From first launch to a running show.

Raedia is a local-first media server that drives screens — projectors and LED walls over ordinary HDMI or DisplayPort — with a serious mapping engine behind it. It mixes video, images, live camera feeds and generated visuals in real time on the GPU, warps that output onto whatever physical surface you are projecting on, and lets you drive the whole thing live from the keyboard, a MIDI controller, or a phone.

The design goal is a simple one: Resolume-grade power with consumer-grade ease. The wedge is a mapping surface that a non-technical operator can actually drive on the night, without a specialist engineer standing behind them.

How it is built

Everything that matters about Raedia follows from three architectural decisions: it is GPU-native, it is local-first, and its control surface is a web page.

The feature set at a glance

The table below is the short version; the full, itemised matrix is in Appendix A.

System requirements

Installing Raedia

1. Download the installer from raedia.dev (or the beta link you were sent). It is a standard Windows installer.
2. Run it. Because the Beta installer is not yet code-signed with a paid certificate, Windows SmartScreen may show a “Windows protected your PC” notice on first run. Click More info → Run anyway. This is expected for the Beta and does not indicate a problem with the file.
3. Launch Raedia. The app opens on the Home screen, which shows your licence state, the phone-remote address, and any recent shows.

Trial & demo mode

On a fresh install Raedia runs in trial / demo mode. Everything works so you can learn the whole tool, with two limits:

• The output carries a demo watermark — you'll see a banner reading “Demo mode — output is watermarked. Unlock to remove it.”
• Saving shows is reserved for an unlocked seat.

When the trial window ends you'll see a Trial ended prompt. Your show is not lost — it stays exactly as it is; you simply unlock to drop the watermark and keep saving.

Activating your licence

There are two ways in, both reached from the activation prompt or the Licence panel on Home:

1. Unlock Raedia → opens the buy page in your browser, where you pick an edition, pay, and get a key on the screen.
2. I already have a key → reveals a paste box. Paste your signed licence token and press Apply key. The status badge in the top-right switches to your tier (for example, Pro) and the watermark disappears.

Raedia's window has three fixed parts: a side rail on the left that switches between the major views, a top bar with your show and layout tools, and the view itself filling the rest of the window.

The side rail & the six views

The rail carries the Raedia mark and one entry per view. Click any entry to switch. Use the « / » toggle at the top of the rail to collapse it to a slim icon strip when you want more room for the view (your choice is remembered).

The top bar

The top bar shows the current view's name on the left. On the right, from the desktop app, you get:

• Show tools (on any view except Home): Media Manager, Snapshots, Export video — see §5.
• Send to screen plus New, Open and Save show — see §8 and §12.
• Layout tools: save a named preset, set/load your default layout, reset — see §4.
• Status badge: your licence tier and connection state.

Status badge & banners

The status badge reads e.g. Pro · online. “online” means Raedia is currently in touch with the licence server; “offline” simply means it hasn't checked in recently — an entitled seat keeps its tier regardless. Two banners may appear across the top when relevant: the demo-mode watermark banner (trial), and a free-updates ended notice (a lapsed annual-updates seat keeps running, it just can't install new versions).

Every working area in Raedia — the previews, the mixer, the effects rack, the source inspector — lives in a panel. Panels can be collapsed, floated out into their own window, moved to a second monitor, and snapped back. You can save the whole arrangement as a named layout and reload it at any venue.

Detaching (floating) a panel

Each panel has a frame with a title bar. Use the frame's controls to:

• Collapse / expand — fold a panel down to its title bar to save space. (Grid rows on SHOW collapse the same way.)
• Undock (float) — pop the panel out of the docked layout into a free-floating window you can position anywhere, including a second monitor for a clean operator view. When a panel floats, it leaves a dock slot behind so you can see where it came from.

Redocking

To put a floating panel back, drag it to its dock slot or snap it to the top of the workspace — Raedia redocks it into the layout. This lets you break panels out for setup and reassemble a tidy operating layout for the show.

Layout presets & your default

The Layout tools group in the top bar manages arrangements:

SHOW is where you build and play the visuals. It is a grid of clips arranged in columns (which you fire as looks) and layers (which stack on top of each other), with a mixer, an effects rack, previews, and an A/B crossfader around it. If you have used a clip-launching visuals tool before, the shape will be familiar; if you haven't, the walkthrough below builds it up from nothing.

Composition settings

A composition is your show's canvas. Its settings — name, resolution (size) and frame rate (fps) — define the pixels everything else is mixed into and then mapped from. Set these to match your output target (for example 1920×1080 @ 60 for a single projector, or the pixel dimensions of your LED processor's canvas).

