Occasionally, if you drag a lot of new items into the Log in Myriad 5 Playout, you may see a warning message similar to the above screen shot.

This message is generated when you drag lots of Media Items into the same position in the Log and it is caused by the way in which each item in the Log is assigned a unique reference number which used internally by the playout engine.

A blank hour starts with a pool of over two billion reference numbers but each time you drag a new item into the Log in the same position, the pool of unique reference numbers between those two items is reduced. The maths is weighted to adding items working down the Log but you can think of it as roughly halving the number of reference numbers available between items with each insert in the same position in the Log.

Consider the simplified diagram below:

If you continue to add Log Items between 'Friends' and 'Bounce Back', eventually you will run out of spare unique numbers to use, that will result in the warning message above.

Alternatively, if you drop items between 'Bounce Back' and 'Oh No!' then there is a bigger pool there but eventually you will hit the same issue.

Work arounds

In the majority of cases, if you do see this warning message, simply changing the position you are dragging into the the Log will mitigate the warning message, however, there are two main approaches you can use to avoid this issue:

Add place markers in your Log then fill in the gaps

The first approach is to add some key elements to your Log and then fill in the gaps with the other Log Items you need.

In the example above, we have initially added four key items to our Log, the unique reference will be evenly spaced between them giving roughly half a billion numbers between each item.

You can then drag in the other items you want to use between the key items.

This means there is only three items between each of the key items which will reduce the likelihood of all the unique numbers being used.

If you had simply dragged items in one after the other in order then each item added would be assigned a unique reference from a pool that is roughly halving each time, eventually you would run out of unique references.

Build hours using the Pad

Another approach could be to use the Pad to build the content for the hour and then use the Send to Log option on the Mix/Send tab to send the built Pad List to an hour in the Log.

This will avoid the issue as the content will be evenly distributed across the entire pool of unique references (Myriad Schedule does not have this issue for the same reason).