Church Tech Arts

This weekend we got to use technology in a pretty cool way to engage with our congregation. One of the things Upper Room is known for is our experiential style of worship. Almost every week, we have some type of activity that allows the congregation to engage in the teaching they have just heard. Sometimes it’s reflective, other times it’s very active. We’ve put giant calendars on stage and asked people to commit to having a difficult conversation by a certain date. We’ve asked people to write on walls, pick up stones with a new name, even bring items in to sell on ebay to raise money for Heal Africa. This week was about celebrating our experiential nature.

We set 3 laptops up around our worship space. During the message, we encouraged people to go to a laptop and “blog” about a particular experiential that impacted their lives. Our web guru, also a Mike, designed a simple form on our web site that would take their entries and pass it to a database on the server via php. The form had a prompt question, and a text box sized to limit the length of the entries (we weren’t looking for a novella, just a few thoughts).

Once the person hit submit, they received a confirmation that their message was sent, and 5 seconds later, the page refreshed (Mike B.–you’re good!). Our Creative Director, Craig, sat in the service with his laptop checking the database via our website admin page (which was also custom designed in large part by Mike B.). As the posts came in, he chose the posts that fit the topic the most closely, and instant messaged them to me via Google Chat. I then took the copy and pasted it into a Keynote presentation. I had build at template that would display the words using the typewriter effect. I adjusted the timing based on a simple 3.5 seconds per line timing that we determined was about the right speed.

During the message, I was receiving the IMs and building the Keynote presentation (which actually resided on our iMac running ProPresenter), while our presentation tech followed our pastor with sermon slides in ProPresenter. Near the end of the message, I saved the Keynote and closed it. During the prayer, we took all lights to black, went to black in ProPresenter and flipped to Keynote. The first slide was black there, too, so the change was seamless if anyone was peaking. We then ran the “blog posts” from Keynote in order to take advantage of the typewriter effect.

At the end of this section, we went back to black, returned to ProPresenter and wrapped up the evening. It was pretty neat to see how people have been impacted by the experientials, and very cool to have their comments on the screen just minutes after they wrote them. Of course, we couldn’t have pulled it off were it not for our great Tech Team (props to Jeff, Ronica, Erik & Les). They truly rocked it tonight and brought their A-game. I’ve always said that one of my goals is to work myself out of a job in the tech booth. I love seeing volunteers so good at what they do that I can concentrate on other activities while they make the service happen with very little input from me. And I love being able to use technology to engage with our congregation in creative ways. That’s what we did this weekend…how about you?

If you’ve already updated to 10.5.5 and don’t want to roll back, the good folks at Renewed Vision have found a work-around to get you back in business. The only downside is that you use the ability to play back DVDs (until a permanent fix is issued) through ProPresenter. Here’s the post from Greg:

So far we’ve determined that the DVD component is involved. A temporary solution is to disable the DVD playback.

You can do so by running the following command in the Terminal (copy everything inside the box below):

Code:

defaults write com.renewedvision.ProPresenter3 disableDVDFunctions -bool true

Note, that you can’t use the preference setting in Pro because it crashes before it is able to save the preferences.

This seems to resolve the problem. If you are experiencing the kernel panic, run the command above in the Terminal and please let us know along with the information requested above.

When you wish, you can turn DVD playback back on directly in ProPresenter, a terminal command is not necessary.

So there you go. As always, remember there’s no rush to install Apple’s software updates. If your system is working normally, and you aren’t having issues that the update is supposed to fix, hold off for a bit. You’ll find life a lot easier for you if you stay off the bleeding edge.

[Update] It should also be noted that this seems to only affect MacBook Pros.

That and have a full-bootable backup of your system before you update. Then rolling back is really easy.

Thanks Greg, Brad and others at Renewed Vision for staying on top of this and getting a fix out so quickly. You guys are the best!

Here’s the whole thread on the Renewed Vision Support Forums…

For reasons probably only Steve Jobs knows, the 10.5.5 update breaks ProPresenter in a major way. It’s causing Kernel Panics (those are really, really bad…). Renewed Vision is working on figuring out what Apple broke this time and will post an update when it’s figured out.

As always, it’s prudent to hold off on installing any updates on a well-functioning system (and especially mission critical systems) until they’re proven to work well and not break anything. This includes (and sometimes means particularly) Apple updates.

