Church Tech Arts

Scheduling volunteers is probably the least favorite part of my job. It’s not that I don’t like my volunteers, but keeping track of the schedules, and keeping everyone on the same page is a big job. Now that I’ve taken on scheduling the support teams, the list of volunteers I’m responsible for has grown quite a lot.

I’ve tried a lot of ways to keep the schedule straight, and the biggest problem is making sure the volunteers have the dates they need. More than once, I’ve been at church calling a volunteer and asking, “Are you on your way?” Often the response is, “Oh, am I on today?” So in an effort to keep this from happening, here’s what I’ve come up with. The solution for me, so far, has been part product, and part procedure. 

The Product
I have tied using calendars, but I find them cumbersome. I prefer to have the list of dates listed out in a spreadsheet. Originally, I kept the spreadsheet on my laptop. Now, I keep it on Google Docs. Having it hosted on Google Docs gives me the advantage of being able to share the schedule with the team. 

I can edit the sheet from anywhere, and the team can bookmark it and see when they’re on at any time. The spreadsheets in Docs are very similar to Excel or Numbers (and you can upload an existing sheet very easily, if that’s how you already keep your schedule). Sharing the sheet is a simple matter of clicking on the “Share” tab.

We used the hosted app feature of Google Docs for our church, so we can share docs easily with other users in our domain. But it’s also easy to share with others outside the domain. And if you don’t want to host your mail there and use the domain feature, you can set up a single user and do the same thing.

Once you invite people, you can decide if they can edit the sheet, or just view it. I have our schedule set up so that I can edit, as can our Creative Director and volunteer producers. Everyone else just gets to view. You can also publish the sheet as a web page, and you can easily send anyone a link to the page (which is what I do with our support teams). Because one of the pages on our production schedule has everyone’s contact info, I have that set up so people have to be invited to view. The system creates a unique link for everyone that provides some level of security.

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Another nice feature is the ability to send an email to all the collaborators and viewers with a single click. The only limitation is that you can’t select individual viewers, or email a subset of the list.

The Procedure
That’s how we do it; here’s what we do. I’ll start the scheduling process by asking people to send me dates for the next 3-4 months that they know they are unavailable. I have an “Unavail” column in my sheet, so as those dates come in, I add the names as appropriate. We run our lighting and presentation teams on a 1 week on, 3 weeks off schedule, while sound is 2 on, 2 off. I start by populating the sheet with that pattern, and make adjustments as needed to move around unavailable dates.

Once I’m done and all the slots are filled, I’ll use Google Docs to send an e-mail to everyone and have them check out the schedule. Often people are reminded of a date they can’t work, so end up making a few adjustments. Once we get through that round, the schedule is “fixed.” Any changes from that point on need to be swaps between team members. They then e-mail me of the change, and I adjust the schedule.

Every Tuesday, I send a quick reminder e-mail to the team scheduled for the upcoming weekend. I ask them to ping me back as a confirmation. When they do, I bold them on the schedule. That way, others on staff can see who’s in for the weekend. If I don’t hear back by Thursday or Friday, I try again, or call. The team is used to this now, and normally I know by Wednesday morning that everyone’s good to go.

And that’s it. It takes a few hours to work out the schedule initially, but once it’s done, it takes less than 10 minutes a week to manage. I follow the same basic procedure for the support teams, but because they run on a fixed team-based 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off schedule, the dates are set for the ministry year. I still send out confirmation e-mails weekly, however.

We also use Google Docs for creating our cue sheet for the week. That is shared with the team on Friday when it’s done. I typically create an input list (in Google Docs) on Friday as well, and send that out to the sound team, so they can see what they’re walking into. I live by the motto, more information=good.

While it’s not a perfect solution, it works pretty darn well. And it’s free. As in nada. So if you’re a smaller church that’s looked into those hosted solutions, but just don’t have the budget for it, check Google Docs out.

Another Solution
There is a hosted solution that I do really like, and I think we’ll be transitioning to it in January. It’s called Planning Center Online. It’s built from the ground up to help churches organize their people and their service documents. It offers scheduling, charting, service planning, and even streaming MP3s for the band and tech team. You can share files and even transpose charts. It’s really slick. Best of all, once you build the schedule, the system automatically sends reminders out to the team, and the team clicks back in to confirm. There is a cost, but it’s pretty reasonable.  

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They have a free version (which is limited to 10 people) and other versions have a 30 day trial. Since it costs nothing to try out, give that shot, too. 

