I am not sure if this applies to the avid playout system but thought I'd pass this along also. We have a GV playout system (ENPS newsroom system), We do ripple everything and have only A/B playout. It works very well. There are two keys here, we have a play next macro on the switcher to roll the next clip as per the rundown which is managed by the producer. The other key element in the system is the UMD ( ) this will tell us exactly what clip is going to roll next and how much time is left on the clip. Works great

Hi Justin! Not sure wha kind of GUI display you guys have (the way the PC cotroller visually looks). We run the same A,B,C config - but I guess we don't have the "ripple" feature that you speak of, sorry no help there. I would however, strongly suggest to your Mgr, chief, News Dir, or however high you need to go...to get that "CUE" or "CUE NEXT" available to you. For us it's one of the keys on our 19 button X-Keys controller. I totally agree w/ Matt! We sometimes get some stuff that for a tease (:40 dur) is something like 3-4 min clip. (Move your "bar" as we call it, down to the next A, B or C event, hit CUE, move your bar back to where you need to be) As far as the secondary 3 playout decks, we use the same idea that our Master Control uses, which is complete backup/redundancy at any given notice. 2 seperate servers, AirSpace, etc. So, in theory, we could have both of our control rooms going, Ctrl 1 on say ABC, and Ctrl 2 on DEF...but we only have enough crew for 1 booth. Hope this helps, Don KXTV, Sacramento P.S. I really do need to get on the stick and get a photo upload account somewhere...I could easily upload a screenshot of our iNews GUI to see if it looks like yours.

Hey Matt, after a week of using our new system, the only problem we are having is the one you pointed out. We will blindly roll the next clip because the video is still playing on the same channel from a story 3 items back. But it's no big deal at this point. That que next feature would be great, but alas the engineers won't give us td's that feature... just curious though, our system has a back up were we dump from channels a,b,c to channels d,e,f via a salvo through our router. do you guys have a similar thing, if so, have you ever had to bail to it? -justin

Justin...my last station had a Grass Valley playback system, and we struggled with the same 'ripple vs. non-ripple'. What we decided was to assign all of the playback channels ... it started with just assigning all of our opens and stingers to the 'D' channel, and as we got used to the system, we assigned all of the playbacks and had the producer look after additional assignments if another "tape" was added to the show. Both certainly have their advantages ... you know where everything is going to be if you assign all of your playouts, and that was helpful to us when we were switching and directing. Rippling just lets you fly with it, and I enjoyed using the ripple feature on the AM show and not putting the time into assigning all of the playouts. The only trouble that I ever had with the ripple was when they copied something from another rundown that had a playout assignment already, so I could end-up with two of the same channel next to each other in the playlist. Not sure if there is a script that you can run to defend against that, but I figured I offer those experiences in hopes that they'd help you out. One other button that you might want (not knowing how your system is connected) might be a "cue next" for each channel. If some rocket-scientist cuts a 3 minute clip for a 10 second tease, you're going to want to get past it in a hurry! I know that some places have tally connected to cause a channel that is playing and no-longer tallied to 'abort' and cue to the next event.