A run of show is the only document in an event that everyone works from at the same moment. Audio reads it, lighting reads it, the video operator reads it, stage management reads it, and the client reads it over someone’s shoulder and asks why the panel is 35 minutes. Build it in a word processor and you will spend the week before the show recomputing clock times by hand every time a speaker gains four minutes. This generator does that arithmetic, and it shows you the one number that matters, which is how far past your hard stop the show runs as it stands.
Put your start time in, put the durations in, and the clock times fall out. Move a segment and everything after it moves with it. The row colour changes the moment the show runs past the hard stop, so you can see where the sheet breaks rather than adding it up in your head.
| Start | End | Segment | Min | Cue and owner |
|---|
Nothing you type leaves your browser. Reload the page and the sheet resets to the sample rundown, so export before you close the tab.
Build the rundown backwards from the hard stop
Most rundowns are written forwards, from doors to close, and most rundowns overrun. The two facts are related. Writing forwards means every segment gets the time its owner asked for, and the shortfall lands on whatever is last, which is in most cases the client, the awards, or the close. Those are the three things nobody wants to cut.
Write it backwards instead. Start at the hard stop, put the close in, put the item that cannot move next, and keep going until you reach the top. If you run out of clock before you reach doors, you have found the problem five weeks early rather than at 11:40 on the day. The generator supports either direction, because you can reorder rows after you have typed them, but the discipline is worth adopting on the first draft.
Changeovers are work, so give them a row
The fastest way to lose eight minutes is to fold set changes into the ends of other segments. A keynote listed at 22 minutes that also has to absorb a four-chair panel set is a 26 minute keynote with an unpaid stagehand at the end of it. Nobody agreed to that, so nobody plans for it, and the change happens in front of an audience while the MC improvises.
The generator has a separate button for changeover rows and renders them in grey so the sheet reads at a glance as content and not-content. Our house allowances, and these are ours rather than a published standard:
- Chairs on or off, up to four: three to four minutes with a briefed crew, longer if the chairs come from outside the room.
- Lectern on or off: two minutes, and add a minute if it carries a mic that has to be patched and checked.
- Full set change with furniture and a screen fly: eight minutes, and rehearse it.
- Speaker swap with a laptop change: two minutes, or zero if you have taken the decks in advance and are running them from one machine, which is what you should be doing.
- Break: whatever catering says, plus five. The room never comes back on time and the five minutes stops that from becoming your problem.
The three segments that break the clock
Q and A. An open Q and A has no natural end, which makes it the only segment on the sheet with an unbounded duration. Give it a number, tell the moderator the number, and have the moderator take the last question with two minutes to go rather than at time. If the session is going well the temptation is to let it run. Letting it run is a decision to cut something later, so make that trade in the room rather than by accident.
Awards. Awards overrun because the per-award time is estimated from the trophy handover and not from the walk. Count the walk. A recipient at a round table eight rows back takes 20 to 30 seconds to reach the stage, and if there are 24 awards that is ten minutes nobody put on the sheet. Either shorten the walk by seating recipients at the front, or put the walk in the duration.
The client address. The one segment on the sheet that no producer feels able to cut on the day. Whatever number you have been given, the safe planning figure is that number plus a fifth, and the honest move is to say so in the production meeting rather than to absorb it in silence.
Reading the overrun figure
The number in the top right is the whole point of the tool. Total runtime on its own tells you almost nothing, because three hours is fine or catastrophic depending on when the room has to be dark. The overrun figure compares your sheet against the constraint that will cost money, and it updates as you type.
What counts as a hard stop is anything set outside your production: a venue curfew, a crew call that goes into overtime, a broadcast window that closes, a meal that has to be served hot, a shuttle that leaves for the airport. Venues in the Gulf and in Singapore in many cases bill overtime by the quarter hour or the half hour, so eleven minutes past is not eleven minutes of cost, it is a full billing block. That is why the tool shows the overrun in minutes rather than a green tick or a red cross.
What we leave off a rundown
A rundown that tries to be the whole production book stops being readable at the calling position, and readability under pressure is the only quality that matters at 09:28. We keep these off the sheet and put them in their own documents: full slide decks, contact numbers, rider details, catering counts, floor plans, and risk assessments. What stays is the segment, the duration, the clock, and the cue that starts it.
One column earns its place beyond that, and it is the cue and owner column. A cue with a name against it is an instruction. A cue without one is a hope. "Lower third at plus 15" is useful to the video operator only if the video operator knows it is theirs, so we write the department into the cue text rather than adding a column that the printed sheet cannot fit.
