The AV checklist for session timing
Session timing fails in the tech check, not on stage. By the time a speaker cannot see the clock, the mistake is two hours old and there is nothing to do about it.
C4E has been running conferences and dealer meets for twenty years. This is the timing part of our AV check: the items that decide whether the clock does its job, in the order we do them.
Sightlines: sit where the speaker sits
Everything here starts with one act that almost nobody performs. Walk on stage, stand at the lectern, and look.
- Can you see the clock without turning your head? If a speaker has to break eye contact with the room to find the time, they will not look. It needs to be in peripheral vision from where they will actually stand.
- Is it lit? A confidence monitor washed out by a front truss is a black rectangle. Check it with the show lighting state on, not the work lights.
- Can they see it from the far side? Speakers move. If your monitor only works from the lectern and your speaker is a pacer, you have a clock for a person who is not there.
- Does the front row block it? A floor monitor is invisible once four hundred people sit down. Check it with chairs in position, and remember heads are higher than chairs.
The screen itself
- Extend, do not mirror. The single most common failure. Mirrored displays put your control panel on the stage screen and the room watches you work.
- Check the aspect ratio. A 16:9 timer squeezed onto a 4:3 monitor, or letterboxed onto an LED wall, will crop the digits you need.
- Kill the screensaver and sleep. A laptop that sleeps at minute eighteen of a twenty-minute session is a story you will tell for years. Disable sleep, disable the screensaver, and plug the machine in.
- Disable notifications. Nothing says professional like a WhatsApp preview at 200pt on the stage screen.
- Hide the browser chrome. Fullscreen, so the room sees a clock and not a URL bar.
- Test at distance. Walk to the back of the room and read it. Digits that are legible on a laptop at arm’s length are not automatically legible at thirty metres.
Sound, if you are using it
- Test the buzzer through the actual PA, from the actual machine, into the actual desk. Levels in an empty room lie, and a laptop’s own speaker tells you nothing about what the room will hear.
- Set the level with someone at the back. Loud enough to land, quiet enough not to be an event in itself.
- Decide if you want it at all. For a boardroom, a flashing screen is plenty and a buzzer is aggressive. For a 600-seat hall with a speaker in flow, sound is the only thing that will reach them. This is a room decision, not a default.
- Tell the sound engineer it is coming. Otherwise they will duck it, or chase it, or both.
Power and network
- The timer laptop is plugged in. Not “has 80%”.
- Know what happens when the wifi dies, because in a hotel ballroom it will. Anything browser-based should be loaded before the session starts and left alone. If your timer needs a live connection to keep counting, find out now rather than at 15:40.
- Do not refresh the tab. Tell whoever is operating: once it is loaded, leave it. A refresh on dead wifi is a blank screen.
- Have a second device. A tablet with the same timer open is a thirty-second recovery instead of a four-minute one.
The human layer
- One named person operates the clock, and they are in the room, not “around”.
- They know the shortcuts. Hunting for a mouse pointer in a dark room is how a timer starts ninety seconds late, and ninety seconds late is ninety seconds of overrun you invented yourself.
- The chair knows the ladder. What they do at zero, at plus two, at plus four. Agreed, not assumed.
- The speaker has seen the screen and has been told what the colours mean. Thirty seconds in the green room.
The failure you have not planned for
Ask one question at the tech check: “If this screen dies at 14:20, what do we do?”
Most teams have no answer. The good answer is boring: a second device already open, and a chair who knows how to end a session with their voice. Timing that depends on one screen staying alive is timing that has never met a live event.
The version you can run in five minutes
- Stand at the lectern. Can you see the clock, in show lighting, without turning your head?
- Extend, not mirror. Fullscreen. Sleep off, notifications off, power in.
- Read it from the back row.
- Buzzer through the PA, level set from the back.
- Loaded before the session. No refreshing.
- One named operator who knows the shortcuts. One chair who knows the ladder.
Our timer is free at c4e.in/timer: it runs fullscreen in a browser tab, keeps counting without a connection once loaded, and has a button to fire the buzzer on demand so you can set levels at the tech check rather than discovering them at 15:00.
C4E runs corporate events, conferences and MICE programmes across India, Dubai and South East Asia. If you would rather someone else ran the room, talk to us.