Presenters — Valendo

# Presenters

When more than one person reads from the same prompter, the script has to say who speaks each part — and the presenter has to be able to tell at a glance, from two metres away, through a sheet of glass.

Valendo does it with colour.

The presenter's screen with the names hidden: each speaker's lines in their own colour

## Making someone a presenter

Write the name on a line of its own, above what they say:

ALEX
Good evening, and welcome to the programme.

JORDAN
And it is a simple question.

Select the name in the editor and press the person key in the Editing header. A chip appears under Settings › Text, and everything below that name is drawn in the chip's colour — until the next presenter's name.

Do it once per person. The app finds every other occurrence of that name by itself.

## Choosing the colour

Click the swatch on the chip. Six colours are offered to start with, each far enough from the others to survive a beamsplitter and studio lighting, and any colour can be picked instead.

Presenter chips with a colour each, a hide key and a remove key

The colour reaches all three screens: the editor, the presenter's screen, and the network page. It is not a marker for the operator — it is how the presenter knows the next paragraph is theirs.

## Renaming

Double-click the chip. Type the new name and press Enter.

The script is rewritten with it. This is the point: renaming the chip alone would leave the script saying one thing and the chip another, and the next person to open the project would have to guess which was right.

## Chapters and stage directions do not break the run

A chapter or a stage direction in the middle of someone's speech keeps its own colour — amber and blue — and then the speech carries on in the presenter's colour.

That is deliberate. A direction is an instruction to the person already reading; treating it as a change of speaker would hand the next paragraph to nobody.

## Hiding the names on air

The names exist for the operator and for whoever writes the script. On the presenter's screen they are one more thing to read out loud by accident.

There are two ways to remove them:

- HIDE on a chip, for one presenter

- HIDE beside the Presenters title, for all of them at once

The global hide switch beside the Presenters title

What is left is the colour, which is what the name was there to establish.

### The names leave the ruler too

This is the part that matters, and the reason the switch does not simply paint the names black.

The reading is paced by a ruler, and every line on it weighs something — including a line nobody can see. A hidden name that stayed on the ruler would leave a silent gap: the presenter would finish a sentence and then wait, watching the text crawl through the space where a name used to be, wondering whether to start.

So the hidden names are removed from the composition entirely. The reading closes over them and the pace stays honest.

The consequence is worth knowing: hiding a name changes the script's duration slightly, because there are fewer lines to scroll. That is the correct behaviour — the duration now matches what is actually going to be read.

## Removing a presenter

The × on the chip. The name goes back to being ordinary text: it stays in the script, and stops being coloured.

## What this is not

It does not split the audio, cue anybody, or send different text to different screens. Everyone sees the same script; the colour says which parts are theirs.

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