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.

Loading Files

Drag and drop an ILDA file onto the viewer, or click the file picker 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 Suite

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

Viewer Interface

2D Preview

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

Use the playback controls to step through frames or play back animations.

Playback Controls

• Play/Pause — animate multi-frame ILDA files
• Frame Scrubber — jump 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, 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
• Loop — continuous playback for animation preview

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.

Analysis Tools

These are live instruments, not static readouts — every widget updates with the playhead as an animation plays. Hover a tile to see it running (captured with the bundled DOLPHIN and MOON test files); click to enlarge.

Stress Heat Map

The stress heat map visualizes scanner load across your ILDA content. Colors indicate:

High-stress areas typically occur at sharp corners, dense point clusters, or long blank jumps. See the Stress Heat Map reference for detailed interpretation.

Point Classification

The Point Classification widget categorizes every point in the current frame and scores how well-optimized the file is:

• Anchor points — dwell points at path starts/ends for clean corners
• Guide points — interpolated points along paths
• Blanking points — beam-off travel between visible segments
• Collinear points — points that can be optimized away without visual change

See Point Types reference for details.

Point Details

The POINT DETAILS widget 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 the number that predicts flicker and 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.

Stability Widget

The Stability widget rates how steadily the current frame will hold on real hardware, based on the frame's point count against your device profile's maximum kpps at the current FPS. Use it to catch frames that will flicker or shrink on a slower scanner before you're standing in front of one.

Point Density Heatmap

The Point Density Heatmap renders a 64×64 density grid of the current frame with a scientific color gradient — hover to read the density at any cell. Dense hotspots are where the galvo spends its time; they pair well with the stress heat map for diagnosing slow-scanning files.

Format Analysis

• 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.

Hex View

HEX VIEW expands to a raw hexadecimal dump of the frame currently on the canvas — up to 512 bytes, stopping at that frame's boundary — with an offset column, the bytes, and an ASCII column alongside, non-printable characters shown as ·. 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.)

AI Diagnostics

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 labelled 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.

3D Beam Viewer

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 output

With a file loaded, the right sidebar's last section — LASER OUTPUT — streams the frame you are watching straight to a laser, making the viewer the natural test bench: analyze a file, preview it through scanner physics in the 3D Beam Viewer, then fire the same frames on real hardware and compare. Choose Preview or a supported DAC (Helios directly; Ether Dream and LaserCube through the Bridge app), confirm the two-step Arm, then press Start — playback and the projector stay in lockstep, so pausing, stepping, or slowing the player does the same on the wall. Connected hardware brings up the bottom-edge safety dock with Power, Arm, Blackout, and Start. The panel's Frame rate slider is the same rate the playback controls use; Galvo speed, Power limit, Corner brightness (Advanced), and Color delay (Advanced) are documented in full under Laser DAC Output, and the color delay is remembered per DAC. Output runs at your Device profile's point rate, through the same output pipeline as every other laser tool.

Exporting

The left sidebar has three export buttons:

• 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 — 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, its frame rate, and its 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 — saves the file's parsed metadata (frames, point counts, format details) as a JSON file. Free for everyone.

Keyboard Shortcuts

See the full reference — including 3D Beam Viewer keys — in Keyboard Shortcuts, or press ? in the viewer to open Laser Settings → Shortcuts, which lists exactly the keys active on the current view.

Troubleshooting

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.

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.