ILDA Viewer

The ILDA Viewer is a professional analysis tool for ILDA laser files. Load any .ild file to inspect its structure, visualize point data, run safety diagnostics, and preview how it will look on a laser projector.

The Viewer opens on the essentials: what the file is, whether it is healthy, how it plays, how a scanner draws it, and a way to send it to a laser. The deeper instruments — the raw byte dump, point-by-point tables, density maps and the extra export formats — are there when you need them, each switched on individually under Advanced tools, so the panels stay readable and the important numbers are never buried.

Loading FilesCopy Anchor Link

Drag and drop an ILDA file onto the viewer, or click CLICK OR DRAG ILDA FILE HERE in the left ILDA SOURCE panel to browse. Only the .ild extension is accepted, up to 25 MB per file and 1,000,000 coordinate records. Color-palette entries do not count toward the coordinate limit. The viewer reads:

• Format 0 — 3D Indexed Color
• Format 1 — 2D Indexed Color
• Format 2 — Color Palette (the only palette format)
• Format 4 — 3D True Color
• Format 5 — 2D True Color (most common modern format)

Indexed frames take their colors from the palette set by the most recent Format 2 section. A file with no palette section falls back to the ILDA standard's suggested default palette.

Files are processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server. If you choose another file while one is still being processed, the newer selection replaces it and the earlier load is canceled.

Test SuiteCopy Anchor Link

No file handy? The left sidebar's TEST SUITE section loads reference patterns in one click — known-good frames for learning the viewer's tools, checking that your projector or player renders correctly, and having something to compare a suspect file against:

Reading RAMPS. Every step is its own stroke, drawn for the same time, so the only thing that changes along a row is the color level. On a projector, watch which step is the last one you can see in each row: a diode that shows the 25 percent step but not the 10 percent step has its threshold between them, and a row that fades unevenly compared with the others points to that color's modulation. The white row shows the three diodes together, so a color cast on any white step means one color is dropping out ahead of the rest.

Reading COLOR SHIFT. Each pair of lines is drawn in opposite directions, the upper one left to right and the lower one right to left, and both are lit only on the right of the center line. With correct timing both lit segments start or stop exactly on it. If a color switches late, its upper line starts a little to the right of the center line, leaving a gap, and its lower line runs a little past it to the left. If it switches early, the offsets reverse: the upper line starts left of the center line and the lower line stops short of it. Early switching is the usual result when the mirrors lag behind the signal, and it is what GALVO SIMULATION shows with MIRRORS on PHYSICS. Either way the two offsets are the same size, and a larger offset means a larger timing error. Adjust the color delay or color shift setting in your projector or output software until both segments meet the line, one color at a time. This is a different check from BLANKING, which tests beam-off travel rather than color timing.

Viewer InterfaceCopy Anchor Link

The workspaceCopy Anchor Link

Three columns: ILDA SOURCE on the left (the file, its health and the test patterns), the preview in the middle, and PROPERTIES on the right (playback, analysis and laser output). Each side panel has an arrow at its top edge that collapses it to a thin rail so the preview can take the width; Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+] do the same from the keyboard and Ctrl+\ toggles both. With a file loaded, the right panel opens on its own. The box at the bottom of PROPERTIES reads Hover over properties to see details. until you rest the pointer on a control, then explains that control in a sentence, so you never have to leave the tool to find out what a checkbox does.

The Settings gear in the top bar opens LASER SETTINGS. Its DISPLAY tab holds viewport choices for the 3D view: VENUE STYLE (Wireframe, Solid or Lit, shown while a human figure or audience is placed outside Cinema mode) picks how those props are shaded, and CAMERA COORDINATES (ON/OFF) draws the camera's X, Y, Z over the 3D viewport for precise positioning. Its ADVANCED tab is where the hidden tools live — see Advanced tools.

2D PreviewCopy Anchor Link

The main canvas shows the loaded ILDA content rendered as vector paths. Points are color-coded:

• Visible points — drawn in their assigned color
• Blanking points — shown as dim lines (laser beam off during travel)
• Anchor points — highlighted at path start/end positions

Rest the pointer on the canvas for the hover bar. For an animation it holds Play/Pause, Previous frame and Next frame, a frame scrubber you can drag to any frame and a Frame readout. For a single-frame file such as PATTERN it holds Zoom out, Zoom in and a Reset zoom (1:1) button showing the current zoom instead, for reading fine detail without changing the file. Drop another .ild on the canvas to replace the current file. The 3D button at the top right switches to the 3D Beam Viewer; in 3D it reads 2D and a Camera Preset dropdown appears beside it.

