The patch lives in a spreadsheet only one person can read.
Video has a drawing, audio has a different one, and the cable that crosses between them is on both — until someone edits one copy. Signal Ops keeps one wiring graph per show: what feeds what, drawn once, and every department reads the same graph.
One drawing, every department
- One graph per show, not one per departmentSources, converters and destinations live on one canvas for the whole show. The department sheet is a filter over that graph — never a copy that can drift from what audio drew last night.
- A cable is stored onceThe line from the video world into the audio world is one record, and the cable schedule reports it to both departments it touches. Nobody reconciles two spreadsheets that each own half of it.
- Drag port to portA cable is made by dragging from one port to another. Ports are real rows, not labels — so re-pointing a device never breaks the cables hanging off it.
- A mismatch is flagged, never rejectedLand an SDI output on an HDMI input and the cable draws with a flag on it. The adapter exists in real life, so the software records what you actually built instead of refusing to.
- The monitor wall is a view, not a second drawingThe Monitor tab reads the same graph. What feeds each screen is answered by the wiring that already exists, not by a separate diagram somebody has to keep in step.
Inside the show, not off to the side
Signal Ops is a tool inside the show and advance workflow, not a standalone ops area. The graph belongs to the show it was drawn for, so the A1 handing off to the V1 is handing over a filter setting — not a file.
When the department sheet is what a tech opens at the rack, it is a viewport over the live graph. Edit a cable on the canvas and the sheet is already right, because there was never a second copy to update.
Draw it once, on a real show week.
Bring the show you are patching next. The first department sheet you filter out of the graph is the last one you type by hand.