DiGiCo SD Series Stage Plot Guide for Live Sound Setups

About the SD Series

DiGiCo's SD Series sits at the top end of touring and broadcast consoles, running the show on major festival main stages, arena tours, and West End and Broadway style theater productions. If your gig runs through a DiGiCo desk, you are almost certainly working with an experienced house or touring engineer who has their own workflow already.

Current export status, honestly

Stageplot Pro does not export a DiGiCo session file, and it is worth being direct about why: nobody can offer this today, not us, not any other stage plot or show planning tool. DiGiCo .SES session files are a proprietary binary format, and the only supported way to move them between machines is DiGiCo's own SD Convert utility, which is version and build locked. There is no published or reconstructable text, CSV, or JSON layout for channel names. Building an emitter would mean guessing at a closed binary format, which is not something we are willing to ship, on DiGiCo or anything else.

That is not a knock on DiGiCo. Console makers who keep session formats closed are protecting a workflow their engineers rely on, and a proprietary binary format is a reasonable design choice for a flagship broadcast and touring desk. It does mean that, unlike an X32 or a dLive session, a DiGiCo channel list has to be built by a human, on the console, every time, regardless of which planning tool you used to get there.

What actually works today

1. Build your complete stage plot and input list in the editor, including monitor mixes.
2. Export a clean, professional PDF, or share the plot link.
3. Send it to the engineer well ahead of the show. On a production this size, a clear, accurate, well-labeled handoff is exactly what an experienced DiGiCo operator wants to receive, since it means less time spent chasing down missing information at load in.

Our working with sound engineers guide covers how to format that handoff so it reads fast on a busy show day.

The honest differentiator here

We would rather tell you plainly that a native DiGiCo import is not possible for anyone than pretend our tool, or any tool, has cracked a closed binary format. If you see a competing product claim DiGiCo session import, ask to see it load on a real desk before you trust it. What Stageplot Pro can promise instead is a stage plot and input list that is accurate, fast to build, and easy to hand off, which is the same job a well-organized paper plot has always done, just faster.

Common DiGiCo stage plot setups

DiGiCo turns up on larger, more complex line ups. The string quartet stage plot and jazz trio stage plot templates both work as clean starting points, whether your show is a small ensemble on a big console or a full band on a festival main stage.

What matters most on a show this size

At the scale DiGiCo consoles usually operate, the input list rarely changes show to show, but the personnel reading it does. A stage plot that stays accurate and easy to update between dates matters more than any single file format, since the humans running the desk are the constant, not the file.

Try it

Open the editor and build a stage plot and input list your DiGiCo engineer can work from directly, PDF in hand.