Group cues hold a unique position in QLab, because they contain other cues. In this way, they are quite like cue lists, and in fact cue lists are indeed a special kind of Group cue.

The default keyboard shortcut to create a group is ⌘0. If you create a Group cue while one or more other cues are selected, those cues will be placed inside the Group. Once a group is created, it can be collapsed or expanded for visual simplicity, using the gray disclosure arrow in the upper-left corner.

The inspector shows two tabs for group cues: Basics and Mode.

Basics

Please refer to the section on the inspector in the Getting Started section of this documentation.

Mode

A group cue can have one of four modes:

Start first child and enter into group.

Cues grouped in this mode will appear in a blue outline with round corners. Cues within this type of group won’t automatically affect each other or trigger each other. When the group is triggered, the first cue within it will play and the playback position advances to the next cue in the list. This is essentially an organizational tool to visually separate cues into different sections within the cue list, and to hide or show an entire group of cues with a single click (on the grey disclosure arrow in the upper-left corner of the box).

Start first child and go to next cue.

Cues grouped in this mode will appear in a blue outline with square corners. Cues within this type of group will get skipped over unless they are connected with auto-continues or auto-follows. Before auto-continues or auto-follows are added, this is equivalent to disarming all but the first cue in the group, except it now includes a way to collapse the whole group at once. Once auto-continues and auto-follows are added, it’s a tool to begin a timeline-like sequence of cues with only one press of the GO button.

Start all children simultaneously.

Cues grouped in this mode will appear in a green outline with square corners. Cues within this type of group will all start at the same time when GO is pressed. Using a start-all group in conjunction with pre-waits is another way to create a timeline-line sequence. For a more detailed description of how this can be achieved, please see the “Building cue sequences” section of the documentation.

Start random child and go to next cue.

Cues grouped in this mode will appear in a purple outline with square corners. When a group in this mode is triggered, it will randomly select any cue within the group that is both armed and not currently playing and start that cue. Note: in versions prior to QLab 3.1, this mode would start any child regardless of its status as already active or disarmed.

Broken Cues

Group cues can become broken for the following reasons:

A cue in the group is broken.

Fix the cue inside the Group, and the Group will be fixed as well.

Timecode triggers require a Pro license.

You’ll need to either install a Pro Audio or Pro Bundle license, or remove the timecode trigger from this cue.