This page covers the two settings that stop you firing the wrong line. They cost a minute and they are the cheapest insurance on a multi-playout desk.
The name
Settings → Outputs → Output name, per playout.
The name appears in four places:
- On the panel heading, beside the
ON AIRbadge. - In the status bar, on that playout’s block.
- In the log, which is where you look when something went wrong.
- On a control panel such as Companion, which reads the names over the network.
Name them after what they feed, not after their number. Stream and Hall screen tell an operator something; Playout 1 and Playout 2 only tell them which came first.
The colour
Settings → Playouts → Colour playout 1 / 2 / …
Each playout has an accent colour. It tints that playout’s list background, its panel, and its block in the status bar — so the whole bottom half of the window changes colour depending on which line you are working on.
That is the point: the colour is not decoration, it is the answer to “which list am I looking at” at a glance, from across the room, without reading anything.
Pick two that are clearly different in a dark room. Blue and amber is the default pairing and it works; two shades of blue do not.
A word about the states on top of it
The colours of the cue states — red for on air, green for armed, amber for automatic — sit on top of the playout tint and are the same on every playout.
So a red line means on air whichever playout you are looking at, and the background behind it tells you which playout that is. Those two never compete because the states are always the stronger colour.