I don’t often use multiple cue lists on Eos.  There are lots of reasons, but one of the big ones is how Eos “selects” the cue stack you just triggered and anticipates that perhaps your next recorded cue would go on a secondary list.  The film I’m working on needs multiple cue lists for me to support the gaffer’s work flow, so I reached out to Andrew Webberly about this issue and fortunately, he had both the answer and the time to share it with me.  The answer is Phantom.

When you are in Tab 16 Cue List Index, you will see many useful options.  Near the center of the options is a header with only one option- Phantom.  Phantom allows you to trigger a cue list without it grabbing focus in your PSD List or having Eos think that your next recorded cue should go into this list.  For me, this makes working with multiple cue lists so much easier. 

If you are wondering about some other options I’ve chosen, I’m happy to share.  This list is an explosion list I return to often for the shoot I’m on.  I always have secondary lists use all the exclude options to prevent the data from being recorded accidentally elsewhere or stomped or affected by other lists or actions.  I wrote the effect list to work on any of the truck pack Vortex fixtures, so I use Channel filter to choose just the Vortex the gaffer wants it on right now.  In this case, that is channel 71. Since explosions get called for randomly and I want to be able to just hit go to trigger the list again, I have “Go from Last” set to “Wrap” to wrap back around to the top of the list from the end.

Hopefully this will take some of the awkwardness of multiple cue lists out of your programming as it has mine.  What other multi cue tips and tricks have y’all discovered?  I’d love to hear them.