Exporting it to the room
The CSV export opens in Excel and Google Sheets without an import step, which is where most rundowns end up living once more than three people touch them. Download it, or copy it to the clipboard and paste it into a sheet that already has your formatting. The file carries a byte order mark, so accented characters and currency symbols survive the trip into Excel on Windows, which is where they seldom do.
Print it in landscape for the calling position and widen the cue column first. Under pressure, the cue column is the one anyone reads.
Where these conventions come from
There is no industry body that publishes rundown practice, so there is nothing here to cite and we cite nothing. The changeover allowances, the plus-a-fifth rule on client addresses, and the advice to write backwards from the hard stop are ours, out of twenty years of calling shows in hotel ballrooms, convention centres and rooms that were sold as ballrooms. Treat them as a starting position and replace them with your own numbers once you have run the format twice.
The arithmetic is a different matter. Clock times, running totals and the overrun figure are computed from what you type and nothing else. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere, and there is no account to make.
Put it on your own site
Copy this into any page and the tool loads on its own, with one link back here:
<iframe src="https://wearec4e.com/tools/run-of-show-generator/?embed=1" width="100%" height="900" style="border:1px solid #e6e9ee;border-radius:8px" title="Run of show generator"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://wearec4e.com/tools/run-of-show-generator/">Run of show generator</a> by C4E</p>The rest of the kit
This is one of the free tools we build for people who run events. The event timer is the clock you put in front of a speaker once the rundown is written, and the room capacity calculator sizes the room the show goes into. Everything is at tools.
If the format is the question rather than the clock, the shape of the day differs for a conference, a dealer meet and a corporate offsite. And if you would rather hand the whole thing to someone who has called a few hundred of them, tell us about the event.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a run of show?
A run of show is the minute-by-minute plan for what happens on a stage and who makes it happen. It lists every segment in order with a duration, a start time, and the cue that begins it. The show caller reads from it, and so do audio, lighting, video, stage management and the client. It is the one document the whole room works from, which is why a rundown that lives in someone's head is a risk rather than a plan.
How is a run of show different from an agenda?
An agenda tells the audience in broad strokes what to expect. A run of show tells the crew what to do and when to do it. The agenda might say "09:30 Keynote". The rundown says the keynote is 22 minutes, walk-on music starts at 09:28:30, the lower third fires 15 seconds after the speaker hits the mark, and the changeover to the panel takes four minutes because three chairs have to come on. One is a promise to guests. The other is an instruction to a team.
How much padding should a rundown carry?
Enough that the first overrun does not eat the last segment. Our house habit is to carry the padding as named rows rather than hiding a minute inside each segment, because hidden padding gets spent without anyone deciding to spend it. Put a real changeover row between anything that needs furniture moved, and put a visible buffer before any segment that has a hard start, such as a satellite link or a meal service.
Why does the generator keep changeovers as their own rows?
Because a changeover is work, and work that has no row on the sheet has no owner. The moment a set change is folded into the end of a speaker's slot, the speaker owns it, and speakers do not move furniture. Giving the changeover its own line makes the duration visible, gives stage management something to point at, and stops the room from believing a panel of four can be seated in ninety seconds.
What is a hard stop and why does the tool ask for one?
A hard stop is the time the show has to be finished, set by something outside the room: a venue curfew, a union call, a flight, a broadcast window, or lunch going cold. The tool asks for it because the overrun figure is the only number in a rundown that changes behaviour. A total runtime of three hours and ten minutes means nothing on its own. Eleven minutes past a curfew that bills by the quarter hour means something.
Can I use this for a livestream or a hybrid show?
Yes, and the hard stop matters more there than in a room. A stream has a published start, an audience that arrives on the clock, and in many cases a broadcast slot that closes. Build the rundown to the slot, keep the changeovers honest, and treat the remote segments as hard starts rather than as things that happen when the previous item finishes.
Does the CSV export work with Google Sheets and Excel?
Yes. The export is a plain comma-separated file with a header row, so both open it without an import step. Fields containing commas or quotes are escaped to the usual convention. If you print the sheet for the calling position, widen the cue column first, because that is the column anyone reads under pressure.
Is the run of show generator free, and can I put it on my own site?
It is free, there is no sign-up, and nothing you type leaves your browser. You are welcome to embed it: copy the snippet on this page, which loads the tool on its own with one attribution link back here. If you want the calling clock as well, the event timer is the companion piece.