Resolume Composition Layout

Default Resolume layout works, but the monitors are tiny and tucked into the bottom-left corner. This lesson walks through rebuilding the layout from scratch so your composition + preview monitors live at the top, panels dock cleanly on the sides, and the whole interface gives you the real estate you actually need on show day.

Lesson 3 in our beginner course, right after the Composition Settings walkthrough.

Prefer to watch? Here's the full walkthrough — keep scrolling for the written version.

Step 1: Save Your Current Layout First

Before you touch anything, save where you're starting from. Head to the View tab → Layout → Save. Name it whatever you want ("default" works fine).

Now you can experiment freely without losing the configuration you already set up in the previous lesson. If something goes sideways, you just load this back up.

Step 2: Explore the Built-in Layouts (Optional)

Resolume ships with a handful of pre-built layouts you can cycle through from the same Layout menu. Big monitor is popular, dual display sends the preview to a second monitor, mini layers compresses everything. Worth poking at them once just to see what's possible — but for the rest of this lesson we're building it from scratch.

Step 3: Move the Monitors Up Top

By default, the composition and preview monitors are crammed in the bottom-left corner. You can barely see what you're outputting. We're fixing that.

Composition monitor → top

Click and drag the composition monitor panel up. You're looking for a long blue line that runs across the top of the interface. Drop it there. The monitor now sits across the top.

Preview monitor → side-by-side, NOT inside

This one is finicky. Drag the preview monitor toward the right side of the composition monitor. Don't drop it when you see brackets on the left and right — that throws it inside the composition monitor and they end up sharing a tab (you'd have to cycle between them).

What you want is a small line that appears only at the top of the right side. That's the side-by-side drop zone. Keep wiggling until that line appears, then drop. Now both monitors sit at the top, next to each other, with their own real estate.

Drag the bottom edge down for more screen

Once the monitors are docked at the top, drag the bottom edge of the monitor panel down as far as your screen allows. The more monitor visible, the easier it is to read what you're playing live.

Step 4: Dock the Composition / Group / Layer Panels on the Right

Now we need to give those side panels somewhere to live. Drag the composition panel all the way to the right edge of the screen — looking for the long blue line down the right side. Drop it.

Then drag the group and layer panels into that same composition panel space. They'll dock as tabs you can cycle through. Hold and drag each one left or right to reorder — small squares appear showing where it'll snap.

Recommended order: composition on the left, group in the middle, layer on the right. Cycle between them by clicking the tab headers at the top.

Step 5: Dock the Clip Panel Underneath

Drag the clip panel and drop it right below the composition / group / layer stack. Now you can see your current clip and transport options while still having one-click access to all three of the panels above it.

Step 6: Dock the Effects Panel Far Right

Move the effects panel into the same right-side dock, far right tab. Effects panel is the one panel worth keeping accessible during a live show — sometimes dragging an unexpected effect onto a clip nails a moment (covered more in the previous lesson's View tab walkthrough).

Step 7: Reclaim the Real Estate

With everything docked, drag the bottom edge of the docked panel stack upward until there's no gray space showing. Clean, tight, no wasted pixels. The whole interface should now feel like it was designed for the screen you're actually on.

Step 8: Save the New Layout

Critical step. View tab → Layout → Save. Name it something memorable. If you ever switch laptops, reset Resolume, or just accidentally drag a panel into oblivion, you load this back up and you're home.

One Honest Note

This is one VJ's preferred layout, not gospel. The principles — monitors visible, panels docked, no wasted space, save your work — matter. The exact placement is yours to experiment with. Some VJs run everything on a single ultrawide monitor, others run dual displays with the preview on a second screen entirely. Build the layout that fits how you work.

What's Next

With your composition settings dialed in and the UI laid out for live performance, the next lesson covers outputting Resolume to an external display — full-screen output, Windows display settings, NVIDIA color range, and the hotkey that saves you when you accidentally output to your laptop screen.

Or if you skipped the previous lesson: Composition Settings — Preferences, Output & UI Setup is where preferences, the blend-mode default change, Spout / NDI, and the View tab cleanup live.

Stuck on the side-by-side monitor drop zone? You're not alone — it's the finickiest step in this lesson. Drop a comment on the YouTube video above or email vjacademy@outlook.com and we'll walk you through it.