Autohide/show skipped cues

[FL K]

Hi there,

I inherited a show file with an abundance of audio description sound cues; Many of them are not coincident with anything else but just take up space and attention from the operator.

I have disarmed and set to skip, which does help the flow of the show, but visually, it's still a mess. I could of course make a version with and without these cues, but it would mean maintaining 2 "streams", which is not desirable.

Then I thought of this brilliant feature I love in a video composition program of my choice (initials a and e ;)), where you can mark layers as "to hide", and have a global toggle button to then hide/unhide all layers that have that marker.

Feature suggestion:

- A global toggle switch (either in global UI as a button, or maybe in tools menu?) to toggle "hide all skipped cues".

- rationale: I assume that often, we don't actually want to see the skipped cues, as they don't do anything AND we don't want to linger on them - so technically, they don't need to (visually) exist for us in the day-to-day programming or operation; it's more like an enduring bin feature, where we can re-activate what we need. Having this toggle switch would give the flexibility for us to see the skipped cues (when working / arming / disarming them), as well as hiding them when we are looking for only relevant visual content to operate a "clean" show.

Hope that sounds usable to more people than just me? :).

All the best,

Freddy

[FL K]

Sorry, I should mention - in this case, the Audio Description is only very rarely used, but I did not want to delete it in case it gets used again in the future.

[Sam Kusnetz]

Hi Freddy

Are you able to nest the audio description cues inside Group cues so that they don’t take up visual space?

If the cues are still called, but just disabled, it seems like hiding them would make the show harder to operate. If the cues aren’t called at all, how does the crew change their workflow on the days when they are used?

Best

Sam

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Sam Kusnetz (he/him) | Figure 53

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[FL K]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for getting back to me on this one -

Yes, cues could be nested (I'd do in top level (individual) timeline group cues as per my normal layout, see at the end of the email), when they are not already called with other group cues, but that would still leave  the same (even with collapsed group cues) or more (when not collapsed) visual real estate cluttered between the actually called cues (when AD is not used).

For the op, I use in this case 2 numbering systems for the cue numbers -

"Q xxx" for (manual and so top level timeline) cues that are always called (some of which will include disabled AD cues inside them), and

"AD xxx" for group cues that that only contain a single AD cue.

The script (for those ops preferring to refer to it) has the two cue numbering systems (digitally as comments with said cue numbers), but (in Word) by different comment authors, so that the two systems at least they have different colours - also not perfect of course, hiding all comments from one author would be amazing, but is currently not possible I think).

So yes, the application case would be:

- I have activated the "skip when disarmed" for all AD cues, everywhere

- When it is NOT an AD show, I disable all AD cues everywhere, so they will not (need/be able) to be operated - at this stage, functionally, the show already works as desired.

- however, imagine a mass of individual AD cues between the always used "Q " cues - then your scrolling "horizon" and screen estate shows a majority of cues that in this case you neither need to know about nor operate, at the expense of being able to better "look ahead" and focus on the essential cues, so:

hiding all "skipped" cues (so cues that have BOTH armed unchecked AND skip checked) would solve that visual problem.

I hope that makes more sense now, with the added explanation :). Yes, you could use fire first child and enter group cue groups instead to sum up several AD cues in one group, and through collapsing that group gain some more screen real estate back, BUT - usually I do like having a top level timeline cue per manually operated cue, so that I can use the cue name to describe the cue point, and leave all grouped content keep their auto names describing what they are/they do - that way, for pure operators as opposed to programmers, you can simply collapse the entire cue list, and hide the underlying mechanics while keeping all operations-critical info (cue numbers and cue names aka cue points) visible.

And seeing that skipped cues have no real influence on the operation of a show, to me it makes sense to be a candidate for being able to hide them from view completely - not always of course, so that you can edit them when needed, but with a toggle.

Cheers,

Freddy