Building an equipment list, from an empty project to the rental PDF.

Step 1

Pick your department

At the top of the screen, a switcher shows the current department: Lighting, Camera or Grip. This is not cosmetic. It drives the equipment family names, the catalogue you are offered and the tools available at the end of the run. Lens coverage, for instance, only appears in camera; the DMX patch only makes sense in lighting.

If you cover several roles on the same shoot, you do not need three accounts or three projects. You will switch departments along the way, on the same project.

Below the switcher, four tabs hold the whole app together: Projects, List, Tools and Sharing. You will walk through them in that order.

Step 2

Create the project

A list always belongs to a project. The project carries the dates, the production and the people, which is what stops you finding a file called "list2_final_OK" six months later with no idea which shoot it came from. The catalogue stays browsable without a project if you only want to check a reference.

In the Projects tab, open New project. The settings screen has four blocks.

Project information

Project name, production, director of photography, director and studio. These fields sit at the top of the PDF, so the rental house knows straight away who it is prepping for. Fill in at least the name and the production.

Project departments

You link one, two or three crews to the same project. A single project can therefore hold a camera list, a lighting list and a grip list sharing the same dates and the same collaborators. Unlinking a department hides it without deleting its lists, so the move is safe to undo.

Schedule

Start and end dates, plus a calendar colour. Those dates feed the calendar filter on the projects screen. Fill them in right away and you will avoid the surprise described below.

Crew and sharing

The Members & access block opens collaborator management. You can come back to it later, once the list has taken shape.

Finish with Save project. A message confirms the project is saved and synced. The Duplicate button next to it earns its keep when a shoot looks a lot like a previous one: you start from the existing structure instead of rebuilding it.

Step 3

Open the list

Open the project and you land on its lists. A first list is created with the project, named after the current department and marked V1. It is empty and waiting for you.

Each list row carries its actions on the right: open, preview, PDF, delete. The Create a list button adds more, which helps when a prep splits into several orders: a set and exteriors, a studio week and a location week, or simply one list per rental house.

Open the list. The editor shows a three-part bar at the top: 1 Add, 2 List, 3 Check & export. That bar is the backbone of everything that follows, and you can move back and forth between the three without losing anything.

Step 4

Add the equipment

The Add step offers four routes. You can mix them freely on the same list.

Typing, the fastest route

The Write to add field takes set language. Type 4x skypanel s60 and the app breaks the line down as you write: it pulls out the quantity, looks the reference up in the catalogue and offers the most likely match, with a list of candidates underneath if you want another variant.

Enter confirms. If your gear is not in the catalogue, or you would rather keep your own wording, the As typed button adds the line with no matching at all. Nothing gets lost: unmatched lines stay in the list and come out normally in the PDF.

Compatible accessories

After you add a fixture, a Compatible items window offers what usually goes with it. For a SkyPanel S60 it brings up the SnapGrid, the SnapBag, the 30° and 60° honeycombs, the eggcrate, the barndoors, the diffusion, the intensifier, the chimera, the octas and the loovers.

Tick what you are taking and confirm with Add. If you always take the same things on that fixture, Only this selection remembers your habit. If the question annoys you, Do not suggest again silences it for that reference. This is the step that catches the most forgotten lines, precisely because accessories are the things you know too well to bother writing down.

Categories, for browsing

The Categories mode opens the catalogue sorted by family. It is the right reflex early in a prep, when you are not after a specific reference but sweeping through what exists so you do not miss a whole position.

Starting from an existing list

Paste a list swallows text in the "Nx item" format, one line per reference. Handy when the production sends its request in an email or a spreadsheet.

Import a PDF reads a rental quote or a colleague's list and lets you choose what you keep. It is the quickest way to check a list you received, or to start from a base without retyping it.

Your kits

The My kits and Presets panels drop in a set you have already put together: your documentary kit, your own gear, the bundle of accessories you always carry.

Throughout this step, a toolbar keeps History, undo and redo within reach, and a panel summarises additions and removals with plus and minus buttons so you can fix a quantity without leaving the screen.

