GO Moves the Pixels
Cues now do something. Press GO and the output crossfades from one look to the next over the fade time you set, on the curve you chose. Capture the look you have, name it a cue, and it becomes a thing you can hit on the night.
The cue panel has been in Lux for a while. It had a cue list. It had a GO button. It had a keyboard transport, a mode selector, and a highlight that stepped neatly down the list every time you pressed Space.
It did not change what was on screen.
Everything downstream of GO was connected right up until the last inch. Space reached the cue system, the cue system reached the transition machine, the transition machine worked out precisely what the frame ought to look like, and then nothing read the answer. The state machine had no caller. Its output had no consumer. It was a beautifully engineered doorbell wired to a bell that had never been installed, and the highlight moving down the list was the sound of nobody coming.
GO now moves the pixels.
That frame is the feature. It is not a colour anyone chose: it is a grid of blue circles one second into a two second fade toward red, caught in the middle of becoming something else.
What a cue is now
Get a look you like on screen. Press “+ Capture Cue”. That is the whole authoring story.
Capture takes a snapshot of the patch exactly as it stands and hangs it on the end of the cue list. Do it again with a different look and you have two cues. Press GO and Lux eases from the first to the second over two seconds, which is the default because it is what a live set usually wants. Drag the fade time to taste. Drag it to zero and the cue becomes a hard cut, because a zero second fade is a cut and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Here is the same patch on either side of a GO:
And the frame at the top of this post is what sits between them, for two seconds, on every frame of the fade. The transition curve you pick shapes that journey: linear if you want the change to feel mechanical, smooth if you want it to feel like it was breathed rather than switched.
The fade runs through the parameters, which means it fades anything that lives on a pin. Colours, positions, radii, angles, strengths. If you can dial it, you can fade it. Things that have no meaningful halfway house, like a checkbox or a dropdown, flip at the midpoint rather than trying to be forty percent enabled.
The panel you can now find
A wrinkle worth admitting: until this release, a fresh project could not open the cue panel at all. The panel appeared only when you loaded a project that already had cues in it, and the only way to author cues was in the panel. It was a room whose door was locked from the inside, and the key was in the room.
There is now a View menu entry and a command palette entry. Search “cue” and it turns up. You can start from an empty patch and end with a cue stack, which was the entire idea.
The part that stays quiet
The thing that scares people about a cue system is the moment it fires. A live set does not forgive a hitch, and “the visuals stuttered when I hit GO” is a worse outcome than not having cues at all.
So the fade costs almost nothing, and the rest of the time it costs actually nothing. A patch sitting between cues does one pointer comparison per frame, decides that nothing has changed, and writes not a single value. It is not re-applying a preset sixty times a second on the theory that it might as well. During a fade it touches only the values the target cue actually names, and it finds them by walking a sorted table rather than building a lookup on the fly, so a two second crossfade allocates nothing at all.
There is one honest limit. The crossfade fades parameters, not pipelines. If a cue switches something structural, a different tonemap operator or a different GI mode, that part changes over on one frame at the midpoint rather than dissolving. Blending across a structural change means rendering both looks and mixing the results, and that renderer does not exist yet. It is on the list. In the meantime the docs say so, which is a change in itself: they used to claim it already worked.
Why it matters
A cue is a promise you make to yourself in the afternoon so that you do not have to think in the evening. You set up the looks while the room is empty and the lights are up, and then, when it is dark and loud and something is going wrong at the back, you press one key and the thing you decided hours ago happens exactly as decided.
That promise only works if the key does something. It does now.