So there you go. Two ways to improve your volunteer scheduling. I’ve found this to be a huge boon to my ministry. By communicating well with my volunteers, they feel cared for and valued. And by having a good system in place, I spend less time on this task, and I get a full crew almost every weekend. Give it a shot.

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.

After my previous post, I’ve had a lot of questions about Compressor. It seems a lot of people have never delved into this great little program, so I thought I’d write a quick tutorial. Compressor’s job is simple. It compresses whatever video project you give it into another format. For example, if you need to output your video to the web, you could compress it down to a web-friendly size and format. I use Compressor a lot for setting my videos up to play well in ProPresenter. Before PP, I used it to create AVIs for Media Shout. It’s a powerful program that’s easy to use. Let’s dive in.

I will assume you’ve edited your project in Final Cut Pro (since Compressor is only available as part of the FCP Studio package). Success with Compressor starts in FCP. Once your project is complete, choose Render Both from the Sequence->Render All menu. It’s important that all of the checks are checked except Full. This ensures that all your video is in a properly rendered format. You need to do this even if your project is playing out fine in FCP using RT Extreme. Avoid this step at your own peril.

Now, set your In and Out points at the beginning and end of your program. I like to have a 1 second black Color clip at the front and a 2 second black Color clip at the end. Whatever is between the In and Out points will be rendered in Compressor. If you don’t do this, you’ll get the entire timeline, which you may or may not want.

Next, choose File->Export->Using Compressor… This will create a reference movie of your project and import it into a new untitled batch list in Compressor. It may take a minute, but should launch Compressor, with your file in the list. You should see something like this.

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Note that if you don’t see all the windows shown here, you can add them by changing your view settings from the Windows menu. There are a number of pre-set layouts, and you can also make your own, just like in FCP.

First, notice that your Sequence has been added to the Batch list. I didn’t name my sequence, so it’s listed as Sequence 1- Liar, Liar. “Liar, Liar” is the project name. If you’re better about naming things than I am, that will help if you batch a lot of jobs at once. Right now, if you hit Submit, nothing happens because you have not told Compressor how you want to format the final output. Look down to the Settings Pane. You’ll see Apple as pre-populated a large number of formats to accommodate various workflows.

I have my own Custom preset that I use for formating movies for ProPresenter. You can download it here if you like. (Here’s one for my Media Shout AVI format if you want). To utilize that Setting file, unzip it and drag the resultant .settings file onto the Custom folder int he Settings pane of Compressor. If you just drag it into the pane, it doesn’t work. So our first step in Compressor will be to drag the setting we want to use and drop it on the sequence in the batch list.

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You’ll see that our preset has been added as a line to our sequence. Note that it is possible to drag multiple settings to a sequence. For example, if I needed to make a ProPresenter QuickTime, a DVD and a FLV for the web, I could drag them all onto that sequence file. It will render out multiple versions of the file without further input from me. Very handy.

Also notice that the setting we applied has 3 columns to it. First is the Settings name, in this case ProPresenter. The second column is the destination, currently, “source.” I only use source when I’m dragging movies into Compressor directly and not exporting from FCP. Rendering to source will put the movie into an obscure, hard to find folder on your Mac, so we’ll change it. Finally the third column is the file name. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

A second tab on the Settings Pane is labeled Destinations. Just like it sounds, Destinations gives you the ability to create and save places to have Compressor save your file. You can create new Destinations by clicking on the + sign in that pane and editing the parameters in the Inspector pane. In this case, we’ll use Completed Projects. Simply drag your Destination to the Setting you applied to your file. Because we can have multiple settings, we can have multiple destinations. Set your batch up accordingly.

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Now that we have our Settings and Destination set up the way we want, the final step is to name the file. Don’t adjust the name earlier, as the settings may not stick as you apply settings and destinations. Simply double click on the file name and name it as you want it to turn out. For this example, we’ll use Liar, Liar Final.mov.

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Finally hit “Submit.” Compressor goes to work. If you  want to see the progress of your project, twirl down the triangle on the topmost entry in the History Pane, and you’ll see the progress bar. If you are doing multiple settings, the progress bar is calculated on the total job, not a single preset.

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When it’s done, you can set back and enjoy your new movie. I’ve found Compressor to be quite good at creating compact files with excellent image quality. Once you get used to it more, you can begin to create your own settings, which you can preview in the Preview Window. Experiment to get the best balance of quality and file size.

I hope that helps. Perhaps another time, I’ll delve more into creating presets and other goodies.