The 2D view opens on the ideal design: every frame drawn whole, exactly as the file stores it. Switch on GALVO SIMULATION under ANALYSIS TOOLS to watch the scanner draw each frame point by point. In 2D GALVO SIMULATION, TRAIL controls retained light and PREVIEW SPEED slows the scan for inspection, from full speed down to 0.01×, slow enough to watch the beam turn each corner. These controls do not change animation FPS or hardware output. MIRRORS chooses IDEAL, the commanded lines, or PHYSICS, approximate mirror motion at the selected scan rate. IDEAL is the default. With PHYSICS on, choose a scanner class to compare its response and set SCAN ANGLE (5° to 60°, default 40°) to the angle your projector draws the full pattern at; the ILDA 30K test pattern is rated at 8°. Set TRAIL to 0% for no retained light. The 3D Galvo, Haze and Cinema beam modes draw from the same simulated scanner and share these controls, and the Audience View camera frames the 3D screen at the same size and position as the 2D view. The LASER OUTPUT preview and Video to Laser's Live previews use the same setting, so a choice made in one place follows you everywhere.

Playback ControlsCopy Anchor Link

For multi-frame files, the PLAYBACK CONTROLS section at the top of PROPERTIES sets how the animation runs:

• Play/Pause — animate multi-frame ILDA files (on the canvas hover bar, or Space)
• Frame scrubber — on the canvas hover bar; drag to any frame in the sequence
• FPS — a dropdown with 10 / 20 / 24 / 25 / 30 / 50 / 60 fps; the < / > keys (or , / .) halve and double the rate
• BEAT SYNC — lock the animation loop to musical time: Off - Loop Freely, 1/8 note, 1 beat, 2 beats, or 1 bar. Set the MUSIC BPM with the slider (60–200) or the TAP button — tap along with the music to set the tempo

Animations opened directly from another BeamTracer tool start at that animation's authored FPS without replacing your saved Viewer default. Choosing a new FPS in the Viewer makes it your new default for later files.

File Info and File HealthCopy Anchor Link

With a file loaded, the top of ILDA SOURCE answers the two questions that matter first: what is this file, and can my projector play it?

Point BudgetCopy Anchor Link

The point-budget badge compares the heaviest frame’s stored points, including blanked points, multiplied by playback FPS with Selected rate. WITHIN means below 70%, NEAR LIMIT means 70–100%, and OVER LIMIT means above 100%. FRAME POINT LOAD shows that comparison for each frame. A file with a single frame has no playback FPS: the scanner redraws it continuously, so the panel reports how many times per second it redraws at Selected rate instead, for example Redraws 25 times/sec at 30 kpps for the bundled test pattern. These are point-count estimates, not measured scanner stress, brightness, or a laser-safety certification. Additional notes describe file properties to inspect; they do not prove a graphic is unsuitable for projection. A flicker rating for the current frame is available as the STABILITY advanced tool.

Format AnalysisCopy Anchor Link

• ILDA signature validation — Every ILDA file must begin with the 4-byte ILDA magic number. A green VALID badge confirms the file genuinely is ILDA data; a failure means it's corrupt, truncated, or was renamed from another format (a common mistake) — so you know to fix the file, not the player. See the ILDA Format reference.
• Format code and version — Which ILDA record format each section uses: Format 0/1 (indexed color, 3D/2D), Format 2 (color palette), or Format 4/5 (true color, 3D/2D). This tells you whether colors come from a shared palette or are embedded per point, and it flags MIXED FORMATS when a file combines several — the most common reason a file plays with the wrong colors on some hardware.
• Frame / palette name and company name — The human-readable labels authoring tools write into each section header (shown as COMPANY, plus per-section names under FILE DETAILS). Useful for confirming you loaded the right file and for identifying which tool produced a misbehaving one.
• Record count per section — How many points (or palette entries) each section holds. Compared against what you expect, a short count is the tell-tale sign of a truncated or partially-written file.
• Total frame count — How many frames the animation contains, so you can confirm the whole sequence parsed (FRAMES: 195/405 means you're on frame 195 of 405) and gauge how long a loop runs.
• Section-by-section breakdown — Expand FILE DETAILS (DEBUG) for a per-section list (format, record count, name) and any validation warnings, or DOWNLOAD FULL DETAILS (JSON) to inspect the entire parsed structure outside the app.

