Worship Techie

A couple weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter that I would love it if PCO did input lists. They replied:

This is my detailed reply. I post it here to encourage any feedback from other TDs.

The Goal

The end goal is to have a list of the mics we’ll be using and what channel they plug into. Since this depends on who is scheduled to be there, it would be perfect if it was integrated with PCO.

Here’s a shot of a portion of my input list:

So the goal would be to be able to arrange that and print it out with my stage layout and rundown every week.

I’ve put some thought into how I’d like it to work. There’s a couple different things that need to happen:

Creating Instruments

First, we need to define how many channels each musician needs, and of what types of mics. I’d like to see a new button when you mouse over a scheduled persons name. Example:

When you click on that microphone, you could edit that person’s instruments. A dialog would pop up that allows you to create as many different instruments for a person as you want (obviously you’d be able to edit / remove instruments as well). In this example, Chad would have a vocal mic (Beta 87) and a DI for his acoustic guitar. It’s important to note that at this point these aren’t actually assigned to a channel… we’re just defining what we need.

Instrument assignments should stick with a musician from week to week, plan to plan. Typically they don’t change much.

Building the List

The second step would be to actually assign the instruments to channels. I’d like to see something that works almost identically to the stage layout window, but instead of moving scheduled musicians to positions on a stage, we’d be moving scheduled instruments onto a spreadsheet.

The input list should remember where instruments were the previous week as well. If Chad was scheduled last week with his guitar in channel 17 and his vocal in 20, and he’s scheduled again this week, the spreadsheet should be pre-populated with where his instruments were last week.

Also, somewhere you’d need to be able to configure how many channels you have available.

That’s pretty much it. It was easy to write the email, but I know it’s a ton of work to implement. I hope you guys can make it happen, that would make us production people really happy!