I’ll admit it: I’m a Compressor fanboy. Now that it’s all grown up to Version 3, it’s more useful than cootie repelant at a Miley Cyrus concert. It can package your movie into any one (or more) of a dozen plus formats (including FLV if you have Flash installed), or your audio into MP3, AC3 and Dolby Digital. While it’s a super-easy program to use, it’s simple interface belies the power beneath. Apple has thoughtfully included a number of workflow enhancements that make your life esier–once you know about them, that is.

One of my favorite features is the ability to save compression presets. Compressor comes pre-populated with a number of useful presets for a wide variety of workflows. But after some playing around, I came up with one that worked really well for creating videos in the right format for ProPresenter. I like h.264 for my codec, and I tested various data rates to come up with a high quality image. I set up various other settings like de-interlacing and progressive scanning, frame sizes and audio settings. After I was done, I saved it as my ProPresenter preset and I’m done.

You can come up with presets for a wide variety of formats, then apply them with one-click ease.

Now, once a video is completed in Final Cut Pro, I select Export via Compressor from the File menu. FCP creates a temporary reference movie of the video and imports it as a new project in Compressor. I drag my ProPresenter setting on the clip, change the filename and destination and hit submit. In all, it takes under 30 seconds, and my videos come out in the looking great in the right format every time.

Now that I have my preset worked out, I can send that preset file to anyone who may be creating videos for us. As many of our volunteers are using Final Cut, they drag the settings file into their Custom list, and their videos will match my specs exactly.

Another little trick I’ve been using more and more is the Droplet. Kudos to Dave Smith at Creative Ideas for Twittering about this some time ago. I don’t use Droplets as much as I use presets, but I value them nonetheless. A droplet is essentially an icon version of your setting that you can drop a video on. The droplet launches Batch Monitor, which will compress your video using the settings in your Droplet.

Creating is one is a piece of cake. Simply select the preset you wish to Droplet-ize (I just made that up), and select the obscure icon for “Save Selection as Droplet”

I put my Droplets on the Desktop where they’re easy to get to. It creates an icon like this:

Drag a video onto the Droplet and, bingo, up pops Batch Monitor, ready to do your compression.

When it’s done, it goes away, and you have your newly compressed file ready and waiting. Droplets are very useful if you receive a file in a format that doesn’t fit your intended need. I use them as part of my archiving workflow.

Every few months, I create a DVD of our recent video projects. Since I play my files out as h.246s, they need to be converted to MPG2/AC3 streams for DVD Studio Pro. If I have the source files still on the system, I can simply run the videos back through Compressor and create the DVD files. But often I don’t, so I simply drag my archived h.264 copy onto my DVD Droplet and bust out the MPG2. If I have a bunch to do (which I normally do), I drag them all in and let it go to work. One could argue that it’s another trip through a compression engine and quality suffers, but h.264 videos look so good to start with, they convert to MPG2’s pretty well, especially at high bit-rates.

I also have a ProPresenter Droplet on my Desktop for transcoding files that come in from outside editors (who have not yet adopted my specs).

So there you go. Another couple of time-saving tips brought to you by a guy who eats the same thing for breakfast every morning just so I don’t have to waste time trying to decide what to eat.

I’ve done a lot of green-screen work in my career. At my last post, I did several videos that were almost all shot on green screen. For one client, we shot 20+ interviews, all on green, then composited them over the graphic background in post using Serious Magic’s (now Adobe’s) Ultra 2. It looked really cool, but took forever!

The other day, I was poking around Joe Wiggleston’s site and noticed some new clips he put up. One was a 10B4 that NorthPoint uses each week. The host was keyed over the background, and it looked pretty good. So I asked Joe what they were using for the key. He told me that NP uses Keylight from The Foundry. I’ve played with this software, and it’s good (and it comes included with After Effects CS3 Pro). It is RAM and processor intensive, though, 

Then he told me he personally likes dvGarage’s dv Matte 3 Pro Studio for keying right inside of FinalCut Pro. Being the curious sort, I checked it out. I didn’t plan on spending 2 hours at their site, but I did. Let me tell you, the software looks amazing. The green screen removal it does is so clean, so fast and so easy, I was stunned.

DV footage is notoriously hard to key because of the 4:1:1 color space. That means that the color information is only 1/4 of the resolution of the luminance information. Because keying traditionally relies on color info, when you key DV footage, you end up with a rough and jagged key. Their software uses information from the luminance channel to help clean up the key, and it makes a huge difference, even with HDV footage (which is 4:2:0, but compressed with MPEG2, not a keying-friendly format).

