Presenters and sessions

A presenter joins from wherever they are with a personal link. They check their camera and microphone in a waiting room, say they are ready, and their video appears inside a slide you designed — on the stage and at the moment you chose. No capture card, no cable, and no Wunderframe account for the presenter.

• Presenter — a person in your presenter library: name, title, organization, photo.
• Session — one dated slot on one stage: who presents, which slide frames them, when it starts, how it goes live and what follows. A session can be linked to its program item (a record in your program), whose title, time, room and speakers then fill its slides — see Your program as data.
• Invite link — one presenter’s personal link to one session. Treat it like a password.
• Rehearsal — a test slot of a session. Same link, same waiting room, nothing reaches a screen.
• Backstage — the waiting room before the session is live.
• Presenter block — the block in a shot or layout that marks where the live video appears.

Open a scene in the shot editor and add a presenter block. Place and size it like any block, then choose what it shows (camera, shared screen, or screen with a camera inset), whether a name label appears, and a fallback still for when the session is not live. The live picture only ever appears on a stage.

One design serves every talk. Nothing about a presenter slide is per-speaker: the presenter block shows whoever is live, and the slide’s blanks are filled from the session when it plays — {speaker}, {speaker_title}, {organization}, {photo}, {speakers}, {title}, {time} and {room_name}, {starts_at} and {ends_at} for a countdown or progress bar, plus the values of its agenda record. Point a hundred sessions at one scene; these are the same values the speaker intro gets, so the two cannot drift apart.

Presenter video is muted on screens except on stages marked plays presenter audio in Venue → Stages. Mark the one wired to the room’s speakers.

Add people in Run → Presenters, or import them from your speaker portal with the API — see Import speakers from a CSV.

On the session page, Send by email mails a presenter their link with a calendar entry: the session, the room, the start in the venue’s time and how early the link opens. The presenter needs an email address in Run → Presenters.

A link is never stored where it could be read again, so every send makes a new link. Resend by email replaces the old one: the earlier link and email stop working. The button shows when the last email went out, or why it failed — the fresh link is then shown to copy by hand.

• Plan one with a date, time, length and note — Same time, one week before fills in a good default. The link opens 15 minutes before it starts.
• Rehearse now starts a rehearsal from this minute for 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours, and creates a link for every presenter who has none, ready to copy.

A presenter often wants to see themselves on a real projector before the day. Give a rehearsal a test stage — any screen except the session’s own stage. While the rehearsal is open, Show on that stage puts the rehearsal there: every presenter in the rehearsal room appears in the presenter slide, exactly as on the day.

• Nothing goes live: the real session and its stage are not touched.
• Stop on, End rehearsal or Remove hands the test stage back to its schedule, and so does the end of the rehearsal window.
• To look first, open the test stage’s Preview and pick the session under Rehearse with presenter — it wears REHEARSAL and changes no screen.

A link opens backstage from 15 minutes before a rehearsal until it ends, and from Backstage opens before the session until an hour after its planned end. Outside every window the presenter sees when they can join next. A revoked link, or a canceled session, is refused with a plain message.

The session page is your backstage monitor: a tile per presenter with live video, microphone level, device state, last seen and readiness. Listen plays a presenter’s microphone on your machine, and the room selector switches to a rehearsal.

Looking after several rooms at once? Run → Backstage shows every presenter session of the day side by side, a column per stage, with pictures, microphone levels, readiness and countdowns — on a desk, a tablet or a phone. See Backstage. A presenter who shares their screen can also appear in a cast zone set to Presenters only.

A panel or an interview needs more than one person on screen. On the session page, each presenter has:

• Put on screen — makes them the one on screen (Switch to while live: a cut between speakers).
• Add — puts them on screen alongside whoever is on already.
• Take off screen — removes them again.

Design the slide for it: give the presenter slide one presenter block per seat and set each block’s Presenter option — Presenter 1 of the session shows the first person on screen, Presenter 2 of the session the second, in session order. Whoever is live shows the lead. A seat with nobody in it shows the block’s fallback, so nobody backstage can appear by accident.

Going live is two questions, and the session settings ask them separately.

When is it due?

• When the presenter is ready — the moment someone presses I’m ready.
• At the start time — I’m ready only marks readiness, and the session becomes due at its start. If nobody is ready then you get an alert, and it becomes due on the first I’m ready.

Who puts it on screen?

• Nobody — it switches by itself — the moment above arrives and the stage cuts to the presenter.
• An operator, at the desk — the live board lights up Presenter ready — Take and the stage waits for that press. Choose this when somebody is watching the room and can see whether the speaker is really at the lectern.

While a show is running on that stage its controller is asked either way — only they may move the screens their show holds — and the live board says which of the two reasons is waiting, so “this one always waits for you” never looks like “a show is in the way”.

Go live now puts a session live at any time, and Not ready sends a presenter back to waiting. Nothing here cuts a presenter off: running past the planned end only alerts you.

Session finished is on the presenter’s page while they are live, on the backstage monitor and on the live board. It ends the session and applies what you chose to follow.

Send each presenter their invite link together with What to expect as a presenter. To plan sessions and create links from your own agenda tool, see Plan sessions and send invites.