HueCue: Professional Lighting Cues for Indie Venues, Without the Professional Price Tag

If you've ever run lighting for a small theater, a community performance space, or an indie venue, you already know the gap. On one side, there's the world of professional lighting consoles — powerful, precise, and financially out of reach for most independent productions. On the other, there's whatever you can cobble together with consumer smart bulbs and a prayer. HueCue exists in the space between those two realities.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Philips Hue lights are surprisingly capable. They support millions of colors, adjustable color temperatures, smooth transitions, and can be controlled over a local network with near-instant response times. For a small venue, a handful of Hue bulbs can cover a stage with real, dynamic lighting — at a fraction of what even a basic DMX setup would cost.

But here's where it falls apart: there's no clean way to build precise, repeatable lighting scenes for live performance and trigger them from a professional cue system like QLab. You can set moods in the Hue app on your phone, sure. But you can't say "at this exact moment in Act 2, crossfade lights 1 through 8 to these exact brightness and color values over 500 milliseconds." That's what a theater needs. That's what HueCue does.

What HueCue Actually Is

HueCue is a macOS app that connects to your Philips Hue bridge, lets you build detailed lighting scenes light by light, and exports those scenes as cues you can drop directly into QLab — or run as standalone shell scripts for any other workflow.

The process is simple. You connect to your Hue bridge (one button press to pair), and HueCue pulls in every light on your network. You create a scene, choose which lights to include, and dial in the exact settings for each one: power state, brightness, color or color temperature — whatever that specific bulb supports. HueCue is smart about this. It knows which of your lights are full-color, which are white ambiance only, and which are just dimmable, and it only shows you the controls that actually apply.

Once your scene is built, you can test it live — hit "Apply to Bridge" and watch your lights change in real time. When it's right, export it. You get four options: a QLab-ready AppleScript, a shell script, raw curl commands, or a JSON backup. Pick the one that fits your workflow.

The Speed Problem (and How It's Solved)

Here's a detail that matters enormously in live performance: timing. If you're running 15 or 20 lights and you send commands to each one sequentially, you're looking at a 3 to 5 second delay before the last bulb catches up with the first. That's not a lighting cue — that's a slow ripple across the stage, and your audience will notice.

HueCue solves this by running every light command in parallel. When you export a scene, the generated script fires all the HTTP requests simultaneously and waits for them all to finish. The result is that all your lights change together, in about 100 milliseconds. That's fast enough for a hard blackout. That's fast enough for a snap crossfade between scenes. That's theater-speed.

Why QLab Matters

If you're running sound and lighting for a show, QLab is likely already in your toolkit. It's the standard for macOS-based show control in small to mid-size productions. But QLab doesn't natively speak to Philips Hue. HueCue bridges that gap by exporting scenes as AppleScript cues that QLab can trigger alongside your sound cues, video cues, and everything else in your show file.

That means one operator, one cue list, one click per transition. Sound and lights, perfectly synchronized, running from the same machine. For a two-person production team running a 50-seat black box theater, that's the difference between a professional show and a stressful one.

Who This Is For

HueCue is built for the venues and the people who don't have a lighting budget but still care deeply about the quality of their shows. Community theaters. Indie performance spaces. Small churches and event halls. Student productions. DIY venues running shows out of converted warehouses and storefronts.

If you already own a few Philips Hue bulbs and a Mac, you have everything you need. No DMX hardware. No expensive software licenses. No lighting engineering degree. Just the ability to build real, precise, repeatable lighting cues and trigger them when the moment calls for it.

What's Next

HueCue is actively being developed. Upcoming features include scene templates for common setups, a visual color picker for more intuitive scene building, support for organizing scenes into groups and folders, and keyboard shortcuts for faster workflow during tech rehearsals. The goal is to keep closing the gap between what indie venues have access to and what professional productions take for granted — one feature at a time.

If you want to follow the project or support its development, you can find more at steadymaking.studio.