Apple is somewhat notorious for changing things and not letting developers know ahead of time. So be aware. And it never hurts to have a fully functioning backup of your previous version just in case. See Back the Data Up, Pt. 2. for some thoughts on how to accomplish that.

[Update 9-17-08] It appears this issue is only a problem with MacBook Pros. And there is a work-around for it.

Today was a proud moment for me. My youngest daughter turned 12, which is a pretty humbling thing in itself. More than that, though, she also ran ProPresenter for “big church” for the first time today. And she did it like a seasoned veteran. As I watched her fire off cue after cue with Olympic sharpshooter accuracy, I started thinking what we could learn her. So here are a few things that Robyn can teach us.

Know the Music
Robyn is already an accomplished musician, and she really knows music. Because she often listens to praise and worship music, she was already very familiar with the songs we sung today. That gives her a real leg up when running ProPresenter (and Media Shout before that–that’s right, she’s 12 and she’s dual platform!). Because she knows the music, she can tell when the worship leader is circling back around to a chorus, or transitioning to the bridge. I watched her quickly navigate to the right slide so fast no one would have ever guessed it was a different order–all because she heard the 2 measure change and went to the right place.

Think Ahead
I also watched her continually scan the presentation to see where the song was going. Even on the first run through, she was paying attention to what was coming up, and if the played order was different from the given order, she caught the change and fixed it before anyone had a chance to say anything.

Cover Your Bases
There were a few sections of two songs that the worship leader sang differently each time through. Without any prompting, I watched as Robyn had one hand on the space bar and another on the mouse. Depending on how the song actually went she would hit space and go to the chorus repeat, or click and drop right into the bridge. Because she had two options, she got the right slide on the screen every time.

Pay Attention
This is an area that she just excels at. She was on top of the songs, and managed to follow the speaker who came in with a “manuscript” that was often more of an outline. She didn’t wander off mentally as a lot of us are prone to do. I didn’t have to remind her to hit any cues, even ones that weren’t purely scripted. She paid attention to what was happening in the room, and got the right slide on the screen at the right time.

Know Your Computer
One reason she is so good at ProPresenter is that she’s been using computers since she was 2. She’s taught herself Photoshop. She’s figured out how to set up websites on her own. She has been building PowerPoint presentations for 5 years. For fun. Because she’s so familiar with how computer programs work, she made the switch from Media Shout to ProPresenter in 30 minutes. Actually, it was less than that. I gave her a 20 minute tour, she played with it for a bit and pronounced, “It’s a lot like Media Shout, only more spread out.”

Care
Part of the reason she did a great job tonight is because she really wanted to. Now that might seem obvious, but how often do we approach our work as just something else we need to get done. In contrast, she really wanted to do a great job. Even though she nailed it during rehearsal, as we walked back in to the sanctuary after taking communion, she said, “OK, I’m starting to freak out now…” She had a good, healthy level of anxiety and wanted to get it right. Too often we lose that.

Now, I’d like to take credit for all of this great training and instinct. But the truth is, she’s just really good at it. And before I even had a chance to train her, somebody else (the volunteer in charge of tech for the kids ministries at Crosswinds–great job Kyle!) had shown her the ropes and taught her good technique.

I think there were some that were nervous about having a 12-year old running ProPresenter tonight. Our guest speaker’s assistant hovered in the booth for the first service (and only the first service, he didn’t have to give any direction at all!). I’m pretty sure my boss was skeptical, but by the end of the first worship set, he jumped on the com and said, “Maybe we should have middle schoolers run ProPresenter every weekend!” In fact, I am writing this as she’s cuing the second worship set for the 7 PM service. I don’t have to think about it!

At the end of the day, any potential critics were silenced. The good news is that anyone can learn from her and improve their game. Whether you’re 12 or 72 (you know, there’s just no way to gracefully illiterate 12…) you can give your best in service to our Lord. Just follow these simple instructions. “And the children shall lead them…”

As most of you know, we switched from MediaShout to ProPresenter a few months ago. The process has been very smooth, and I’m very glad we made the change. The only small wrinkle in the system is how we deal with sermon note slides. With MediaShout, we created the slides in PowerPoint, then imported that deck into MediaShout.  MediaShout played the PowerPoint presentation back just like we were actually in PowerPoint. This was both good and bad. It’s good because if we needed to make a last-minute change to a slide, we switched to PPT, made the change and refreshed the cue in MS. That worked well. The bad was that the integration never felt that tight. Sure, it worked, but if you had a build slide, MS only shows one thumbnail and no indication that it is a build. And random access to slides was dicey (then again maybe your pastor never changes up his or her sermon on the fly?).

