them into laser geometry, and streams that to a Pangolin BEYOND projection zone — live, every frame.

Because the laser is drawn from the video, the two can never drift apart: whatever is on the wall is what the laser draws. There is no separate laser timeline to program and nothing to re-cue when you change the clip. You put one LaserBridge on each clip that should have laser, pick a mode, and the laser follows that clip's triggering automatically.

What you need

Resolume Arena or Avenue 7+ (Windows, 64-bit)
Pangolin BEYOND running on the same computer
Your laser hardware configured, zoned and armed in BEYOND as usual. LaserBridge never touches BEYOND's arming, blackout or safety settings — it only sends frames to a projection zone.

First: enable the Resolume webserver

One tick, and it's worth doing now. Resolume › Preferences › Webserver › tick “Enable Webserver”. Leave the port at its default (8080). Nothing else to configure — no browser, no login. The plugin talks to Resolume privately on your own machine and finds its own clips automatically.

Why it matters: Resolume never tells an effect whether its clip is actually triggered, previewed, or un-fired — effects keep rendering either way. The webserver is how LaserBridge knows the truth.

With it on: the laser starts when you trigger a clip, stops when you press X or clear the layer, and previewing a clip never fires the laser.

With it off: everything still works, but the laser simply follows whatever the clip renders — it can stay on after you press X. Fine for a first play, not for a show.

Quick start

Add the LaserBridge effect to a clip. If you use Auto Mask (or any keying effect), place LaserBridge after it in the chain.
Tick one mode at the top of the panel (they behave like radio buttons — picking one un-picks the rest): Trace Clip, Beam Runners, Sweep, Trace Bars, Spotlight, Laser Cannon, Trace Reveal, Grid.
Tick Arm Laser.
Set Zone (Output group) to the BEYOND projection zone you want. Zone numbers match BEYOND's own numbering, starting at 1.

Chain position matters. The laser samples the clip exactly at LaserBridge's position in the chain. Effects placed after it — including layer and composition effects — are invisible to the laser, so a colour effect on the layer will shift the video but not the beam. Put colour effects you want the laser to follow before LaserBridge.

First time only — line the laser up:

Select Grid. The laser draws a border, grid and centre crosshair filling the clip's frame.
In BEYOND, warp that projection zone until the grid sits exactly on your projected or LED image.
Switch to any other mode. Everything now lands in alignment automatically — you never align per-clip.

Getting a clean trace — use Show Mask

Every mode that traces content (Trace Clip, Beam Runners, Trace Bars, trace-style Sweeps) works from an internal black-and-white mask: white means “trace this,” black means “ignore.”

Tick Show Mask (Edge Detection group) and the video output becomes that mask — you are looking at exactly what the laser will draw. Tune with it on, then untick it.

Extract From: Luma (brightness), Alpha (transparency — cleanest if the clip has an alpha channel, e.g. after Auto Mask), or Edges.
Threshold: How bright or opaque a pixel must be to count. The main knob — raise it until only your artwork is white and background noise is gone.
Colour Key: Trace only one colour. Turn it on, pick the colour on the Key Colour strip, widen Key Tolerance until the mask catches all of it. For white content, tick Key White instead (white has no hue). Great for pulling a single element out of a busy graphic.
Min Shape Size: Throws away specks smaller than this — kills flicker from noise and grain.
Smoothing: Rounds off jagged mask edges before tracing.
Max Shapes: Cap on how many separate shapes get traced. If a shape you want is missing, raise it; if the laser looks overloaded, lower it.

The modes

Trace Clip

Draw the artwork's outlines.

The laser continuously traces the outline of everything in the mask. Logos, text, shapes — the laser redraws them live as they move and animate. Point cost grows with how complex the artwork is, so bold simple graphics look best; if a busy clip starts to flicker, lower Max Shapes or simplify the content (or use Beam Runners instead).

Trace Bars

Scrolling slices of the trace.

Like Trace Clip, but the outlines are only drawn inside moving bands that scroll across the frame — a rhythmic, scanner-style treatment of the same artwork. Because only the bands are lit, even complex artwork stays cheap.

Bars Direction: Left, Right, Top, Bottom, or “Grid (both)” for a moving lattice of horizontal and vertical bands.
Bar Width: Thickness of each lit band.
Bar Gap: Spacing between bands.
Bar Speed: How fast the bands travel.

Beam Runners

Hot beams chasing the outlines.

Bright laser beams race along the artwork's outlines. Each beam is a true hot beam — a stack of points dwelling on one spot, like a beam cue — and the plugin automatically splits the available points evenly across however many beams you set, so fewer beams means brighter beams, and the total point count (and therefore flicker) never changes.

The cost is per beam, not per shape — this is the mode for busy, detailed artwork that Trace Clip cannot afford. Also the most “laser show” looking mode on haze.

