Most of my panics last more than 1.5 seconds! But what pray are they in QLab3
In previous versions of QLab, selecting a cue and pressing S to stop it, or pressing Esc to stop all, would immediately stop the cues. In v3, those are "panic" buttons, which means instead of a hard stop, you get a 1.5 second (by default) fade out of the cues, so you can recover more gracefully. Press Esc or S a second time to get a quick hard stop. So, the panic duration is how long that fade out will be on a panic action.