Step 5

Review and arrange

The List step shows what you have just built, already sorted. References have landed in their families on their own: LED panels in one block, fixture accessories in another, and so on. You did not have to create a single category.

Everything edits in place. Tap a line to change its quantity or its label, confirm with Enter or by leaving the field. Each category has its own controls: add a line inside it, collapse the block, move it up or down. That order is the PDF order, so arrange the categories the way the rental house will read them, or the way the truck will be loaded.

A PDF preview sits alongside and folds away if you want the room. You watch the document take shape while you fix the list.

Step 6

Check before you send

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that separates a list from a good list. The Check & export step opens on a Check the list button. Run it. The report runs locally on the device, nothing leaves for a server.

What the report tells you

• Missing essentials. Accessories normally paired with the fixtures already on your list, and absent from it.
• Rules. Set habits, written by someone who applies them. A SkyPanel hung overhead wants a barrel clamp, a safety cable and a clamp per head. An S60 calls for a chimera and a loover.
• Low quantities. Zero rolls of gaffer across a whole project, for example.
• Compatibility to verify. Reference pairs worth a second look, with an explanation. The guidance is indicative and does not replace your judgement.
• Breakdown. Item and unit counts, a split by category and by brand, and a data completeness figure for the catalogue.

Fix, run it again. Once the list is clean the state flips to Ready for the shoot.

The list tools

A Tools block gathers five checks that work on the current list: Checks to reopen the alert detail, Weight to anticipate the load, Power to size the supply, DMX for the patch, and Rental check to compare what you asked for against what was actually pulled. In the camera department, a Coverage tool is added for lens coverage.

Step 7

Export the rental PDF

The same content can come out in six templates. That is not decoration: a warehouse hand loading a truck and a line producer signing off a budget do not read the same document.

A language switch produces the document in English or French, which settles international shoots without retyping the list. You can add notes to the PDF, open the preview before sending, then use Share PDF.

A second selector chooses what you export: the current state of the list, or a revision saved earlier. Useful when the rental house is still working from your V1 and you have already started V2.

Step 8

Generate the DMX patch

On a lighting list, the DMX tool finds the controllable fixtures already present, suggests a mode for each, then spreads them across 512-channel universes. The packing runs sequentially and never splits a fixture across two universes, which is the rule most often broken when patching by hand in a spreadsheet.

You keep control of the starting universe, the first fixture number and the maximum number of universes, and you can set an address manually or anchor a fixture to a given universe. The ones after it shift along in cascade.

The export comes out as a CSV that Blackout reads, with the columns the desk expects, or as JSON for Luminator. You go from list to desk without retyping a single address, and more importantly without the patch drifting away from the order while the list is still moving.

Step 9

Work with the crew

The Sharing tab holds the project contacts, the invitations and the roles. You invite a camera assistant, a sparks, the production or the rental house, and you decide what each of them can do.

The share link works like a shared document link: you pick the role it grants first, Read-only or Can edit, then you copy it. It only works for signed-in Cinecyclop accounts, so a list does not end up loose in the wild.

Someone on read-only watches the list evolve without being able to change it, and the app says so plainly instead of letting them think something is broken. Same when you look at another crew's department: you read, you do not edit. The point is simple, and it is the real win on a prep: one live list instead of four files drifting apart.

Step 10

Save revisions

At the bottom of the Check & export step, a Revisions block freezes the current state under a number. Each revision keeps its date, its author and its item count, and the app constantly compares the current state against the last saved one.

Make a habit of creating one before every send. When the production asks three days later what changed since the original order, the answer is on screen instead of in your memory.

Common traps

• The invisible project. The calendar filter hides projects outside the current month. Use All periods, or date your projects as soon as you create them.
• Closing the accessories window too fast. It is the best safety net in the app. Take the two seconds, or save your usual selection so you never have to think about it again.
• Skipping the check. Sending without running Check the list means going without the only automatic control in the whole run.
• The wrong template. A compact manifest sent to a production, or a graphic presentation sent to a warehouse hand, wastes everybody's time. Choose for the reader.
• The wrong department. If the catalogue does not offer what you are looking for, check the switcher at the top: you may be in camera while building a lighting list.