Running a smooth show

Once your event is running and your team is in place, the director's seat is where the show lives. This page covers how to work it well — advancing the show, communicating with your crew, managing Q&A, and handling the moments when something goes sideways.

The director's seat

The director's seat at /dashboard is your control surface for the live show. The cue list on the left shows all cues in order. The active cue is highlighted and broadcasting to all output screens in real time.

A few things worth keeping in mind:

• What you see, your crew sees. Advancing a cue updates every output simultaneously. There's no preview mode — when you click, it goes live.
• The session state drives everything. If the event is stopped, outputs go idle. Don't stop the event mid-show unless you mean to.
• You can scroll the cue list without changing the active cue. Scrolling ahead to check upcoming cues doesn't advance the show.

Advancing cues

Click a cue in the list to make it active. There's no "next" button — you click whichever cue you want active. This gives you flexibility to skip forward, jump back, or repeat a cue if needed.

Tips for smooth advancement:

• Stay one cue ahead mentally. When a cue goes live, your attention should already be on the next one. Hesitation in the director's seat reads as hesitation in the room.
• Use cue titles as your script. If you can't immediately understand what a cue means from its title alone, it needs a better name. Good titles — "Offering intro", "Sermon — James 1", "Closing song 3" — mean you're not decoding labels under pressure.
• Timers advance automatically. If a cue has a timer set, it will advance to the next cue when the timer expires. You don't need to watch it — but you should know which cues have timers so you're not surprised when the show moves without you clicking.

Messages and alerts

The message panel sends a message to all active output screens immediately. It's visible to every crew member watching an output — use it for coordination, not conversation.

When to use messages:

• Calling a hold: "Hold — we're running 3 minutes long"
• Confirming a change: "Q&A opening in 2 minutes"
• Calling an early start: "Going early — skip to offering"

When not to:

• Casual commentary or jokes — it appears on every screen at once
• Long multi-sentence messages — crew reads in a split second; keep it to one short line

Alerts work similarly but with higher visual prominence. Use alerts for urgency — a medical situation in the room, a technical failure that needs an immediate response — not for routine show calls.

Q&A during the show

If you're running a Q&A segment, the general flow is:

1. Open Q&A (toggle in the director's seat) when the segment begins
2. Your moderator approves questions in the moderation panel
3. Approved questions appear on the Q&A display in order of approval
4. Close Q&A when the segment ends

A few practical notes:

• Open Q&A a minute early. Audiences take a few seconds to notice and engage. If you open it exactly when the presenter asks for questions, the first question often arrives late.
• The moderator and the director don't need to be the same person. In fact, they usually shouldn't be. The director is advancing cues and managing the room; the moderator is reading and filtering questions. Splitting the roles keeps both jobs manageable.
• Close Q&A before you advance to the next segment. Leaving it open means the display keeps showing questions during unrelated content — confusing for the audience and your crew.

When things go sideways

Output screen goes blank or stale: The output is likely disconnected from the socket. Refreshing the output tab reconnects it. This doesn't affect the show for anyone else — it's a client-side reconnect. The current cue state loads immediately on refresh.

Wrong cue is active: Click the correct cue. There's no undo or revert — just advance to what should be live. If you need to go back, click the earlier cue directly.

Timer advanced past a cue you needed: Click the cue you need. Timer-advanced and manually-advanced cues behave identically — you can always go back.

Presenter asks for a repeat: Click the cue again. Clicking an already-active cue rebroadcasts its state to all outputs. It doesn't restart a timer.

Team output showing wrong content: Check that the team is assigned to the correct room and that the output URL includes the right room ID. A misassigned output showing a different show's content usually means the URL was copied incorrectly at setup.

After the show

• Stop the event when the show is over. This clears all output screens to idle state and signals the session is done.
• If you ran Q&A, confirm it's closed. Q&A left open after the event ends means the submission interface stays live even after outputs have gone idle.
• If you're repeating this show next week, note anything you'd change while it's fresh — cue titles that were unclear, timers that were off, team assignments that caused confusion.