Run of Show and Rundown Templates

A rundown is the document a live show actually runs on. Every row is one thing that happens: a segment, a break, a package, a song, a speaker. Every row carries a duration. The document adds those durations up and tells you when each item starts, when it ends, and whether you land on time.

Run of show, running order and run sheet are the same document under different names. Which one you say depends on where you work and what you produce. What doesn't change is the job: hold real durations, recalculate everything downstream when one item moves, and print in a form somebody can read in a dark control room. The formats below cover what comes up most, with the timing conventions that matter for each one.

An example rundown

A 30-minute studio talk show with a 19:00:00 start and a hard out at 19:30:00. Two breaks, one sponsor read. Durations are mm:ss. Start times are calculated, not typed. A newscast is built differently and gets its own section below.

What each column is for

• # is running order. It's the only thing that changes when you move a segment, and everything else recalculates from it.
• Start is computed. The first segment gets the show start time. Every other segment starts when the one above it ends. If you're typing start times by hand, one change to a duration in the middle of the show invalidates every row below it.
• Segment is what the row is, written the way the crew says it out loud. "Interview: city council" beats "Guest 1." The person calling the show is reading this at speed.
• Type separates what floats from what is fixed. Breaks and sponsor reads are contractual and don't move. Content is what gives when the show is heavy. Marking type is what makes that decision fast at 19:20.
• Duration is planned running time. Use real numbers. A rundown where everything is a round 5:00 is a rundown nobody trusts.
• Notes, not shown above, carries the production detail the row needs: source, playback, who is on camera, what has to be ready and when. This is the column the technical director reads.

How the timing works

Two numbers matter while you're building. The first is total running time against your slot. The second is backtime: given a fixed end, what has to be true at each point on the way there.

Take the example above. Say the feature package comes in two minutes heavy, 6:30 instead of 4:30. The second break is sold for 19:21:30 and doesn't move. Backtiming tells you the moment it happens that the panel now has to run 4:30 instead of 6:30, which means you tell the host before they sit down rather than in their ear at 19:20.

When you're heavy, you cut from content, not from breaks. When you come up light, you stretch the segment with the most give, usually an interview or a panel. A rundown that recalculates as you edit is what makes either decision take five seconds. See Segments and Timing for how Runsheet handles this.

Templates by format

The document is the same shape everywhere. What changes is which columns earn their place and where the time goes wrong.

Broadcast rundown

News, built in blocks separated by breaks. A block, B block, C block, D block, with three or four breaks spaced through the half hour instead of the two in the example above. Breaks are fixed and sold, so content floats around them. A local half hour has historically carried around 22 minutes of content inside a 30 minute clock, and in plenty of markets that number is lower now. When you run heavy, you cut from the back of a block, because that's the material sitting against the break you can't move.

See a full 30 minute newscast, block by block →

Live event run of show

Corporate general sessions, keynotes, product launches. Same rows, different columns. Event producers need cue detail on every line: audio source, video playback, lighting state, who is walking on and from which side. The distinction that most templates get wrong is that the agenda is what the audience sees and the run of show is what the crew runs. They're different documents for different readers, and mixing them up is how a speaker ends up on stage with no mic.

Conference agenda

Multi-day and usually multi-track, which means one runsheet per room per day instead of one giant document. The thing conference producers consistently underestimate is speaker changeover: mic swap, laptop handoff, deck loaded and confirmed on the screen. Three to five minutes covers a same-room speaker swap with a crew that has done it before. A room change, a different mic setup, or a crew meeting the venue that morning and you're closer to eight or ten. Budget nothing and you're ten minutes late by lunch on day one.

Church service order

Prelude, welcome, worship set, announcements, message, response, benediction. What breaks here is song transitions and lyric operator cues. List every song as its own row with the key and who is leading, and the volunteer running lyrics has something to follow instead of guessing. The message is the item with the most variance, so build the back end of the service assuming it runs long.

Podcast episode

Cold open, intro, sponsor read, segments, interview, listener questions, outro. Most of a podcast doesn't need to be timed to the second and pretending otherwise makes the document useless. Ad slots do. Mark where the reads land, how long each one runs, and which are host-read versus dropped in, because that's what the sales side will ask for and what the editor needs to cut against.

Awards show

The longest format and the most fragile, because the variable is people. Budget roughly 45 seconds of walk-up and 60 to 90 seconds of speech per award, then accept that some of them will run double. The big televised shows cue the play-off music at around 45 seconds. Industry and regional awards mostly don't, which is why they overrun. The move either way is to build a cut list before you go on air: the packages and interstitials you drop first when you're heavy, in the order you drop them. Deciding that live is how shows end up cutting the wrong thing.

Running order

UK broadcast terminology for the same document. Items rather than segments, VT rather than package, gallery rather than control room, PA rather than production assistant doing the counts. A UK gallery also talks about a show over-running or under-running where a US producer says heavy or light. The structure is identical to a US rundown, but the vocabulary differs enough that a template written for one reads as slightly off to the other.

Run sheet

Standard across Australian and New Zealand events, and common in the UK too, though British crews are as likely to say running order. Carries more logistics than a broadcast rundown does: bump-in and bump-out, which Americans call load-in and load-out and the British call the get-in, plus supplier arrivals and who has the room when. On a smaller event one run sheet covers the whole day and the show is one section of it. On a bigger one the bump-in detail splits off into a separate production schedule.

Build it in Runsheet instead

A template in a word processor holds up right until the first duration changes. After that every start time below it is wrong and you're the one fixing them by hand. Runsheet does that part. Add segments, set durations, drag to reorder, and every downstream time updates as you go. It's free, it runs in the browser, and you don't need an account.

Build a runsheet →

Once the show is built you can print it landscape for the control room, export it as CSV or JSON, or run it live with a segment timer and backtime against your hard out.