GDTF and MVR: Today and Tomorrow

About a dozen or more years ago, Petr Vanek, customer support manager at Robe Lighting, was thinking about how to create machine-readable data to help Robe fixtures work better with lighting consoles. The reason had to do with the accuracy—or, more correctly, the inaccuracy—of some fixture data used by programmers, designers, electricians, and other lighting professionals.

“What I was primarily really frustrated by was the fact that I saw so many typos and issues in existing fixture profiles,” he says. “Soon after I started [at Robe], maybe 2007, I was trying to compile a list of all the fixture files from all the lighting console manufacturers and cross-reference it to see where Robe Light’s definitions are missing.”

A GDTF file for most lighting fixtures can be found on the GDTF share website. It indicates which have been developed by the manufacturer and which by someone else, whether the file has been tested in real life, and whether it’s been tested in a visualizer, all of which gives you a good indication of how accurate it might be.

Vanek approached other manufacturers to gauge their interest in developing a consolidated approach and, at the time, there was “not a big response.” A few years later, however, MA Lighting expressed an interest and, along with Vectorworks and Robe, started developing General Device Type Format (GDTF) and My Virtual Rig (MVR).

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