Layers, columns & decks

Three building blocks organise the grid. You can have up to 20 of each.

Managing the grid

Add rows and columns from the grid's controls (add layer, add column, add deck). Each layer and column can be duplicated, cleared, or renamed (a # token auto-numbers them). Collapse a layer row to tuck it out of the way while keeping it live.

1. Add a layer — click add layer. It appears as a new row with its own opacity, blend and effects.
2. Add a column — click add column to create a new empty look across all layers.
3. Load a clip — drop media onto a cell, or click the cell and pick a source (next). The cell becomes a clip tile showing a thumbnail.
4. Fire it — click a clip to play it on its layer, or fire the column header to launch the whole look.

Clips & sources

A clip is a cell holding a source. Click an empty cell to open the Source picker — “Choose a source” — and pick from:

The Source Inspector

Select a clip to open the Source Inspector, where you set how that source sits in the frame and plays back:

Layer controls, mixing & blend modes

Every layer carries its own mix controls, shown in the Mixer:

• Opacity — how strongly the layer shows over the ones beneath.
• Blend mode — how it composites down: Normal, Add, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Difference, Exclude.
• Audio — per-layer volume, mute and solo.
• Solo / bypass / mask — isolate a layer, bypass it, or feather a rectangular mask over it.
• Layer colour — a colour tag from the palette so you can read the grid at a glance.

The A/B crossfader

The crossfader mixes between two buses, A and B. Assign layers to the A mix or the B mix, then move the crossfader to blend from one set of looks to the other — the classic way to transition a room between two scenes by hand or by controller.

1. Assign layers to bus A or bus B.
2. Position the crossfader at A (or B) to start.
3. Sweep it across live — or bind it to a MIDI fader (see §9) — to transition.

Clip & column transitions

Rather than hard cuts, clips and columns can transition when fired. Set a transition's duration (in seconds) and its easing: Linear, Ease In, Ease Out, or Ease In/Out. A duration of zero is an instant cut. This gives every cue a smooth, musical feel without manual fader work.

Media Manager · Snapshots · Export Video

Three tools sit in the top bar on SHOW (and other views):

Raedia ships 31 GPU effects plus a framework for loading more. Effects run on the graphics card, so you can stack several and still hold frame-rate. They can be placed on an individual clip or on a whole layer.

Applying & stacking effects

1. Select a clip (for a per-clip effect) or a layer (for a per-layer effect).
2. Add an effect from the effects rack — choose from the catalogue.
3. Adjust its parameters — each effect exposes its own controls (see the reference below).
4. Stack more — add several effects; they process in order, top to bottom.

Animating parameters & envelopes

Effect parameters aren't static. You can animate them over time and shape them with envelopes / curves, and you can drive any parameter from audio (an FFT band) or a control input (§9). That is how you get an effect to pulse to the music or sweep on a fader.

The 31 built-in effects

The full parameter reference is in Appendix B. In brief, the catalogue is:

Beyond the built-ins: ISF, FFGL, LUTs & masks

Layers also carry three “compositor passes” that sit alongside the effect chain:

The Mapping Surface is Raedia's signature. It takes the composite you built on SHOW and lands it precisely on a physical screen — a projector at an angle, an odd-shaped set piece, a wall of LED panels. You carve the output into regions, warp each one onto its surface, mask out what shouldn't show, and blend overlapping projectors.

Regions & slices

A region (also called a slice) is one rectangle of your composite sent to one place on the output. Every region has two halves:

• Input Selection — which part of the composite this region shows. Drag to pan the source rectangle, drag its handles to resize it — you're framing the top/bottom/left/right of the artwork.
• Output Transformation — where and how that content lands on the physical output.

You can add regions, duplicate a region (same shape and settings, offset so you can grab it), remove one, or stretch a region's destination to fill the whole output. Assign each region to an output (or leave it Unassigned, which shows nothing).

Warp & masks

Enter Map edit mode to shape a region's destination:

Outputs

The editor drives one output at a time — pick which from the output selector. Raedia distinguishes:

• Physical output / Primary output — a real display connected to the machine.
• Network output — send the mapped result on to another destination on the network.
• Full mix (all layers) — the complete composite as the source for a region.

Edge blending

When two projectors overlap to cover a wide surface, edge blend feathers the overlap so the seam disappears and the image reads as one. Set the blend on the overlapping edges of the regions involved.

Output presets & virtual screens

Save an entire output configuration as an output preset so you can recall a venue's mapping instantly. Virtual screens let you build and rehearse a mapping offline — before you're physically at the venue with the real projectors.