AI DiagnosticsCopy Anchor Link

For files that fail to parse or look wrong, the AI diagnostics tool sends the file's hex dump to Gemini and returns a plain-English explanation — so you don't have to read raw bytes yourself. It's built to catch the failure modes that stop a standard parser cold:

• Corrupt headers — A 32-byte section header whose fields don't add up (bad record counts, garbage format bytes), which halts parsing before any points are read.
• Wrong format codes — A section tagged with a format number that doesn't match its actual point data (e.g. true-color data labeled as indexed), producing scrambled points or colors instead of an outright failure.
• Byte alignment errors — Point records read at the wrong length, so every record after the first is pulled from the wrong offset. This is the classic cause of a file that starts fine and then dissolves into noise.
• Truncated data — A file that ends mid-record because an export was interrupted or a transfer dropped bytes.
• Non-standard extensions — Vendor-specific or newer records that don't follow the ILDA spec; some players silently skip them while others choke.

For each file the tool returns a diagnosis (the main problem, in one or two sentences), a confidence rating (high / medium / low), a header breakdown (signature, format code, record count, and the specific issues it found), and concrete suggestions for fixing or recovering the file — including whether it's likely recoverable at all.

AI diagnostics requires Pro; signed-in users below Pro get 3 free analyses shared with Video to Laser's AI analysis. AI Beam Creator has a separate generation allowance. See Pricing.

Analysis ToolsCopy Anchor Link

The ANALYSIS TOOLS section of PROPERTIES holds the instruments you reach for on every file. Each is a checkbox; rest the pointer on one and the box at the bottom of the panel explains it.

• GALVO SIMULATION — watch the scanner draw the frame point by point instead of seeing it whole, with the SCAN RATE the file runs at, MIRRORS (IDEAL or PHYSICS), the SCANNER class and SCAN ANGLE under PHYSICS, TRAIL and PREVIEW SPEED. It is how you see what a projector will actually do with a file — rounded corners, lag, the order things appear — before you fire a beam. G toggles it. Details under 2D Preview.
• SCANNER PATH — draws every blanked move as a dashed line, so the invisible travel between shapes stops being invisible. Long jumps you cannot see are the usual reason a file stresses a scanner or shows ghost lines. B toggles it.
• STRESS HEAT MAP — recolors the paths by how hard each segment works the mirrors, green through red, so you can see where in a frame the trouble is rather than only that there is trouble. S toggles it.

The overlays that read a file in more detail — WAVEFORM, DENSITY, PPS GRAPH and METADATA — appear in this section once switched on under Advanced tools.

Stress Heat MapCopy Anchor Link

With GALVO SIMULATION enabled in 2D, STRESS HEAT MAP compares simulated mirror positions with commanded positions. Colors indicate relative tracking deviation:

These colors are not scanner safety ratings. With simulation off, the heat map instead compares coordinate jumps. See the Stress Heat Map reference for detailed interpretation.

Advanced toolsCopy Anchor Link

The Viewer hides its deeper instruments by default so the essentials stay in view. Every one of them is a switch away: click the Settings gear in the top bar, open the ADVANCED tab, and switch on the tool you want. Each switch has a one-line note saying what the tool is for. SHOW ALL and HIDE ALL set every switch at once. A tool you switch on stays on across files and sessions until you switch it off; a tool that is off is absent from the Viewer entirely — no empty section, no hidden panel — and the Viewer does no work for it.

The switches are grouped by where the tool appears:

These are live instruments, not static readouts — every widget updates with the playhead as an animation plays. Each tool below is shown running on the bundled DOLPHIN, MOON or BLANKING test file; hover a tile to see it move, click to enlarge.

