Interface

Last updated 7 August 2026

Backstage's interface is a set of windows you arrange yourself. Every one docks, floats, tabs and resizes freely, and a saved arrangement is a workview — so the same installation can have one layout for building the scene and another for running the show.

This page lists every window and what it is for. The groups below follow the order you build a show in, not the order they appear in the menu.

Windows are opened from the View menu, and most objects open their own window when you double-click them — a CalibratorLite node opens Calibrator Lite, a stepper opens the Stepper window.

Building the scene

Window	What it is for
Scene Objects	The scene as a tree. Where surfaces, displays, projectors and cameras are created and organised into groups — a group holds one complete scene, so several can live in one project.
Scene View	The 3D view of the installation. Place and aim objects, and judge a projector's frustum against the surface it has to cover.
Inspector	The properties of whatever is selected. It has no content of its own — the window you last selected something in decides what appears.
Surface/Projector Assignment	Which projectors cover which surfaces. Every projector in a render group covers every surface of that group automatically; this window exists only to narrow that.

Content

Window	What it is for
Assets	Everything the project can play — imported media, image sequences, capture inputs, NDI sources, generated test images, and containers that combine them.
Drop Converter Status	Progress of media being converted into playback formats by the watched-folder service.

Hardware and routing

Window	What it is for
Outputs	The sinks for audio and video. Video outputs can be split — to feed a quadrant splitter or address rectangles on an LED controller — and grouped when several carry one large image.
Video Routing	The matrix connecting projectors and displays to physical outputs. Until something is routed here it produces no signal, which makes this the usual answer to "the scene looks right but the screen is black".
Audio Routing	The same idea for audio streams, mixers and audio outputs.
NDI Routing	Routes NDI sources on the network to hardware NDI devices and input slots.
Output View	What an output is actually sending, on screen — useful when the physical device is not in front of you.

Image quality

Window	What it is for
Output Warping	Warps a projector's image on a picture of it, by dragging control points — for keystone, or for aligning overlapping projectors by hand.
Calibrator Lite	Camera-based alignment built into Backstage: photographs projected patterns and generates warp meshes and projector frustums automatically.

Playback

Window	What it is for
Sequencer	Media placed in channels along a timeline. All channels in one sequencer play in perfect sync, so sources that cannot stay in sync belong in separate sequencers.
Stepper	An ordered list of steps, each triggering one or more sequences — advanced manually, by trigger, or when a sequence finishes.
Broadcast Scheduler	A weekly timetable that starts sequences at set times on chosen days, for installations that run unattended.

Logic and operator surfaces

Window	What it is for
Node Editor	Visual programming: nodes wired together to build show logic and automation the built-in windows do not cover.
Web Consoles	The operator pages this server publishes to browsers.
Page Editor	The drag-and-drop editor those pages are built in.
DMX Mapping	How pixels of the rendered image map onto DMX channels and universes for Art-Net and sACN output.

Monitoring

Window	What it is for
Performance Overview	Frame timing, GPU memory, per-stream playback diagnostics and output status, per render group. The pre-show health check.
Log	What the server reports about itself. Severity is meaningful: a warning describes something the machine does not have, an error describes a fault.
Settings	Everything configured once per server rather than per project.