They have another product called dv Matte Blast that does green screen removal in real time! Another product, Conduit Live, will take any video input you have, and remove the green screen live (!), and allow you to test it out over a background. They even keyed water, live, over a background! Very cool. 

While I’ve not had much occasion to do a lot of keying here at Upper Room, I’d really like to. Once we roll over to the next budget year and I have money again, I would like to get a flexible green screen and start shooting interviews over that. Then, if we want to put people on black, white or a background, we can. I will definitely be looking to pick up dv Matte 3. Once I do, look for a full review. They also have full trial versions available on the website, so check them out.

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I am truly amazed at how much media production we can accomplish on a computer now. I remember when QuickTime was introduced back around 1990, and thinking, “Well, that’s cool, but it’s not going to replace tape to tape editing any time soon.” Turns out “any time soon” was about 5 years, as that’s when I bought my first full-frame QuickTime based editing system. Back then, there were precious few tools to help us manage the coming onslaught of digital data. In fact, the early systems were not much more than digital A/B roll editors. But they were the future.

Today, it is possible to create video productions using just a laptop that would have required 2 rooms full of hardware a decade (well, maybe a decade and a half) ago. With the rapid proliferation of digital formats, files and media we have to deal with we have to find ways to make it all work together. While everyone knows about FinalCut Pro, Premier, After Effects and the other big players, today I’m going to highlight some of the unsung players in our industry. The little tools and widgets that make life easier in the digital media age. These are a few of my favorite little tools.

Switch
It happens all the time. You need a music bed for your project, so you surf over to FreePlay Music or another online site and find the perfect track. Once downloaded you find that it doesn’t play right away on your timeline because it’s compressed (either MP3 or AAC, or something else altogether).

Sure, you could open your audio editor, or have FCP render it out. Or, you could drag it onto the Switch icon. In under 20 seconds, you have a easy to work with AIFF or WAV file. No fuss, no muss. You can batch convert, and pick your file format settings. It does one thing—convert nearly any audio file to anything else—and it does it really well. And it’s free!

Handbrake
Let’s say you need to borrow a scene from a DVD for a sermon illustration (check out CVLI.org for info on how to do this legally). There’s no better tool to grab a section of a video than Handbrake. Pop in any DVD, select the chapter(s) you want to rip, pick your format settings and rip it. In no time, you have a very high quality MP4 video to work with. Best of all, ti’s free! But there’s one problem, FCP won’t import MP4 files. For that, you can fire up…

VisualHub
Sort of like Switch for video, VisualHub is a great tool for converting any video format to any other format. And it’s fast. You don’t have a lot of control over the video settings, but it makes quick work of tearing through the conversion process.

It will also work in batches and I’ve not found a format it won’t handle (though I’m sure there are some). It’s not free, but it is cheap. At under $25, it pays for itself in one session. I find myself using it a lot when we get user provided content; everything from MP4 camcorder video to Flash file.

Kuler
Kuler is one of the coolest things to come out of Adobe Labs. It’s a Dashboard widget, an Air Application and a web-based service. Kuler helps you figure out what colors go with what. I have a great eye for composition, but I’m not so great at picking color themes. Kuler makes it easy. You can pick a base color, and it will let you create a nearly endless variety of complementary colors in a 5 color set. New to the web service is a feature to load in a photo, sample a color and it will generate five complementary colors from that sample. Very cool.

There are thousands of themes to choose from, so if you’re trying to come up with some graphics and you have a desire to use colors from a 70’s kitchen or a beach house or a desert, search those phrases and see what someone else has already come up with. You can even save the color set, import directly into Illustrator and by swapping color sets, come up with variations on your design. You have to go get Kuler. Now.

The Unarchiver
99% of the time Stuffit will unzip your files perfectly. But what about the 1% of the time it doesn’t. It’s happened to me and it’s not fun. The answer is The Unarchiver. Another in the line of “do one thing and do it well” products, The Unarchiver unzips files. That’s it. It does it fast, and it does it right. It’s also free.

Cocktail
I’m not sure who comes up with these app names, but they’re clever (if not obscure). Cocktail is my favorite Mac OS maintenance tool. Computers are like cars in that they’ve gotten a lot more reliable over the years. To extend the analogy, Macs are like Hondas. Change the oil, rotate the tires once in a while and you’re good to go for a long time. They do need occasionally maintenance, however. Apple thoughtfully built  maintenance scripts into the OS, but they only run at 2 AM. If you’re a cheapskate like me and don’t leave your computer on 24/7, they don’t run. Enter Cocktail.