WaveformCopy Anchor Link

WAVEFORM (ANALYSIS) adds a checkbox under ANALYSIS TOOLS; ticked, an OSCILLOSCOPE (XY WAVEFORM) panel appears under the preview plotting the X signal in its top half and the Y signal in its bottom half over the frame. It is there because overshoot, ringing and odd scanner motion show up as shapes in these traces long before they are obvious in the drawing, so a frame that "looks a bit off" can be diagnosed rather than guessed at. In 3D it is drawn on the screen surface.

DensityCopy Anchor Link

DENSITY (ANALYSIS) switches on two views of the same thing. The DENSITY checkbox under ANALYSIS TOOLS marks every stored point on the preview so clusters and dwell points stand out, and the POINT DENSITY section in ILDA SOURCE renders a 64×64 density grid of the current frame with a scientific color gradient — hover to read the density at any cell, and change the grid resolution with its RESOLUTION buttons (32, 64 or 128). Both exist to show where a scanner spends its time: filled shapes and heavy dwell points that can overheat coils show up as hot cells, so you can thin them before they reach hardware. The grid shows point concentration, not measured velocity, optical intensity, or scanner stress.

PPS GraphCopy Anchor Link

PPS GRAPH (ANALYSIS, 2D only) adds a checkbox under ANALYSIS TOOLS; ticked, a PPS PER FRAME bar chart appears under the preview with one bar per frame of points per second — every stored point, blanked ones included, the same count FILE HEALTH budgets — against your DEVICE rate: green under 90% of the limit, amber from 90 to 100%, red above. Click a bar to jump to that frame. It answers "which frames of this animation will overload my scanner?" in one glance, where FILE HEALTH reports only the heaviest.

MetadataCopy Anchor Link

METADATA (ANALYSIS, 2D only) adds a checkbox under ANALYSIS TOOLS; ticked, a METADATA & THUMBNAILS panel appears under the preview listing each frame's name and point count under FRAME NAMES with a FRAME THUMBNAILS strip that scrolls with the playhead. It is for finding your way around a long show file — spotting where one sequence ends and the next begins, and jumping straight to a frame by its picture.

Point ClassificationCopy Anchor Link

POINT CLASSIFICATION (DIAGNOSTICS) adds a section under ADVANCED DIAGNOSTICS in ILDA SOURCE that categorizes every point in the current frame and describes its geometry:

• Normal — ordinary lit draw points
• Anchor — dwell points at path starts/ends for clean corners
• Corner — sharp direction changes, worth checking for anchors
• Guide — interpolated points along paths
• Blanking — beam-off travel between visible segments
• Collinear — points on straight segments; spacing may be intentional for velocity, color, or dwell

Under the counts, GEOMETRY OBSERVATIONS calls out things like sharp corners without nearby repeated points. It shows how a file spends its point budget, which is the first thing to know before optimizing one. See Point Types reference for details.

Point DetailsCopy Anchor Link

POINT DETAILS (DIAGNOSTICS) adds a section under ADVANCED DIAGNOSTICS with two views, SUMMARY and FULL LIST. SUMMARY shows the frame number, the largest frame's point count, and the first lit point's X, Y, color index and hex color with a swatch. FULL LIST is a sortable table of every point in the current frame — the raw coordinate data behind the preview. Each row shows:

• # — the point's index in draw order
• X / Y — its position in ILDA's ±32767 coordinate space
• Jump — how far the beam travels from the previous point, as a percentage of the full field. This is a geometric distance, not a prediction of flicker or scanner stress: a > 60% jump is flagged red (a "danger jump"), 30–60% yellow, and the stats bar reports the frame's Max Jump and total danger-jump count.
• Type — NRM (normal draw point), ANC (anchor / dwell point), or BLK (blanking / beam-off travel)
• RGB — a color swatch for the point (hover for its exact R/G/B values)

Click any column header to sort by it. Sorting by Jump descending takes you straight to the longest beam moves in a frame — the first things to fix when a file scans poorly or flickers. The footer totals visible vs. blank points.

StabilityCopy Anchor Link

STABILITY (DIAGNOSTICS) adds a section below FILE HEALTH that estimates redraw frequency from the current frame's point count and selected device rate and rates its flicker risk on a badge — ESTIMATE while the frame redraws fast enough not to flicker, then LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH as the redraw rate falls — with the visible and blanked point counts, the load and a RATE and JUMP readout. FILE HEALTH already reports the redraw rate of a still frame; switch this on when you want that rating frame by frame through an animation. It does not guarantee flicker-free projection or predict distortion. Actual results depend on the projector, scan angle, brightness, and viewing conditions.

