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, on that playout’s tab → Output name.
The name is the name of the output, and it appears in three places:
- In the status bar, on that playout’s block.
- In the log, which is where you look when something went wrong.
- On a remote control, which can use it to identify this output.
The panel heading does not change: it always reads Playout 1, Playout 2 and so on. That is what the colour below is for.
Name the outputs after what they feed, not after their number. Stream and Hall screen in the status bar tell an operator something; Playout 1 and Playout 2 only tell them which came first.
The colour
Settings → Outputs, on that playout’s tab → Colour.
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.
It answers “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.