You can set it up to run basic maintenance tasks when you know the computer is on, or fire the scripts manually. It’s the equivalent of a regular tune up. And at $23, it’s a lot less than your mechanic will charge you to open the hood.

So there you go. A quick collection of tools to make your digital-media life easier. Have a favorite I didn’t mention? Dont’ keep it to yourself. Share it with the rest of us in a comment. Thanks for reading!

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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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As I told you last week, we’ve made the switch to ProPresenter. Last Monday’s post was one of my most read and most commented on posts so I thought I’d give you an update.

Things went really well during the service (though getting there was a challenge). To be fair, ProPresenter worked nearly flawlessly. It fired every cue on time, and was entirely stable. Due to a scheduling glitch, we were down a man, so I had to do lights and train our presentation operator in ProPresenter and Keynote. Thankfully, she picked both up quickly.

I say ProPresenter worked nearly flawlessly because we had an issue importing the exported Keynote slides. For some reason, v. 3.2.9 imported the slides in reverse order. If there 8, it would not have been a big deal. But there were 40, so I had to manually re-order the slides as people were walking in. That was a challenge. Between services, we had to make some changes to the Keynote, so I re-exported them, and upgraded Pro to 3.3. Yeah, that’s right—I went live with a new version without ever having used it before. Thankfully, 3.3 fixed the reverse import order and ran flawlessly.

We’re still figuring out the best way to do things and getting used to the new work flow, but the simple fact that I could throw it in front of a presentation operator who has only been doing Media Shout for about 6-8 months is a testament to it’s easy-to-use interface. In fact, I showed her a few tricks on formatting songs then left to focus lights. When I came back, she had figured out how to do a bunch more stuff and was making great progress. In contrast, after 8 months, Media Shout remained a mystery.

I’ll also say that Keynote is so much better than PowerPoint it’s not even funny. And I know PowerPoint. For the first 9 months of 2007, I spent 20-30 hours a week using PowerPoint. I know what it can do and I’m really fast. However, I always felt I had to trick it into doing what I wanted and that every operation was 4 clicks too many. Keynote is like a breath of fresh air. It does what you want it to do without making you jump through hoops. The biggest improvement is that masters actually work the way they should. The inspectors and palates are laid out in a way that is immediately intuitive and accessible and give the ability to make changes quickly and efficiently. And at $79 as part of the iWork suite (also includes Pages, a killer word processor and page layout app and Numbers a spreadsheet app), it’s totally worth checking out.

Ease of use is also a huge factor. After watching a few Lynda.com videos of Keynote at home just to get up to speed on the basics, she was able to get done what she needed to with minimal input from me (I was programming light cues, remember?)

I’m also thrilled to have access to h.264 video. The DV codec AVI files I used to render out for Media Shout always looked like crap (especially type) and they were huge. The h.264 stuff looks like Digi-Beta (remember that?) are tiny by comparison. I love the new “bail to logo” feature also. Despite our best efforts to plan the service completely, sometimes we just need to go to a series logo slide. While we could always find one, eventually, in earlier versions or in Media Shout, it’s great to be able to hit F5 and have the logo come up.

The live video feature is intriguing, though I don’t think we’ll be using it for a while (we have lousy cameras at the moment). For churches that want to be able to run lyrics over IMAG of the worship team though, this feature is huge.

For those that are interested, right now we’re running ProPresenter off my MacBook Pro, though a 20″ iMac is on the way. The MBP was great, though in our setup, the screen is a bit small. I’m looking forward to a 20″ screen in a week or two. We’ll also soon be sending audio through a new Lexicon Alpha FireWire interface. I’ve been playing with that for the past few weeks and am really impressed. It’s a vast improvement over the 1/8″ mini jacks.

So there you have it, week one. Renewed Vision has done a great job developing the product, and the support has been incredible. They are rolling out updates so fast that I went from 3.2.4 to 3.2.9 (missed the 3.2.8 seed because I wasn’t fast enough) and right to 3.3 in less than a week and a half. Some may suggest that they should have fixed all the bugs before rolling it out, but it’s almost impossible to find them all in-house. It takes users actually beating on the program to discover them all. In fact it’s the same methodology that Microsoft uses. Well, except that Microsoft sells beta software as a new version then takes 2 years to fix the bugs. Great work, guys. You’re my new favorite software company!

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