Hex ViewCopy Anchor Link

HEX VIEW (DIAGNOSTICS) adds a section under ADVANCED DIAGNOSTICS that expands to a raw hexadecimal dump of the frame currently on the canvas — up to 512 bytes, stopping at that frame's boundary — eight bytes a row, with an offset column, the bytes, and an ASCII column alongside, non-printable characters shown as ·. The whole row fits the panel; scroll the dump to read further into the frame. It follows the playhead, so scrubbing or playing walks the dump through the file; the line underneath names the frame and its absolute byte offset. Each ILDA frame carries its own 32-byte header, and those bytes are color-coded by field, with a legend covering signature, format code, frame name, company, record count, frame number, total frames, and projector number. Hover any legend entry to read what that field means in the Properties panel.

It's the ground-truth view for learning the ILDA format or debugging a file the parser reads oddly: you can see exactly which bytes carry the record count or format code and confirm the header matches what Format Analysis reported. (Some fields the header carries but the FILE INFO panel doesn't surface — such as the projector number — are visible here.)

Export WAV and Download JSONCopy Anchor Link

EXPORT WAV and DOWNLOAD JSON (EXPORT) add buttons beside EXPORT ILDA under the preview. They are described under Exporting.

3D Beam ViewerCopy Anchor Link

Switch to the 3D Beam Viewer to see a volumetric simulation of how your ILDA content will look projected through fog or haze. Multiple rendering modes simulate different projection environments.

Live laser outputCopy Anchor Link

ExportingCopy Anchor Link

Under the preview, EXPORT ILDA is always there. Two more buttons join it when switched on under Advanced tools → EXPORT:

• EXPORT ILDA — opens the Export ILDA File dialog with format conversion (Format 0/1/5), hardware presets, and point reduction. This is a Studio feature; signed-in users below Studio get 3 clean exports per calendar month, shared with the direct-download allowance in the other laser tools and resetting on the 1st. See Pricing.

• EXPORT WAV (advanced) — opens the Export Sound-Card WAV dialog, which writes the loaded file as a multichannel WAV whose channels are the projector's own inputs. Play it out of a DC-coupled multichannel audio interface wired to the projector's X, Y and color inputs and the file drives the scanner directly, with no laser DAC in between. Three controls:

  • POINT RATE — 44,100, 48,000, 96,000 or 192,000 points per second. This is also the file's sample rate, so set your interface to match.
  • CHANNEL LAYOUT — 5 channel (X, Y, R, G, B; brightness is carried by the color channels), 6 channel (X, Y, R, G, B, I — the default, and what most projectors want), or 8 channel (the same six plus two spare channels, written silent).
  • FRAME REPEATS — how many times each frame is written in a row, which is how long a frame stays on screen. It opens on the value nearest 30 frames per second for the loaded file.

  Under the controls, the dialog shows how long the file will play (Plays for), its Animation rate (distinct frames per second, which the default FRAME REPEATS aims at 30), its Redraw rate (how often the scanner draws a frame, repeats included), and its File size before you download. Same Studio allowance as EXPORT ILDA. Your interface must be DC-coupled; on one that is not, a still image drifts back to the center of the field.

• DOWNLOAD JSON (advanced) — saves the file's parsed metadata (frames, point counts, format details) and its point-budget report as a JSON file, for scripts, spreadsheets or a bug report. Free for everyone.

Keyboard ShortcutsCopy Anchor Link

TroubleshootingCopy Anchor Link

File won't load: Check the ILDA Format reference to verify your file structure. The viewer validates the 4-byte "ILDA" signature and 32-byte header on load.

Stress heat map shows all red: Your file may have too many points per frame for the target scanner speed. See Understanding PPS and the Optimization Guide.

Can't find HEX VIEW, POINT DETAILS, STABILITY or DOWNLOAD JSON: They are advanced tools, off by default. Click the Settings gear, open ADVANCED, and switch on the one you need — see Advanced tools.

AI diagnostics unavailable: Sign in, confirm that the app shows an available AI analysis or an eligible plan, then try ANALYZE WITH AI (GEMINI) again. If it remains unavailable, use Send Feedback from the header.