A watchdog for VJs: from crash to show back up in eleven seconds.

Why it is worse for us than for a DJ

A DJ who loses a deck still has the other one playing. A lighting desk that reboots comes back to a static look. A visual rig that dies gives you a black wall in front of a thousand people, and the room notices in under a second.

And the recovery is not just relaunching. It is relaunching, finding your project, loading your media, getting back to the right point of the show — while the track keeps going.

The honest approach: assume it will happen

You can spend forever trying to make software that never fails. It is a good goal and you should chase it. But on the night, what saves you is not the promise that it will not crash: it is what happens in the sixty seconds after it does.

So the design question changes. Not "how do we never fall over" — that one you work on anyway. The one that matters at 2 a.m. is: if we fall over, how fast are we back, and do we come back as the same show?

What that looks like in practice

• Something watching that is not the thing that can die. A process supervising the main app, separate from it, that notices the silence.
• Relaunch without a human. Nobody should have to find a laptop in the dark and double-click anything.
• Come back as your show, not as an empty project. The state has to be on disk continuously, not saved when you remember to.
• And a log that tells you what happened, so the next morning it is a bug and not a ghost story.

Eleven seconds, and how we know

In LumaDeck Pro that whole chain takes about eleven seconds: down, relaunched, show back. We know because we did not wait for a bad night to find out — we killed the process by hand and timed it, repeatedly, and the log narrates every step.

Eleven seconds in front of a full room is still long. It is a bad moment. But it is a bad moment you recover from, instead of the end of your set.

What to ask your own tools

Whatever you use, the question is worth asking out loud: if this dies right now, who notices, who restarts it, and what state does it come back in? If the honest answer is "me, by hand, from scratch" — that is worth knowing before the gig, not during.