Looking Through a Cue List

So far we’ve had short cue lists; just a handful of looks. This has made it easy to remember what we’ve created, the purpose, and the order of our cues. But once your list becomes longer and longer it can be really helpful to be able to see your cue list in its entirety. And in this chapter we’ll be altering the timing of cues, so it would be great to be able to observe the status of our cues.

Good news! This is the purpose of the PSD or Playback Status Display.

This display will show you the current cue, it’s timing, important flags, labels, effects, and more! As you can see in the following image, the PSD is structured like a spreadsheet with rows and columns. EOS will highlight the cue that is currently live with yellow, just like LIVE mode.

It’s also really helpful to be able to observe cue transitions. In the image below, you can see that we’re currently executing Cue 2, and that we’re 70% through the transition or have 2.9 seconds remaining. This is shown both in the rows as well as the status display near the bottom.

We’ll cover more about the various columns of the PSD in subsequent lessons (fade times, flags, follows, hangs, delays, etc); but I want to let you know about this one last tidbit – the PSD can show you a lot more information than you probably need. It’s helpful to be selective about what you see. And it’s likely that you might need different information at different points in your design process.

If you want to alter what you see in your display, simply right click on the tab or press the gear icon to the left of your tabs.

You can now tick the check boxes to enable or disable different items in your PSD. You can also zoom in or out. And really, you can do this with any display!

• Timing – Refers to how long it takes to transition from one look to another. Different parameters of a cue can have different timings.
• Flags – Unique information about how a cue ought to behave differently than the default behavior. For example, you can turn on / off the Auto-Mark feature discussed in our Moving Lights section.
• Attributes – These are extra functions that you can append to a cue, such as automatically going to the next cue when this one is complete.
• Label – A quick name given to a cue.
• Notes – An extended description for a cue.
• Effects – Are there any effects running in this cue?
• Ext Links – Does this cue automatically start another action such as a Macro.

Try it out and then move on to the next lesson.