Automatic cue naming
Published:
Starting with version 0.6.0, Q2Q will automatically name cues for you now! This was a very fun feature to implement, and there’s a lot of customization you can leverage.
By default, new projects will have their cues named with a single alphabetical letter, starting at the beginning–A. Adding and deleting cues will follow this rule. This is because these new cues are actually all named $ - which Q2Q substitutes with a letter, one greater than the previous. So when you add a new cue, it doesn’t change the other cues’ names; it just affects how Q2Q interprets the names. You can see this for yourself by opening your .q2q file in a text editor and seeing that all the cues really are named $!
But some people don’t want letters; they want numbers. Got you covered there, too–use # for your cue names (you can set a project-default cue name in the top toolbar), and it will auto-increment starting from 0.
There’s a lot more to this cue-naming grammar however; this is where it starts to get interesting. You can add multiples of a substitution symbol to get Q2Q to count with more digits: for example $$$, $$$, $$$ becomes AAA, BBB, CCC; and ###, ###, ### becomes 000, 001, 002. Q2Q can increment more than one at a time if you add a number to the end of the substitution, like so: ###5, ###5, ###5 becomes 000, 005, 010 (works similarly with letters). There’s still more stuff you can do–for the full spec, take a look at the Automatic Cue Naming chapter in the user guide.
My preferred naming strategy
When designing a show, I prefer sounds to be named with letters, and lights with numbers, so there’s less ambiguity, letting the stage manager call out “Ready 30BD… GO!” (meaning “light cue 30 and sound cue BD”). If you use numbers for both, the SM has to specify which are which (unless you’re doing a Chicago-style one-operator-to-rule-them-all show, in which case, you have no need of this distinction).
I also like my cues spaced out, so I have the flexibility to add stuff in between last-minute without causing a rename of half the show and pissing off the SM.
So I would usually go with the $$5 naming scheme (or perhaps $$$5 if I really need the deep organization, like for shows with many cues per scene). I usually use the first letter correspond to the scene, and the second letter is incrementing inside the scene. Say we have Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, each with 3 sound cues inside them. I would name my cues like so:
$$5->AA$$5->AF$$5->AK{BA}->BA$$5->BF$$5->BK{CA}->CA$$5->AF$$5->AK
During the design phase, it’s very easy to just insert cues here and there. But, after the cues have been taken down by the SM, and therefore shouldn’t change names anymore, we can start “locking down” things as we insert new cues. For example, say we need to add two cues between AF and AK without affecting the existing names. We can just give each intermediate cue its desired name without curly braces, and Q2Q will ignore it when counting:
$$5->AA$$5->AFAH->AHAJ->AJ$$5->AK{BA}->BA$$5->BF- …etc
This feature also pairs well with the cuesheet CSV export, which uses cue names as displayed by Q2Q, as expected!
I’m excited to see what people do with this feature. What naming scheme will YOU choose?