The Emergency DMX Bypass Switch provides emergency and panic lighting control solutions for DMX-driven house lights and DMX-controlled lighting used in emergency and egress lighting. Each Bypass unit can handle up to four individual universes of DMX and can also act as a DMX splitter, but also has separate triggers for panic situations as well. Each state, panic or emergency, can be set to trigger “snap shot” loads or can be set to drive all loads on each DMX path. Each state can also be triggered via normally open, normally closed dry contacts, or from a 12VDC signal. Once the state is returned to normal, bypass will return loads to the DMX controller, and return states can be timed at 1 or 10 minutes, or be set to return under intelligent timing, which truncates the return to normal time when valid DMX inputs are sensed.