Building a show fills the SHOW grid and the Mapping Surface; going live pushes the mapped result out to your projector or LED wall.

1. Connect your output as a normal Windows display (extend, don't mirror).
2. Pick the screen. If more than one display is attached, use the Screen… selector in the top bar to choose which one — it lists each display and marks your primary (“this one”).
3. Send to screen. Click the screen button. Your mapped output goes full-screen on the chosen display and the button shows it is live.
4. Run the show — fire columns, sweep the crossfader, trigger clips, drive effects. Everything you do on SHOW appears on the output in real time.
5. Stop output by clicking the live button again.

The Control view maps external hardware and protocols onto anything in your show — fire a clip from a pad, sweep an effect from a knob, take a cue from a lighting desk. Bindings you set here are saved with the show, so a mapped rig reloads at the next venue.

The dashboard

Raedia exposes controllable parameters on a dashboard — the set of things you've made available to map and to drive from the remote. Build the dashboard up with the parameters that matter for your show so the important controls are one surface.

MIDI

1. Connect your controller — it appears under MIDI devices. Multiple devices are supported and kept distinct.
2. Press Learn next to the parameter you want to control.
3. Move the control on your hardware — the knob, fader or pad. Raedia binds it.
4. Repeat for every control you want. MIDI clock in/out keeps tempo-based features in sync.

MIDI mapping extends to effect parameters, so a controller knob can drive, say, a blur radius or a hue shift directly.

OSC

OSC in/out lets other software and touch-surface apps (e.g. TouchOSC) send and receive control messages — useful for custom control layouts and show-control integration.

DMX / Art-Net / sACN

Raedia speaks the lighting-world protocols DMX, Art-Net and sACN as control — so a lighting console or timeline can trigger and drive Raedia as part of a larger show, keeping visuals and lighting in lockstep.

Keyboard shortcuts & Quick Search

Map keyboard shortcuts to fire cues and toggle controls hands-on. Quick Search lets you find and add effects and sources by name without hunting through menus.

REST / HTTP API

For deeper integration, Raedia exposes a REST/HTTP API, so external systems and show controllers can drive it programmatically.

Raedia's remote is a genuine differentiator: the same interface runs, zero-config, in any browser on your network. No app to install on the phone, no pairing.

1. Find the address — the Phone remote panel on Home (and the Remote view) shows the network address to open.
2. Open it on a phone, tablet or laptop on the same network — just type the address into a browser.
3. Drive the show — fire clips, move faders and trigger the parameters you exposed on the dashboard, from anywhere in the room.

Wire is Raedia's node-based patcher — a visual canvas where you wire nodes together to build custom sources, effects and signal flows that go beyond the built-in catalogue. If SHOW is the instrument, Wire is the workshop where you build new instruments for it.

The Wire workspace

Nodes, ports & signals

Each node has typed ports carrying signals — numbers, booleans, text, 2-D/3-D vectors, colours, textures and shapes. You connect a compatible output port to an input port to pass a value along. Ports have sensible defaults, so a node does something useful before you wire anything into it.

Using a patch in your show

1. Build a patch on the Wire canvas from the nodes you need.
2. Save the patch.
3. Use it as a source — on SHOW, pick Wire patch in the Source picker to drop your patch into a clip and play it like any other source.

A Raedia show is one file — a .raedia bundle — holding everything: your layers and clips, the mapping, the control bindings, and even the panel layout. One file to back up, one file to carry to the venue.

A dry run, start to finish

1. New show, then set the composition size/fps to your output.
2. Add layers and columns, and load clips/sources into the grid (§5).
3. Add effects where you want them (§6).
4. Map the output on the Mapping Surface — regions, warp, masks, edge blend (§7).
5. Map your controller and expose dashboard parameters (§9).
6. Save the show to a .raedia file.
7. Send to screen and run it live (§8) — drive it from the desk, a controller, or a phone (§10).

Raedia licensing is built to be undramatic: activate once, and the show keeps running whether or not you're online. This section describes the model — editions and prices are confirmed at checkout when you are invited to pay.

The model

Appendix A · Full feature matrix

Appendix B · Effect parameter reference

All 31 built-in GPU effects and their parameters.

Appendix C · Keyboard & interaction reference

Appendix D · Control & I/O reference

Appendix E · Recommended system spec

Figures are practical guidance for the Beta; match GPU and storage to your resolution, layer count and codec. Transcoding to HAP reduces decode load significantly.

Appendix F · Glossary