AV and production
Published
Event Tech Notes AV and production
AV is where the venue contract, the physics of the room, and your agenda collide. The expensive surprises are almost all visible in documents you already have.
Event AV has two layers. The visible one is screens, sound, and lights. The structural one is contracts, rigging points, and electrical capacity, and it is the structural layer that produces the invoices nobody forecast.
In-house AV versus outside producers
Most venues have an in-house AV provider, either an internal department or a contracted partner resident in the building. In-house teams know the rooms, the rigging, the house sound, and the loading dock, and for a straightforward general session they are often the efficient choice.
An outside producer works for you, not the building. For anything with creative ambition, complex staging, broadcast elements, or a multi-room show that must feel coherent, a producer who has done your kind of event brings judgment the in-house team is not scoped to provide. The trade is money and friction: the outsider pays to learn the room, and the venue may charge for the privilege.
That charge has a name. Read your venue contract for the exclusive-AV clause. It comes in strengths: a true exclusive (only the house provider may work in the building), a right of first refusal, or, most commonly, permission to bring your own provider subject to supervision fees, liability requirements, and mandatory use of house staff for rigging and power. The mechanism to understand is that AV commissions are part of how venues price the building; a low room rate is often subsidized by the expectation of house AV revenue. Negotiate the clause before signing the venue contract, because afterward you have no leverage. Ask specifically: which services are exclusive, what outside providers pay in fees or forced labor, and who controls rigging.
Rigging and power are constraints, not line items
Rigging is almost always exclusive to the house, for defensible liability reasons, and it is priced per point and per motor. Your set design meets reality as a ceiling plan: rated points, in fixed places, with fixed capacities. A design that ignores the plan gets redesigned or gets expensive.
Power is the same story at floor level. Rooms have finite electrical service, and large draws (concert sound, LED walls, broadcast lighting, a full streaming setup) may require company switches or generator supply, ordered weeks ahead through the venue. Power also caps everything else: the espresso machines on the show floor and the charging tables compete for the same panels. Get the power capabilities in writing during site selection, not during load-in, and give the same early scrutiny to the network drops your production will need, because venue connectivity is ordered on the same slow paper as power.
The run-of-show governs everything
The run-of-show (the minute-by-minute document listing every cue: who is on stage, which microphone, which slide deck, what appears on which screen, when) is the actual operating system of your event. Everything upstream feeds it and everything on-site executes it.
It matters because production is a coordination problem among people who cannot see each other: the audio engineer, the graphics operator, the stage manager, the stream director. The run-of-show is their only shared state. When it is current, a fired speaker slot is a rehearsed contingency. When it is stale, the room finds out in real time.
Practical rules that professionals treat as non-negotiable: one document, one owner, versioned visibly, distributed by the owner and nobody else. A rehearsal that walks the actual run-of-show with the actual operators. A freeze time after which changes are called over comms, not edited silently. And every piece of tech that touches the stage, the countdown clock, the confidence monitor, the polling tool from your event app, appears in it as a cue with a named operator, or it does not go on stage.
The unglamorous summary: read the exclusive-AV clause before you sign, get the rigging plot and power spec before you design, and treat the run-of-show as the contract between everyone working the room. Do those three things and AV becomes what it should be, which is boring.