Beam Count: How many beams (the readout shows points per beam).
Direction: Which way the beams flow. Free Run is classic orbiting. The others make every beam agree: born at one side of its shape, flowing across, fading out at the far side, then reborn — Left/Right, Top/Bottom, or Center Out / Center In (each shape pulses from its own middle; on a circle, beams are born top and bottom and flow outward both ways). Great for radial artwork and anything with flow.
Beam Speed: How fast they travel along the outlines.
Beam Tail: What share of each beam's points becomes a fading comet trail instead of beam brightness (0 = pure hot beam).
Tail Length: How far that trail reaches back.
Beam Scatter: Varies the beams' speeds so they spread out instead of travelling in formation.

Sweep

The beam erases or reveals the clip.

The signature effect, and the only mode where the plugin drives the video as well as the laser: one internal position drives both the laser beam and the video mask, so they are always perfectly locked — which is what sells “the laser is burning the image away” instead of “two effects happening near each other.”

Pick a look with two dropdowns in the Sweep group — Sweep Action (Erase or Reveal) and Sweep Style (Bar or Trace):

Erase + Bar: A visible laser bar sweeps across and the video burns away to black behind it.
Erase + Trace: No bar — the beam eats the content's own outlines at the moving edge as it disappears.
Reveal + Bar: The bar sweeps across and the video appears behind it.
Reveal + Trace: The beam draws the artwork into existence — it rides the outlines at the reveal edge with a fading tail, then slides off leaving the video standing.

An un-triggered Reveal clip previews black on purpose — the content must not exist until the beam has drawn it.

How a sweep is triggered. With Auto Sweep on (the default) the sweep fires the moment the clip is triggered — perfect for reveals. For a wipe-out, keep a second copy of the clip with Action set to Erase: firing that copy is the exit.

The Fire Sweep button sits at the top of the panel, outside every group. Press it to sweep the clip that is playing right now, at its actual playhead. It is a normal Resolume parameter, so you can MIDI-map, OSC-map or keyboard-map it — a “burn it off the wall” button on your controller. With Auto Sweep off this is the only trigger, giving you full manual control; re-triggering the clip resets it to play normally again.

Sweep Time: How long the sweep takes edge-to-edge (0.3–12 s).
Sweep Angle: Travel direction, any angle.
Trail Length: How far the glow or ember trail stretches behind the edge (shared by the video trail and the laser tail).
Bar Glow: The hot core right at the edge (Bar style).
Laser Sparks: Real laser embers tumbling off the sweep edge, drawn by the beam itself. Each ember costs laser points, so it defaults to 0 — a few go a long way.

The Trail group dresses the video side of a sweep, and is rendered in the video so it costs no laser points at all:

Trail Style: None, Glow, Sparks, or Glow + Sparks.
Trail Amount: Intensity of the glow.
Spark Density / Spark Size: How many video embers, and how big.
Spark Gravity: How hard embers fall once the edge passes them.
Spark Fade: How long an ember lives before it cools to black.
Spark Colour: Ember tint (defaults to fire-orange). Video sparks and laser sparks share the gravity, fade and colour, so they read as one shower.

Spotlight

A wandering circle reveals the clip.

A laser circle roams the frame like a searchlight, and the video exists only inside it — the beam appears to be searching the wall and finding your content. Like Sweep, the plugin drives the video: the laser circle and the revealed pool are one position, always perfectly locked. A spotlight clip previews as just the pool, and that is normal — the content only exists where the light is.

Spot Size: Radius of the circle.
Move Range: How far from centre it roams (0 = stays put).
Move Speed: How fast it travels.
Randomness: 0 = smooth orbit, 1 = unpredictable wander.
Afterglow: Content the circle just left keeps glowing and cools off over this many seconds — a fading tail of everything the spotlight has recently touched.
Rim Glow: Bright video-side ring where the beam rides.
Spot Colour / Spot White: The circle's colour. White (default) is the classic followspot; untick Spot White to pick a hue on the strip.

Laser Cannon

Blast the clip into view.

Trigger the clip and it starts fully covered in black. A searingly bright laser bolt — hundreds of points concentrated into a small ring — fires at a fresh spot with every pulse, and each hit blasts a hole in the covering: an impact flash, expanding energy ripples, and the clip showing through the punched hole. The bombardment continues until the whole clip stands revealed, then the last scraps of covering wash away. Re-triggering the clip re-covers it and starts a fresh bombardment.

Fire Rate: Shots per second.
Fire Chaos: 0 = metronome, higher = unpredictable shot timing.
Hits To Clear: How many hits to fully reveal the clip (hole size adjusts automatically to match).
Ripple: Intensity of the energy ripples at each impact.
Ripple Colour: Tint of the impact ripples.
Match Laser: On (default) = ripples follow the laser bolt's Fixed Colour; off = ripples use Ripple Colour.

