Set up your first show in Story Hub
Create a show, invite your story team with the right roles, and build your cast roster — everything to do before day one of production.
August 10, 2026 · 2 min read
Story Hub is the browser side of Hotsheetz — where your show lives, your team collaborates, and your transcripts and hot sheets land. Setting up a show takes a few minutes, and doing it before production starts means your first shoot day flows straight through the pipeline.
Before you start
You'll need a Hotsheetz account. Head to hotsheetz.com/login, create an account with your email and a password, and confirm your email address when the confirmation message arrives.
Step 1: Create the show
From the projects dashboard, create a new show. Give it the name your crew actually uses — it appears on hot sheets, exports, and in the desktop app's show picker.
Storage is handled for you: new shows get Hotsheetz-managed cloud storage automatically. There's nothing to connect and no bucket to configure. Remember that only transcripts, notes, and show data live here — your media files never leave your own machines.
Step 2: Invite your story team
Open the Users area and invite your team by email. Every invite carries a role:
- Owner — full control of the show, including team management and settings.
- Admin — manages the day-to-day: settings, cast, team invites.
- Staff — works the story: scenes, transcripts, notes, and exports.
Invitees sign in with their own email and land directly in your show.
Step 3: Build your cast roster
Open the Cast area and add a profile for each cast member — names and photos. The roster does more than look organized:
- Speaker labels in transcripts match against your roster, so dialogue reads as your cast, not as anonymous speaker numbers.
- Cast filters in Scene Explorer are driven by the roster.
- Face cards and roster PDFs export straight from the profiles you build here.
If you're mid-casting, add who you have — the roster can grow as the season does.
Step 4: Dial in project settings
Open Settings for the show. The one section worth doing before day one is audio and slate identification — it teaches Hotsheetz how your sound department names its files, which is how scenes get identified automatically when transcripts come in.
The easiest path: ask your mixer for one example filename in their usual style. There's a ready-to-send message built into the settings page for exactly this. Paste the example in, confirm the pattern, and save.
What's next
With the show configured, put the desktop app on the machine that will handle media — usually your DIT's — and you're ready for audio. That's covered in Install the desktop app.
Put it to work on your show
Create your show in Story Hub, install the desktop app, and let tonight’s hot sheet write its own first draft.