Worship in HD

1. Display Foldback - we have a stage projector in our system, and often we’d like to do different things on the two projectors.  Now we can.  Well, we will, anyway. This feature requires an outboard “black box” from Matrox which basically makes your computer only see one projector (but the image is twice as wide). We ordered the Matrox DualHead2Go, and once we get it in, I’ll let you know how it goes. My big concern is that currently we do some things outside of EasyWorship (videos, powerpoint, etc., for various reasons) - with the Matrox we may have problems doing that since it’s set up as a single second monitor from the PC. I’ll be watching this closely and plan to post how we overcome that obstacle (probably in the forum). One more note on the Matrox: we ordered the digital version since we’re running widescreen. Our new resolution to cover both projectors will be 2560×720.

2. Full Screen YouTube Videos - EasyWorship did a really good job integrating other media into their software, including YouTube content.  The built-in internet browser now connects to SongSelect lyric service, too.  Previous versions were a bit glitchy I felt, so this is a really nice upgrade.  Two things need to be noted about this: First, make sure you preview your content as YouTube traditionally is lacking on video quality.  Second, and more importantly, just because YouTube content is “available” and easy to show using EasyWorship, you still need to obtain permission when using YouTube videos.  People often think because the content is available it can be shared, but that’s not true (without permission).  That being said, EasyWorship has done a great job with it’s online feature and the interface updates for importing and using media (videos, graphics, audio, etc).  Adding a YouTube video to the service schedule is incredibly easy and it works really, really well (so far).

I’d love to hear your feedback on these or other features in EasyWorship 2009.  I’d like to extend this conversation to our forum, where I created a topic for this post.  See you there!

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve surely heard about the new version of ProPresenter, to be released shortly.  We run EasyWorship, but from what I’ve seen, ProPresenter 4 is the real deal.  I had the pleasure of visiting a church in Petaluma, CA, last week running ProPresenter (on a MAC) for 2 16:9 main screens and an environmental backdrop screen.  Justin, their technology director, told me ProPresenter is INCREDIBLE (his words, of course).

In any case, I wanted to list a few features of the new software here in a quick post, and encourage ALL PROPRESENTER users to contribute to our forum.  Let us know the pros and cons, stuff you’re looking forward to in the new version, and any other thoughts on the software.  Here’s the forum link: ProPresenter.  Some features on ProPresenter 4:

• Enhanced messaging window for messages, clocks, and “tokens”.  You can save messages that you use on a regular basis.  And dynamic data is managed by “tokens”, which are “placeholders for clocks, timers, and text”.
• Customizable video attributes where you can make small changes like color on the fly without editing your graphics.
• The new version also allows for templates in the presentation library, and it will resize text for various resolutions based on the template.
• You can import PowerPoint directly, now.  I didn’t realize this before, but EasyWorship had them beat on this one (till now, that is).
• Built-in stage display!! I LOVE this one.  You can customize a third output for the stage display.  Your singers/speakers can view different content than the congregation, all within ProPresenter.  Obviously, you would need a dedicated video card output for the stage display.  The Stage Display output is customizable.
• They are improving their original Song Automation capability to make it easier to use.

All in all, the more I hear about ProPresenter 4, the more I want to take it for a spin!  Users, let us know what you think at our forum!

And here’s the link to the ProPresenter site.