Going live

This page covers the time when the show is running. It explains how to arm and start a cue, what the colours in the list mean, what the panel shows, and what to do when something has to change during the show. The page is short, because during a broadcast your attention should be on the screen.

Arm, then GO

You run a show in two steps, always in the same order.

1. Arm the cue you want to play next. Click the cue, or use the arrow keys to move to it. The cue turns green, shows the NEXT badge and appears in the next-cue picture. Arming a cue does not change what is on air.
2. Press GO to put the cue on air. You can use the GO button, the space bar or the Enter key. The cue turns red, and the program arms the next cue automatically.

Because the program arms the next cue for you, a simple show needs only a GO for each cue. The rest of this page explains how to follow what is happening while you work.

What arming does

When you arm a cue, the program prepares it. Scenes and web pages are already loaded when you press GO, so the picture appears immediately, without a moment of black.

You can also use arming to look ahead during the show. When you move the green marker up and down the list with the arrow keys, nothing changes on air and the red line stays in place. When you have seen what is coming, move back and press GO.

Reading the list

A cue is always in one of four states, and each state has its own colour and badge:

Colour	Badge	Meaning
Red	ON AIR	The cue is on air.
Amber	AUTO	The cue starts automatically when the cue on air ends.
Green	NEXT	The cue is armed. The next GO starts it.
Grey	—	The cue has already been played.

Amber is the most useful colour to learn, because it shows what will happen without you, and so it also shows when you are needed again. In the picture above, Channel ident follows the clip on air automatically, and the operator has already armed Announcement 1 in the Announcements group further down.

Amber appears only where a cue ends by itself. A still without a duration waits for a GO, whatever its follow action is, so it never starts an automatic sequence.

Cues in the archive are also grey. They never play, and GO skips them.

Reading the panel

Above the list, each playout shows the following:

• ON AIR next to the name of the playout, and a red border around the preview. Both mean that the playout is broadcasting.
• NEXT: on the right of the heading, followed by the cue that the next GO starts. The next-cue picture beside the preview shows this cue.
• The countdown on the transport bar, which shows the time remaining on the current cue. Towards the end it turns amber and then red, at times that you can set yourself.
• The status bar at the bottom of the window, which shows the output of each playout and the number of dropped frames.

During a cue

While a cue is playing, you control it with the transport bar:

Play / pause, or the P key	Pauses the picture and resumes it.
Restart	Starts the cue again from the beginning.
Stop media	Stops the media, so that the picture goes to black.
Timeline	Drag it to move to another position in the cue.

Stopping

Press STOP, or the Esc key, to take the playout to black and end the cue.

Stop and pause are different. Stop ends the cue, but pause only holds the picture, so that you can continue afterwards. Use pause when you want the picture to stay on screen while you deal with a problem.

Changes during the show

A show rarely runs exactly as planned, and you can make the following changes while it is running.

To skip a cue, arm the cue after it and press GO. The numbering does not change.

To repeat a cue, arm it again and press GO.

To add something that is not in the list, drag the file into the list. You can do this while the show is running, because it does not affect what is on air. Then arm the new cue.

To remove a line without deleting it, right-click the line and choose Move to archive. This option is available when the list has an archive folder, which you add with the arrow beside Hold → Archive. The line moves to the folder at the top of the list and keeps its settings, and GO skips it from then on. A cue that is on air stops immediately when you move it to the archive.

To click on a web page that is on air, use the Operate button in the status bar. It opens the page in a window where you can click, type and scroll. The button appears only when there is a page to operate.

More than one playout

Each playout has its own STOP and GO buttons on its own panel, and its own list.

Click a panel to make that playout active. The cue list below then shows the list of that playout, and the keyboard controls that playout as well. This means that the space bar starts a cue on the playout whose panel you clicked last. So when you work with two playouts, check which panel is highlighted before you use the keyboard.

Playouts work independently unless you link them. You can link a cue to a cue on another playout, so that one GO starts both. You set this in the Link column of the cue, and part 4 describes it in detail.

If something goes wrong

What you see	What to do
Black where there should be a picture	Check the status bar to see whether the output is running. Then check whether the cue is still on air, or whether a follow action has ended it.
A cue does not start	Look for a warning mark on the line. The file has probably been moved.
The picture is correct, but the stream is not working	The stream has its own status, separate from the cue list. Check the block of the stream in the status bar.
You have lost your place in the list	Look for the red line. Red is what is on air, and green is only the cue you have prepared.

Part 14 contains the full troubleshooting section. During a show, remember two things: Esc gives you black, and red is what the audience sees.