With ProPresenter, we use Keynote for creating sermon slides. We could use PowerPoint, but Keynote is so much better there’s no point. After we build the slides in Keynote, we export them as JPGs (Keynote automatically serial numbers them, including build steps), and import them into Pro. Once the slides are in Pro, they act like any other element. All steps of the builds are visible and accessible, we can access any one at any time and it’s generally very easy to move through a message. Except…

The fly in this wonderful ointment appears when we need to make a change. Normally, we create the slides in the early afternoon on Sunday (we meet Sunday nights, remember) and import them into Pro. During run-through we proof the slides. It’s not uncommon to find a typo at this point. Thankfully, these are easy to fix, we simply switch to Keynote, make the change and re-export—overwriting the existing files. On playback, Pro calls the new files and all is well in the kingdom. Except…

There are times when we need to add a slide. Sometimes as the pastor is tweaking his message he changes a few things. Other times, we discover there is a better way to present a build (like I did this past Sunday), and we need to do a wholesale re-arrange. This is where it gets sticky.

It all comes down to how you build your Keynote. If you create your build steps manually, it’s not that big a deal. You can delete your existing slides from the Pro presentation, and re-import the whole lot of them and be fine. If however, you employ Keynote’s build feature to create the builds for you, there often needs to be some re-arranging of slides in Pro. Other times we’ll start a build, step out to a scripture slide, and come back to the build. Rather than create multiple copies of the same slide, I just duplicate it in Pro (which simply calls the same file multiple times). The long and the short of it is this; exporting the slides early in the day often leads to a few more steps of exporting and re-arranging. This Sunday, I hit on the solution; Don’t do it. Well, at least not until the last minute.

Our new workflow, starting this Sunday will be to keep the slides in Keynote right up until a few minutes before doors open. We will freeze the presentation at 4:30 (service is at 5:00, doors open at 4:45), which means no more changes. We’ll do a quick export, set it up in Pro (which normally takes a minute or two) and we’re done. We’ll proof the slides in Keynote during run-through, so if there are changes, they can be made on the fly right there, saving us a few steps. Once I get the pastor’s sermon at 4:30 I can scan it to see if we need to make any changes to the way we’re built, then export. I’ll let you know how it goes, but I feel really good about this change right now.

The alternative of course, is to just run the sermon notes from Keynote. My problem with this is twofold. First, when Keynote is in Presentation mode, it takes over the graphics card, and changing from Pro to Keynote causes the screen to dip to black for a second. I don’ t like this (call me a perfectionist if you want…). Second, while I like Keynote’s presentation mode better than PowerPoint’s, I like Pro much better because you can see the whole deck at once. In our world, random access is important. Your mileage may vary.

Looking back over this post, I realized it took me more time to explain it than it will take to implement the change. Hopefully it will save someone some time! 

Anthony Coppedge has written a great post on starting a creative team in your church. We’ve been busy developing our creative process over the last year, mainly due to the efforts of my boss, Craig. Having this process in place has made a huge difference in our week-to-week services. Anthony has some excellent thoughts on how to get this moving, including handouts from WFX. Thanks, Anthony!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: ProPresenter is the most actively developed software I’ve ever seen. The programming team at Renewed Vision just keeps cranking out the revisions, fixing bugs and adding new features almost weekly. As we’ve been using it pretty heavily now over the past few weeks, here are some of my favorite new features (and fixes).

Bail to Logo
This is a great feature. There is a button on the screen (which can also be activated by hitting F5) that will take you to any slide you previously set. I like to use it for our speakers. We will assign the “bail” slide to our series slide. Whenever the speaker drifts off script into a new illustration, or whenever it feels like the current slide has been on too long, but we don’t have anywhere else to go, we can hit F5 and painlessly get to our series slide. Getting back to the regularly scheduled program is as simple as clicking on the next slide or (cue next favorite feature)…

Keyboard Access to Slides
By simply typing the number of the slide and hitting enter, you can directly select any slide in a presentation. Let’s say you’re in a song, ending a chorus and the worship leader throws in a bridge. You could click back to it or just hit 8-enter (assuming 8 is your bridge) and you’re right there. It also works great for speaker slides. This weekend we had a collection of slides, but weren’t entirely sure when the speaker would need them. Rather than clicking, our presentation tech simply used the numeric keypad and enter. Very simple, very fast. Or you could (cue next favorite feature)…

