Hold

This page covers the hold: a line that puts up your hold image and waits. It is the trade’s word for a pause built into the running order — the show reaches this point and stops there until somebody presses GO.

Adding one

Hold in the toolbar. It needs no settings; it is a waiting point.

What it shows

Whatever you set under Settings → Cue list → Hold image → Image shown during a hold:

Choice	What appears
(Black — no image)	Black
A scene you pick	That picture — a logo card, a “we will start shortly” slide

A playout can differ from that: Settings → Outputs, on that playout’s tab, under Options → Image shown during a hold:. There the first choice is (same as the cue list), which follows the setting above; pick a scene to give that playout a hold image of its own.

Standby picture while nothing is on air, in the same place, is a separate switch: with it on, that playout’s output shows its hold image — or black if there is none — whenever nothing is on air, not only during a hold.

Setting a hold image once is worth doing. A hold on black looks like a fault to anyone watching; a hold on a card looks like the programme.

What it is for

Situation	Why a hold fits
Between two blocks, waiting for the room	The list cannot run past it by accident
At the very top of a list, before you start	The first GO then starts the show, not the second
After an automatic block, to hand control back	The chain of auto-follows ends on something visible

A hold is not the only way to make the list wait — a cue with follow action pause holds its last frame too. The difference is what the audience sees: a paused clip shows a frozen frame of that clip, a hold shows your hold image.

What it is not

It is not a stop. The playout stays live; only the running order waits. Audio from a music bed keeps running, and the output never drops.

It is not black by definition. If everyone in the building says “put it on black”, set the hold image to black once and let the word mean what they think it means.