Live Show Tracking

One of Script Elephant's major features is its support for live show tracking.

This allows a show caller to mark which section is live, and anyone else with the script open will be able to automatically follow along in real time.

Using Live Tracking

For all users who want to use and watch the live tracking, they can simply open your session's full script view or run of show view.

If a Director is tracking, then each user's screens will automatically update in real-time. They can disable auto-scrolling by disabling the "Enable Auto Scrolling" button in the bottom-left corner.

Session Agenda

The session agenda visible at the top of the script view will update in real-time based on which block is live. This is a great way to watch a session from a birds-eye view.

For example, you can open a second browser window, disable auto-scrolling on that window, and scroll to the top of the page to get a tiny floating agenda that will always show which blocks are coming up next.

Enabling Live Tracking

To begin live tracking, make sure you are signed as a user with the Director user assignment. Then open either your session's full script view or run of show view.

From here, your live tracking controls are visible in the bottom-left corner.

These controls are:

Enable Tracking Control: Enable this to control tracking from this browser tab.
Enable Auto Scrolling: Enable this to have your browser window automatically scroll when a new section is marked 'live'.
Ring Bell: Flashes a visible "bell" on-screen to get your team's attention.
Connection Quality: a measurement of how reliable your internet connection is.

These settings will be remembered for each browser tab, even if you refresh the page.

Using Tracking Control

After clicking the button to enable tracking control, you can advance each section through any of these states:

Not selected (default)
Selected (gets a faint outline)
Ready (highlighted green to indicate to your team to prepare to fire a cue)
Live (highlighted red to indicate to your team that a cue is now live)

You can advance through these states by clicking a section several times. That is to say: clicking it once will select it, clicking it a second time will mark it ready, and clicking it a third time will mark it live.

Keyboard shortcuts

After a section has been selected, you can control your tracking with the following shortcuts:

Up/down arrow keys to select the previous or next section
Enter to advance the selected section to the next state, which will be either ready or live.
Spacebar will select the next section. If the next section was already selected, this will also mark that section as live.
Shift+Spacebar will mark the previous section as live.
Escape will clear all tracking states from this session.

Once you are in a flow, you can simply hit Spacebar to make the next section live, and Shift+Spacebar if you need to make the previous section live.

Auto Scrolling

This button will automatically scroll your browser to the current "live" section whenever the show caller updates it.

Disable this if you prefer to freely scroll without your browser automatically updating.

Keyboard shortcuts

Backspace will enable auto scrolling and scroll you to the currently live section (think: "take me back"). This is helpful if you need to temporarily scroll ahead or look backwards, but then want to quickly scroll back to the current section and enable auto scrolling again.

Ring Bell

This button is a way for anyone on the team to get the rest of the team's attention. It functions similar to a "call" button on a comm. Everyone's screen will flash with a brief yellow bell symbol. No noise will be made.

Keyboard shortcuts

B will 'ring' the bell.

Connection Quality

Hovering over this will show you your measured connection quality to the Script Elephant server.

Your browser will continually stay connected with the Script Elephant server. Every few seconds, the connection quality is cacluated by measuring your browser's round-trip latency to the server, along with any jitter or packet loss encountered. This is used to calculate your score.

Understanding connection quality

Above 90% is an excellent score that should experience real-time feedback with minimal observed latency.
75-90% is a good score that may experience slight delays of less than a second.
50-75% is an acceptable score that is likely to experience some delays up to a second.
25-50% is a low score that will is very likely to experience noticeable delays of a second or two.
Below 25% is a poor score that will experience significant delays of several seconds or more.

In what environments can I use live tracking?

Script Elephant's Live Tracking feature is designed to be as resilient as possible, built with the understanding that it is likely to be used in demanding environments, such as congested public spaces, unstable WiFi networks, and tethered to cell connections.

With this in mind, it is designed to be used it in most of the above situations. This is because:

Behind the scenes, Script Elephant uses Web Sockets, which is a technology that allows your browser to be "pushed" updates as soon as the server has them. In environments with a dedicated internet connected with an Ethernet / fiber optic connection, this can provide you with consistent real-time interactivity with no observable latency.
In addition, your browser will send a heartbeat to the server every second. This allows it to measure your connection quality and re-establish the connection if necessary.
Your browser will continue sending these requests for as long as your browser tab remains open. This means that your device can go to sleep, or completely lose internet, and as soon as a connection is re-established, the script will update with the latest highlighted sections.

All of this internet traffic is optimized to require only a tiny amount of bandwidth (less than half a kilobyte). This minmizes the burden on your network infrastructure, and also allows Script Elephant's live tracking to work even under extremely challenging network environments.

What should I use live tracking for?

One of Script Elephant's guiding principles is:

People are the heartbeat of every live event, and our platform amplifies their expertise—not replaces it.

Live Tracking is designed to help your team members excel at their craft - not replace them.

Script Elephant's Live Tracking functionality is intended to allow your team to stay on the same page and to easily and confidently know what's coming up next.

Live Tracking is not intended to directly control playback devices or trigger show-critical equipment. Our belief is that direct show automation and control requires a different category of tooling: locally-controlled, ethernet-based integration software such as Bitfocus Companion, which are specifically designed to help you automate your production.

Script Elephant's purpose and mission is to organize your team's information in a singular easy-to-use platform to help them produce a precisely coordinated production.