Hot Key Assigns
You can also assign any letter key (a-z) to any slide. I started thinking about how easy this could be with some of the simpler worship songs we sometimes sing. A song with a verse, chorus, bridge and blank could be assigned to verse=”a”, chorus=”s”, bridge=”d”, blank=”f”. Why those keys? Because it’s the home row; you could fire the entire song, in any order with one hand without taking your eyes off the action. Even if you don’t know the order in advance, you could pay attention to the music leader and be right there with the right slide without looking. Very cool. And to make it easier, ProPresenter displays the hot key shortcut on the slide so you don’t have to remember it.

New “Hot Keys” (the white letters in lower left corners); Disabled Live Video button; and Direct Keyboard Access (the 13). Hit enter and you’re right there at slide 13. Cool!

Advance to Next in 0 Seconds
I’m really happy to see this feature added. Previously (as in version 3.3.1 and earlier), the shortest amount of time you could enter into a “Go to Next” box was 1 second. Now you can enter 0. This is especially useful for the end of a video cue, as you can now automatically advance it to black, or a series slide or whatever you want. I’m finding that we’re building our video cues with a black slide first, with a go to in 3 seconds, followed by the video with a go to in 0 seconds. With this setup, I can cue lights and presentation at the same time and the video will start playing just after the lights are out (using  a 3 second fade on the lights). It’s one cue for the presentation op, as they merely need to fire the first black. 3 Seconds later the video is fired and as soon as the video is over, it moves on to black (or our next graphic). Super-easy.

Disabled Slides
There are several songs in our library with sections we don’t always sing. Sometimes it is a rendition of a hymn that we will do stanzas 1,3 and 4, skipping 2 and 5. Previously, we would have had to either delete the unused stanzas (and type them in again later if needed) or move them to the end and make sure we don’t accidently cue them or create another version of the song in the library. Now we can leave them in the presentation and disable them. When disabled, they are grayed out and you can’t fire them. You can leave them inline where they normally belong, or move them to the end. Either way, they’re right there whenever you need to bring them back. This also works great for alternate endings, special bridges or other elements one worship leader may use and another doesn’t.

New Presentation from Clipboard
I’m not actually sure when this feature showed up, but I love it. Because we’re still building our library, it seems I’m entering a new song every week. In Media Shout, creating a new song meant multiple trips between applications and a bunch of copy-paste cycles. With ProPresenter, I can select the entire song, complete with “Verse,” “Chorus,” “Bridge,” and whatever other headings are there, copy it to the clipboard and select “File->New Presentation from Copied Text….” It’s smart enough to use the headings as slide labels, and I can tell it to drop into the library or add it to the playlist I’m building. Talk about time-saving. What once took a few minutes and a ton of keystrokes now takes a few seconds and about 3. Love it!

Disable Video In
One feature I just discovered is the ability to disable the “Video In” button. Right now, we don’t use live video at all in our setup, and it scared me that the Live Video button was right next to the Bail to Logo button. One errant mouse click and our presentation operators face would become the background (built-in iSight you know…). Thankfully, a checkbox in the preferences disables the button so a hasty click won’t embarrass anyone.

I’ve also noticed improvements with the sorting of dragged in groups of files. This has been an issue that has been hard to replicate. I posted it on the Renewed Vision forums a while back and they couldn’t duplicate the problem I had. I thought I was going crazy until someone else posted a similar problem. I’m not sure if they changed anything or if my computer is just acting nicer, but the last few group imports I’ve done have sorted correctly.

Things I’d Like to See Added
The ability to have an info loop running (a presentation of however many slides with Go to Next timers set, looping back to the first slide) and be able to edit or re-order another presentation in the playlist without affecting screen output. We could do this in Media Shout (though it was annoying because the script would jump to the new slide every time the timer advanced it), and it saved our bacon when we had to make last minute changes during walk-in. Call it a “Keep doing what you’re doing on the screen while I go do this in the background” mode. Rather like the “Blind” mode in a light board.

The ability to sort a presentation by some criteria (name, date, label, color, etc.). Not sure how often I’d use this, but it’d be nice to have the option.

The option of fading an audio cue out when going to the next slide. I realize the intent of the audio cue is to fire a click track or backing track for the band (or house) to hear and be able to follow along with the lyrics. But sometimes, we just want a sound effect with the slide, and need that sound effect to end when we move on. I know we can hit the fade audio cue button, but that’s 2 clicks…call me lazy.

