When you are satisfied, click OK at the bottom. This will make importing information back into Capture easier. Notice I kept the Capture UID and put it under the Vectorworks UID. Over in LW, open a new empty project and go to File>Import Data.Ĭhoose your file, and then LW opens a dialogue box where you can map the incoming information to the LW columns that make sense to you. I don’t need to change any of this, so I won’t. You are presented with another brief dialogue box that allows you to filter your export either with a Filter or through Selected Objects.

For most needs, though, Lightwright Text Files covers our needs. If you need those coordinates, you will either need to stay with the CSV export and then do a search and replace in your preferred spreadsheet to change A.1 to 1/1 (and onward through the Universe alphabet). It doesn’t include XYZ coordinates of any kind, which are not needed in LW, but may be helpful if you plan to export from LW to your console. The drawbacks are the info that gets left out.

I change the Addressing style of Capture from A.1 to the Lightwright-friendly 1/1. The reason you are choosing Lightwright Text Files is it translates a few things. It’s worth explaining a couple things here. From the pulldown menu (shown), you want to pick Lightwright text files, name the file and save. You’ll be presented with a dialogue box with some choices, all of which are hidden. Starting in your Capture file, go to File>Export Fixture Data. Updating to the Beta 6.0.42.413 fixed the issue. Possibly important note- when I tried to recreate these steps for this tutorial on Lightwright 6.0.41.405 on a Mac, I would go through the whole process to have a bunch of empty entries. Getting info from Capture into LW is not complicated, it just has a couple of annoying things that can mess you up. But since you are reading this, you probably already know all that. It combines all the excellence of the best spreadsheets with an integral knowledge of electricity, lighting protocols and helps me fix mistakes before I ever load in a show. I came “up through the ranks” to programmer/designer by being a Production Electrician first, so Lightwright is an indispensable tool for me. Mistakes are humbling, publishing them even more so. After writing the blog that I intended to finish my Drafting with Capture series, I belatedly realized that I had not, in fact, ever written the exporting Capture to Lightwright tutorial I thought I had.

Lightwright 6 mark