You've got your clips loaded, the engine is reacting to the music, and it all looks great — on your laptop. Between that and the projector there's one step, and it's the one nobody explains to you in a booth you've never seen before, with the set about to start. It takes two minutes, and it's worth knowing before you need it.
This is the whole thing. A VJ setup has two surfaces: the one the room sees, and the one you touch. If you throw your only screen at the projector, the crowd gets your buttons and you get nothing to work with. So the plan is always the same: the visuals go out to the big screen, the controller stays on your laptop, in front of you, where you can fire clips without the room reading your menus.
LumaDeck does that with a second window. Everything below is how to get it there.
Connect the laptop to the projector or the TV with HDMI or USB-C. Your operating system will pick it up on its own, and then it'll do one of two things:
It's a system setting, not a LumaDeck one: on Windows it's Win+P → Extend; on macOS, System Settings → Displays and turn Mirror off; on Linux it depends on your desktop, but it's in the display settings and the word is the same. Get this right first — everything else depends on it.
In LumaDeck, hit ⧉ Dual screen. A separate window opens with just the visuals in it: no panels, no buttons, no interface. That window is your output.
Now drag it onto the projector's desktop — the one you just extended — and let go. Your laptop keeps the controller; the projector has the show.
The visual window opens in a normal frame, and at first glance there's nothing to click to make it fill the screen. There is, it's just hidden on purpose so the room never sees it:
A ⛶ Fullscreen button fades in over the visuals. Click it and the window takes the whole projector. The button hides itself again after about three seconds, so it can't get caught on screen mid-set. To bring it back — to exit, for instance — double-click again: it'll read ✕ Exit fullscreen. Esc also gets you out.
And a detail that matters more than it sounds: the mouse pointer disappears by itself a couple of seconds after you stop moving it, and comes back the moment you do. No arrow parked in the middle of your show for the whole night.
Testing at home, or a booth where the projector is the only display? Hit ⛶ or press F and LumaDeck goes fullscreen right there. Esc comes back. It's the fastest way to see what the room would see, though for a real gig the second window is what you want: you can't play what you can't see.
What lands on the projector is the show and nothing else: the scenes, your clips, the FX, and your name if you've set your brand text — that's part of the picture, not an overlay of the interface. What stays on your laptop is everything you touch: pads, faders, the audio panel, the scene picker. The room never sees you work.
On the free tier, the output carries a small LumaDeck watermark in the corner. Pro removes it. Everything else in this guide — the second window, fullscreen, the cable — works exactly the same either way.
Do it once at home with any screen and it stops being a thing you think about. Which is the point: on the night you should be watching the room, not your display settings.
Open LumaDeck, load a clip and send it to a second screen. No sign-up needed.
Open LumaDeck