Previewing a stage

The picture on a stage card is the real player, small and muted — it shows what the room sees right now. The Preview page answers the other question: what will this stage show at 10:15 tomorrow, and why?

Open a stage’s Preview. It plays the stage’s player on a clock you move and says, in words, what decides and until when — Call sheet · Room A loop · until 10:00, then cue Keynote (show Plenary). Below it is the stage’s whole day: bookings, show cues and sessions. Click one to jump there; if nothing is booked, Book it opens the call sheet on that stage and hour.

Open player opens the player full screen in a new tab, as you rather than as a screen, so it never takes one of the stage’s device places. On a wall, pick a panel to see just its part, or Whole wall.

Every preview has the same bar: the stage preview, the story preview and the full-screen previews in the editors.

• Pick a date and a time, drag the slider across the day, or jump with −15m, −1m, +1m and +15m.
• Run the clock at 60× or 600× to watch a day go by, or pause it; 1× runs it at normal speed again.
• Now goes back to the real clock.
• Session makes the preview act as if the session on this stage were scheduled, backstage, ready, live or overrunning — so a rule like “hide the countdown once live” can be watched without a presenter.

The time is always the venue’s. When the venue is in another time zone than your computer, the bar names the zone.

A moved clock or a pretended session wears SIMULATED, so a screenshot is never mistaken for the room. Rehearse with presenter watches a session whose presenter is really backstage, as if they were live: it wears REHEARSAL, takes nothing and changes no screen. A real screen never shows either badge — its clock cannot be moved.

A stage with rules lists them beside the preview, each marked holds, not now or playing at the moment you picked. Move the time or flip the session and watch a rule take the stage — the words then say Rule: Doors · Doors open · while it holds. See Rules that choose what plays.

The preview plays your latest edits, published or not, so you can check a change before anyone in the room sees it. In a workspace that publishes manually, the screens play the published release until someone presses Publish — see Publishing. Stage settings and rules are not published; they apply when saved.

When a single screen is turned, the preview offers As designed and As mounted. As mounted draws the TV the way it hangs, with the picture turned inside it — see Mounting and rotation.