LED Walls: Styles, Cabling, and Live Video for Technicians

When you’re the one who must build, cable, and troubleshoot an LED wall on site, you need more than a rendering. 

The LED Video Wall tool in Vectorworks Spotlight 2026 gives technicians a way to make panel choices, control numbering, and verify video sources before anyone loads the truck.

LED Wall Styles let you standardize how walls behave across a show file, so you spend less time adjusting one‑off settings.

Each parameter in a style can be set by style or by instance, which determines whether that value is locked for all walls using the style or editable per wall in the Object Info palette (OIP). For example, you might lock panel type, joint limits, and classing by style, while leaving image offsets and video inputs by instance so they can be tuned per position.

You can start from the default styles in the Vectorworks library, duplicate them, and then adjust them for your rental inventory, typical wall sizes, or house rig. 

If a single wall needs to break the rules, such as a one‑off configuration for a thrust or B‑stage, you can convert that wall to Unstyled and make local changes without affecting other walls in the file. 

Editing the style in the Resource Manager updates every wall that references it, which is useful when you need to swap panel types or adjust structural assumptions for an entire design.

The Design Layout section of the LED Wall Preferences mirrors the main draw modes of the tool, but it also exposes controls that directly affect how well the wall matches your actual panels. 

Aspect Tolerance helps you convert conceptual walls into panel‑based layouts by allowing a small deviation so that wall dimensions land cleanly on whole panel sizes, while Wall Thickness gives you a quick way to reserve depth in a rig or scenic build. This is helpful when you are juggling truss loads, sightlines, and backstage clearances.

Because these settings are tied to the drawing mode, including them in an LED wall style lets you pre‑bake typical behaviors for your shop. For instance, you can create a style that always starts in Builder mode with your standard 500 mm panel, a specific joint limit, and a known wall thickness, so every new wall you draw is already in the ballpark of what your crew will build on site.

Every LED wall style can include a default still image so you can see scale and aspect quickly, but the real technical value comes when you start wiring up video sources. In the Image Settings, you choose the default still, set pixel pitch–based scale, and decide whether images should tile, while the overall texture takes care of how the wall’s sides and back render in your documentation views. 

It’s often best to set only the base image by style and leave shifts and tiling by instance, so you can tweak looks for different positions without creating extra styles.

For video playback, you can decide whether each wall listens to a file‑based clip, a capture device, or an NDI stream. Local video files are ideal for previz and offline checks, but remember that you’ll need to remap these files if the project moves to a different machine.

Capture and NDI inputs, on the other hand, are better mirrors of a real show system; using the Select Video Source command, you can bind each LED wall to a specific input and confirm in the Showcase palette that Vectorworks sees your NDI streams before you ever get to the venue.  

Once Showcase is running, mapped files and live feeds play back directly on the walls in your Spotlight model so you can verify routing and basic looks.

Technical planning for LED walls often comes down to clean, predictable numbering that matches how you’ll cable on site. 

In the Data, Power, and Numbering section, you pick a parameter to number: panel ID, data circuit name, or power circuit number. Simply set a start value, an increment, and choose a direction pattern that describes how numbering snakes across the wall face. The preview then lets you see whether the pattern matches how you want to pull cable, before you commit to the scheme. 

To model data chains, it helps to think in two passes. First, you can group panels into runs by assigning a data circuit name with a higher unit count, effectively breaking the wall into segments that match your processor outputs. Then, you assign data circuit numbers within those groups, using a restart limit so numbering resets correctly at the end of each run.

You can repeat the same process for power distribution using your preferred feed sizes, and renumber at any time without disturbing other wall properties, which keeps you flexible as processor assignments and power plans change.

Data tags act as live labels that pull values from your LED wall objects or individual panels, and they stay linked when data changes. For technicians, this means you can tag panels with their power and data identifiers and trust that the labels will remain correct as the design evolves. You can orient tags for Top/Plan, Front, or Back views and position them on a grid so that panel‑level information stays readable in printed plots and PDFs.

A practical approach is to use two tags per panel for cabling: one that shows a simple icon for power or data and a second that displays the actual circuit text, placed in opposing corners for legibility. 

When you combine those tags with live data visualization, you can map data circuit names or power groups to colors, making it much easier to spot mis‑assigned panels or broken sequences.

Standardizing class assignments for panels, supports, and annotations inside your Styles makes sure that all these visual cues land on predictable classes, which supports clean view filters, sheet layer viewports, and export workflows for the rest of the production team.