The bolt fires in the Colour group's Fixed Colour.

Trace Reveal

The beam draws each shape into view.

Trigger the clip and it starts covered. A single beam with a fading tail and a hot pen tip traces around the outline of the first shape (the one furthest in your chosen direction) — and the moment the trace closes, that shape is revealed. The beam jumps to the next shape in order and repeats, working its way across the screen until the whole clip stands revealed. Re-triggering covers it again.

Draw Order: Which side of the screen the show starts from.
Trace Speed: How fast the pen travels along the outlines.
Fade Tail: How much fading line trails behind the pen.

Best on artwork with a handful of clear shapes — logos, lettering, icons. The pen colour follows the Colour group as usual.

Grid

Setup pattern.

A fixed border, grid and centre crosshair for aligning the BEYOND zone to your image (see Quick Start). Not a show mode.

Beat sync

Every mode with a speed can lock it to Resolume's tempo. Each of those groups has a “… Sync” dropdown: Off (default — the mode's own speed knob rules), or 4 Bars, 2 Bars, 1 Bar, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16.

Pick a division and the mode does one “step” in that musical time:

Trace Bars: The pattern advances one slot (bar + gap) per division — on 1/4 the grid steps on every beat.
Beam Runners: A beam crosses one screen width per division.
Sweep: The sweep takes exactly that long to cross, so a 1 Bar sweep lands on the downbeat.
Spotlight: One wander cycle per division.
Laser Cannon: One bolt per division. Set Fire Chaos to 0 for a tight lock — Chaos still jitters a synced cannon.
Trace Reveal: The pen covers one screen width per division.

While a Sync division is set, that mode's speed knob is inactive and its readout says “sync 1/4” (or whichever) so you can see why.

The tempo comes from Resolume itself, not the webserver, so beat sync keeps working with Resolume Link off and on a machine with no network at all. It follows whatever Resolume's BPM is set to — tap the tempo or use its clock sync as usual.

Other settings worth knowing

Output group

Zone: The projection zone, listed as Zone 1 to Zone 16 and numbered exactly as in BEYOND. The last entry, “Custom list…”, drives several zones at once.
Zones: The typed zone list, which only appears once the Zone dropdown is set to “Custom list…”. Write zone numbers and ranges: 1, 1, 4, 7, or 1, 3-5, 8 — up to 32 zones. They need not be consecutive; real rigs get zoned 1, 4 and 7 as often as 3, 4, 5. Separators are forgiving, and anything unreadable is skipped rather than blanking the output, so the laser never drops out mid-edit. Each zone keeps its own geometric correction in BEYOND: align each once with Grid mode and the same geometry lands correctly on every rig. Zones do not share a point budget — each is its own projector drawing the full frame.
Scan Rate: Scanner speed in kpps. 30k is fine for tuning, but 8–12k usually projects sharper corners and cleaner blanking on real scanners. If corners look rounded or you see faint travel lines, come down here first.
Video Delay: Holds the laser back, for when your video wall runs a few frames behind (LED processors usually do) and the laser is therefore acting early. Raise it until the two land together; the readout shows the amount as “laser +N ms”.

Video Delay only works in one direction. If the laser looks late, this control cannot help — it can never make the laser earlier. Check that in BEYOND's previs window versus the real projector first: previs draws on the GPU with its own delay, so a laser that lags in previs can be dead-on on the wall.

Colour group

Clip Colour: Default on — the laser paints with the artwork's own colours. Untick to use Fixed Colour.
Fixed Colour / Fixed White: The colour used when Clip Colour is off. Fixed White (default on) is plain white; untick it to pick a hue on the strip.
Intensity: Overall laser brightness scale.

Scanner group

Fine-tuning for how the mirrors are driven — Point Spacing, Corner Dwell, Corner Angle, Blank Dwell and Max Points. The defaults are sensible — leave them unless you know your projector wants otherwise.

Resolume Link group

The webserver connection. Leave Port at 0 for the default 8080. The readout tells you if it cannot reach Resolume. If the webserver goes down mid-show the link fails open: the laser keeps following the video rather than going dark.

Safety

LaserBridge only ever composes frames and sends them to BEYOND projection zones. Arming, blackout, zone limits and audience safety live entirely in BEYOND and in the hands of your laser operator — nothing in this plugin can arm a laser or defeat a safety setting. Always follow local laser-safety regulations.

Static Guard (Output group, on by default) watches the output: if it degenerates into stationary dots for more than a second — say, a paused clip leaving beam runners frozen — it fades that zone to black to protect LED walls and surfaces from high-power dwell, and recovers instantly when the content moves again. Static outlines are unaffected; the beam still sweeps along them. Leave it on.

Contents