Either the ability to set fade time increments (.1, .3, .5, whatever) in preferences, OR to have the up/down arrows increment by .1. Right now, they increment in .5 sec. steps, which for me is too coarse. I find myself switching between .3, .5 and .7 a lot, and it takes a mouse click, 3 keys and another mouse click to make that happen. While we’re at it, it would be great to be able to have different fade time settings for each presentation. Some songs demand a quick .3 sec fade, while others feel better at .7 or even 1. I would love to set this during rehearsal and have it follow along.

I’d also like the have the labels menu keep the order that I put them in. I’ve gone through 2 or 3 times now and added my standard collection of labels, in the order I want, and they keep getting re-sorted. Not sure if it’s a feature or a bug, but it bugs me. Being able to add new labels at the end and drag them up into the list, placing them in the middle of the list if I want (like re-ordering the playlist), would be nice, too.

Overall, I’m very happy with the choice to migrate to ProPresenter. I think it’s great software, and I love how active the community is. My favorite part is that I know as soon as Renewed Vision reads this, they’ll start working on some of the ideas and they’ll show up in a few weeks. Not because I’m that important, but because that’s how they are. They listen to their users and implement suggestions that make sense and benefit a large number of people (or sometimes just a few–they’re that good). Thanks again guys for making my life less stressful on Sundays!

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Posted by popular demand, I’ve set up a link to our speaker support PDF form. You can download it from the Downloads page, or just grab it here. I played around with it for a while to see if I could come up with a completely generic version, but decided to leave it exactly as we use it. To make the most of it, you’ll need to open it in Acrobat Professional and make some changes, namely editing some of the instructions, and changing the e-mail addresses the form goes to.

This is pretty easy in Acrobat Pro (especially v. 8). If this proves to be less than helpful, let me know and I re-visit it after Easter. My hope is that this serves as a springboard for you to take it and modify it so it meets your needs. And if you come up with something better, by all means share it…we’re open to suggestions!

Peace.

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Sunday was the second weekend of ProPresenter. Again, it worked flawlessly and our second volunteer picked it right up. He was called away to help his brother between the 5 and 7 services so I stepped in to man the con. It occurred to me that my MacBook Pro came with a remote, so I pulled it out to see if it would control ProPresenter. Sure enough, it works great!

So instead of being tied to the keyboard, I was able to stand back fire the slides and sing along. The left/right buttons on the remote advance and go back, and up/down moves through the playlist. I’m not sure if this is officially supported or not, but it worked like a charm. I felt much more in control of the process, and I was able to engage in the worship.

I was also able to fire cues from across the tech booth while manning our video switcher. A truly multi-tasking moment! At any rate, it’s one more thing I appreciate about it.

I also saw that Renewed Vision just released 3.3.1 which includes a few bug fixes for the previously released 3.3 (a week ago), which again qualifies Pro as the most actively developed software ever. Having used it for a few weeks, I have a few questions and suggestions…I’ll be calling tomorrow!

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The scene repeats itself over and over again every weekend. Perhaps even in your church. It’s worship time, and the band is rockin’. The congregation is singing out as the worship leader leads. Eschewing hymnals as old-fashioned, the words are projected on 2 large screens above the stage. As the worship leader looks out over the worshiping throng, he (or she) internally reflects on the goodness of God, and decides to repeat the verse. Suddenly the congregation appears confused and stops singing. About halfway through they start up again, but the mood of the moment is obviously broken. What went wrong? That darn presentation computer operator messed up again! Or did they?

Now, keep in mind that I’m all about being a team player. I really try to not differentiate between the band and the tech team when referring to the worship team. In my mind, we are all the worship team; band, worship leader, vocalists, tech team. Together we are allowed to lead God’s people into worship. Unfortunately, we don’t often spend enough time learning about each other’s roles, and how what we do affects others. It is in that spirit that I write today’s post.

I would argue that the presentation operator’s job is one of the most stressful in a worship service. They have all the responsibility of ensuring the right words are on the screen at the right time, and none of the control to determine when that time is. Should the worship leader deviate, they have less than a second or two to find the right part of the song and get it to the screen. It’s a huge challenge and responsibility.

