A name and a colour for each playout are the simplest protection against starting a cue on the wrong playout. They take a minute to set.
The name
Go to Settings → Outputs, open the playout’s tab and enter an Output name.
The name appears in three places:
- In the status bar, on the playout’s block.
- In the log, where you look when something has gone wrong.
- On a remote control, which can use the name to identify the output.
The heading of the panel does not change: it always shows Playout 1, Playout 2 and so on. To tell the panels apart, use the colour, described below.
Name each output after its destination, not after its number. Stream and Hall screen in the status bar tell an operator something; Playout 1 and Playout 2 only tell the order in which the playouts were created.
The colour
Go to Settings → Outputs, open the playout’s tab and set the Colour.
Each playout has an accent colour, which the program uses for the background of the list, for the panel and for the block in the status bar. The lower half of the window therefore changes colour when you switch to another playout, so you can see immediately which list you are looking at, even from a distance.
Choose two colours that are clearly different in a dark room. Blue and amber are the default and work well, but two shades of blue do not.
The state colours
The colours of the cue states are red for on air, green for armed and amber for automatic. They appear on top of the colour of the playout, and they are the same on every playout.
A red line therefore means on air on every playout, and the background behind it shows which playout it is. The state colours are always the stronger ones, so the two never conflict.