A lot of rundowns come to Show Caller already in motion.
Here's how the day-one moves look from where you are now.
Spreadsheets to Show Caller.
There's a reason for it — a spreadsheet is fast, everyone knows how to read one, and the producer can hand the planning around without committing to a system. The trouble starts when the show begins. The spreadsheet doesn't move. The team is on a stale printout. The producer is on a different tab.
Show Caller picks up where the spreadsheet ends. Drop in an Excel file with a dozen tabs — the importer scores them, picks the most rundown-looking one as the default, finds the header row even when it isn't on row 1, and maps your columns to the show. Four clicks and the show is in.
From there, Plan View is the spreadsheet you knew. Drag rows. Tab through cells. Add columns for every department your show needs. Build it with the whole team — every edit syncs to every other device in real time, with full undo, find, and an edit history on every cell. By the time you're done planning, the show isn't a document anymore. It's the show.
From PCO to a team show flow.
Most worship teams have a service plan in Planning Center before Sunday. The truth of the service. Then it gets printed.
The moment that printout leaves the printer, it stops being the truth. The worship leader holds a chorus one more time. The pastor speaks four minutes longer. The kids' video runs short. The paper says one thing, the room is doing another, and the production team is on their own to figure out which.
Show Caller pulls your Planning Center service directly into a live rundown — songs, notes, key, BPM, service start time, all of it. From there it's not paper anymore. The producer can extend a song, cut a transition, push the welcome by ninety seconds, and every operator's view updates in the same breath. Estimated Time of Day recalculates down the rundown. The next cue is always honest about when it's going to land.
PCO plans the service. Show Caller runs it — and lets it breathe when the moment asks for more.
Leave your stopwatch at home.
The audience took an extra five minutes to get seated. The opener ran sixty seconds long because the band liked the vibe. The keynote still needs a solid twenty minutes to land — twenty-five if the audience laughs in the right places. Catering, breakouts, and childcare are all waiting at the end. Where are we?
Show Caller's timing engine answers that, continuously.
Every cue has a duration. The countdown runs server-authoritative at 500ms ticks, interpolated to 60fps on every device. As each cue completes, Over/Under tells you exactly how far ahead or behind plan you are. Estimated Time of Day projects when every remaining cue will land, recalculating the moment anything changes. Add ninety seconds to a song? The whole downstream picture updates. The producer sees the real landing time of the whole show, all the time.
- +1 / −1 minute buttons — add or shave time from the running countdown.
- Reorder cues in flight — everything downstream re-times.
- Cut a cue to give a long moment its room.
- Time of Day triggers for hard outs — broadcast joins, satellite windows, the doors-close moment.
- Per-cue thresholds for the warnings — a 10-minute song doesn't want the same amber-band as a 30-second sponsor slate.
The stopwatch on your lanyard is doing one number. Show Caller is doing fifty, in real time, for the whole show. Leave it at home.
A unified approach to Show Caller and ProPresenter if you've got to run both.
ProPresenter is already in the room. Lyrics, scripture, lower thirds, the stage display the talent reads from. Show Caller doesn't try to replace any of that.
Instead, Show Caller becomes the timing master, and ProPresenter runs the slides. Map each cue in your rundown to a ProPresenter playlist item. When the producer fires GO, Show Caller advances the cue and triggers the right slide together — fire-and-forget, never blocks. Arm and disarm the ProPresenter column per cue, so rehearsal calls don't fire live graphics.
When the worship team is leading instead and ProPresenter is the source of truth for what's on screen, flip Show Caller into follow mode. Now Show Caller tracks ProPresenter's active slide in real time and surfaces it across the team. One button gives control back when you want to drive again.
And when the producer is also the ProPresenter operator — which happens more often than the rest of the industry acknowledges — that's where this lands. One keyboard, one show, both systems. Triggers fire from inside the rundown, follow-mode keeps the teams in sync. No more hopping between two apps to remember where you are.
Presenter, Backstage and Public displays keep everyone on schedule.
Production information should be at every station that needs it. Operators, stage managers, green room talent, foyer staff, mobile crew. Not on a paper rundown someone needs to find. On a screen, lit up, telling them what's now and what's next.
Show Caller outputs HDMI, NDI, and Blackmagic DeckLink — up to eight configurable outputs per machine. Patch the Stage Timer into your switcher as a video source. NDI a Backstage Display onto the dressing-room monitor over the network. Send a Producer TX to the truck. The video engineering is done.
Each display does a different job:
- Stage Timer — for the talent. Big TED-style countdown, NOW and NEXT cards, color walking green → amber → red.
- Backstage Display — for the green room and crew bays. Current cue with progress, next up, coming-up list, the show clock.
- Public Display — for foyers, lobbies, lobby slates. Audience-appropriate. No operator detail.
- Producer TX — compact reference for broadcast monitors.
- Mobile Cue View — for the floor manager walking the building.
Portrait mode rotates 90° in software, so you can lay a TV on its side without a scaler or a third-party box. Per-output Stage Scale and Text Brightness dial the look to the room without changing accent colors.
It's a visual conductor. Operators and talent see the same beat, in the form that's right for each of them.
Standby, silent.
Sometimes the show calls for a game-day move. Cut a slate. Stack the next two songs. Skip the bumper because the speaker wrapped early. Normally that means the producer keys the comm and talks the operators through it — over the opener, on top of the worship leader's prayer, in the middle of a take.
With Silent Standby, the producer doesn't have to say it. Select the cue you're moving to. Hit READY. That cue lights up with an amber ring in Live View, and every operator's assigned column on that row lights up too. Each operator taps once to acknowledge — their cell turns green with their initials. The producer sees, at a glance, who's ready and who isn't. No one keyed a mic.
It's a silent symphony. The producer gets the confidence to reshape a session in real time, knowing the team is moving with them, without ever raising their voice.
Stage Management, on the rundown.
The bigger the show, the more its rhythm runs on who's actually ready. Did the keynote get miced? Is the band on deck? Did the next presenter walk in yet? Most production rooms answer these by yelling over comms during the moment when comms should be quiet.
Show Caller adds a fourth role for this work: Stage Manager. PIN-gated, peer to Producer, Operator, and Viewer. The SM works inside Live View — the same place the rest of the team works — through a dedicated panel that lists upcoming cues with their presenters.
The presenter column itself is structural — it sits on every cue, always there, after the title and before the operator columns. When the Producer writes the rundown, they drop a presenter (or three, or eight) into each cue: just a name, typed in. The SM panel reads that list and gives the SM two tap targets per presenter:
- 🎤 miced — the mic is clipped on. Tap to confirm.
- ▶ on deck — they're in the wings, ready to step.
The Producer reads those flags from across the room. They never set them — that's the SM's job, because the SM is the one who actually sees the mic clip on. Not assumed-ready. Actually ready. The Producer hits GO knowing the answer.
Big show? Bring assistant SMs. Multiple SM clients work concurrently — the server's the authority, last-write-wins, no locking.
"Not miced" is a perfectly valid end state. Panels often have shared house mics. The plan for who-gets-what lives in the audio column. The presenter chip reflects what physically happened. The system never warns or color-codes a chip as "incomplete." That's not the SM's job either.
It's the same idea as Silent Standby, applied to people instead of cues: the Producer gets the information they need, without anyone keying a mic.