It’s not a Word.doc
I think one of the most common misconceptions of worship leaders is that the software used to put the words up on the screen is a lot like Word and that changes are super-easy. Thankfully, some of the newer versions of the software have gotten easier. Even so, making changes to the songs on the fly is a challenge. If you’re planning on changing the way the song is sung, it’s best to communicate that clearly to the presentation people early in the process so they have time to not only make the text change, but to ensure the formatting of the song remains consistent.

Communication is key
Presentation software is like a database. It pieces together parts of songs in the right order and presents them on cue. It’s brilliantly simple in concept. However, the challenge is trying to decide what parts to present when. Songs can have all kinds of parts; verses, choruses, bridges, pre-choruses, refrains, tags, endings, and the list goes on. At Upper Room (and many other churches I know) we try to put the song order together before Sunday to make rehearsal time more productive. But consider the challenge when we get an order like this:

V, Pre-Ch, Ch x2, Br, Inst, V2, Pre-Ch, Ch x2, Br x2, Tag, End

Looks easy right? Except when the presentation operator gets to the computer and sees that he has only a verse, a chorus, a bridge and an ending defined. Now, all the words may be in the computer, but they may not be called the same thing. In that case the above order could just as easily (and correctly) be written as:

V, Ch, Br, Inst, V2, Ch, End

How can this be? Simple—older versions of presentation software gave us 4 labels. So we had to figure out how to get a dozen part “types” into four labels. So the person who originally put the song in the database combined the pre-chorus and chorus repeat into a chorus. It works fine, until the worship leader wants to repeat the chorus without repeating the pre-chorus. This could be accomplished by simply creating “chorus 2″ and using that instead. But can you tell from the first order what gets repeated? Not without a chart.

The woman who has been leading worship at Upper Room while we search for a permanent leader is quickly becoming my favorite worship leader because she supplies me with full-length charts of every song each week. If it’s anything more than a simple verse & chorus song, she’ll lay out every word she plans on singing, in order! This completely eliminates the confusion of simply supplying abbreviations because regardless of what a part is called, we can make sure the words are in order.

I highly recommend this practice, at least until you have a solid book of songs that both the tech team and worship leader are comfortable with, and all parts are well defined. I spent some time in the youth department of my last church putting together a song list that matched the worship team book. That way, we could use shorthand and not get burned.

Stick to the script
I fully appreciate that sometimes the spirit of the room dictates that you add an extra repeat of the chorus, or throw in an alternate ending for a song. There are times when people get wrapped up in the song and it makes sense to keep singing it. I support that and want to accommodate that to the best of our ability. What I don’t support is not bothering to actually learn the song and stick with the order you gave us. I’ve worked with worship leaders in the past whose song order, let alone verse/chorus order could be considered a guide at best. This might work great when sitting around in a living room with a dozen people, but when there are a few hundred, a few thousand, or more people trying to worship God and the only thing they have to go on are the words on the screen, it’s a recipe for disaster.

I can hear some out there saying, “But it’s all about what the Spirit moves me to sing!” And that’s great when you’re in your car. When you’re leading people in worship, it’s not about you. And it’s not about me. It’s about leading the people of God into worship effectively and without distraction. When you’re not singing what’s on the screen because you went off script, the people get confused and the mood is broken. To be fair, presentation operators screw up too, but I’ll tackle that in another column.

You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s all on the computer, follow along!” Two problems with that theory. Problem 1: Presentation software is generally pretty linear. It’s designed to move through a song in order. It’s possible to go back, but it’s a challenge. To go back, first the operator has to figure out where you went. Are you repeating verse 1 or 2? The bridge or pre-chorus? Then he/she has to scroll back (or look at tiny thumbnails) and find the part you’re repeating, and once found, fire the slide. Depending on how many lines of the song are on the screen at once, by the time the operator figures out where you are, you could be somewhere else.

Problem 2: The presentation operator should be leading the lyrics, not following. Good presentation operators will change slides somewhere in the space between the last and second to last word on a slide. This puts the next set of words up before anyone has to sing them. This style of “leading” ensures there will be an uninterrupted flow of worship, not punctuated by fits and starts as the congregation tries to figure out what to sing next. If the operator can only follow, the song will be broken at each slide break.

This is why it’s so important that the worship leader and presentation operator being on the same page to effectively lead the congregation together. Worship leaders, if you’re willing to plan ahead and communicate effectively with us, we can work together to create engaging, powerful and immersive worship times. The more information the presentation operator has at their disposal, the better the experience will be. To be fair, we need to do our part, pay attention and make sure the right words are up at the right time. But like I said, that’s another post!

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