Media Shout 3.5 is out - ProPresenter is in Part 1
After sincere thought and prayer, we finally decided to switch our media to a Mac based system. I hope to do a 2 or 3 part series on why we switched and how the transition is going.
Why did we decide to switch? A few reasons…
1. Media Shout was unstable.
In all fairness to Media Shout, its stability improved greatly for us with the 3.5 version series of updates. But its past failures have been hard to forget. We’ve been very hesitant to use it to its fullest extent. When we first started using Media Shout 3 about 3 years ago, it was beyond unstable. We had to use very old drivers for our graphics card (almost 12 revisions back from the current version at the time), and even then video playback was buggy. Through some act of God (honestly, I don’t recall what happened) it was stable enough to use for most of the media we had. That was close enough for me.
2. Media Shout transitions were painful for me.
I am freak when it comes to details. It’s my gift. It’s who I am. There were little things about how Media Shout presented that just bothered me. For starters, there was no smooth text dissolve over video backgrounds. Sure, they added this functionality in the 3.5 series of updates. I was very excited about this. I never updated Media Shout before because it was always such a pain to make stable. But I couldn’t wait to give Media Shout 3.5 a shot. However, even when I set the transition to the fastest dissolve for the text layer, it was still way too slow of a dissolve for us to keep up with the song.
Another thing that just grinded my gears about Media Shout is how it would stop a video when transitioning to graphic or sometimes even another video. That tiny little glitch looked so tacky to me that I cringed every time it happened. It’s like I died a little each time.
Do most people notice these things? I don’t know. Probably not to the extent that noticed.
3. Church media is a becoming Mac world.
That statement is a bit of an overgeneralization, but for us it’s a fact. As we look at other churches that graciously give away or provide sermon series graphics and media, the media was almost always in a QuickTime format. Media Shout could be hacked to play the QuickTime files, but again, it was a buggy process. The QuickTime files are generally much larger than other formats and are a bit of a resource hog. Media Shout doesn’t like to share its resources. Not to mention since Media Shout was unstable for us to begin with, we always opted to burn all our media elements for the week to a DVD. It was nearly impossible for us to do this with the QuickTime files without a Mac. I started using my personal Mac Mini at home to burn the DVD’s and it just couldn’t have been easier. As a church, we strive to provide every tool necessary to pull off our experiences. If volunteers want to use their personal stuff, that’s ok. But we don’t ever want to FORCE them to do it. Since I was using a Mac at home to prepare for Sundays, it was time for the church to buy a Mac of their own.
All of the glitches that plagued us with Media Shout, ProPresenter addressed. The feature set of ProPresenter isn’t nearly as extensive as Media Shout’s, but ProPresenter does what it does VERY well. Also, we plan to use Keynote for the message slides. Again, this is going to be a huge transition for us. None of us have used a Mac before, none of us are familiar with ProPresenter, and I hate the idea of building the message slides in Keynote (because it’s basically PowerPoint on steroids, and I don’t like PowerPoint).
So why did we do it? Because it’s going to look good. ProPresenter will solve our transition issues. The Mac will solve our QuickTime issues. And Keynote looks downright impressive.
Yes, it is clearly going to be a lot more work. But the end result will create a presentation that a PC and Media Shout just can’t provide. As a detail man, presentation is everything. Because I want nothing we do on the media team to distract from the worship experience…. Only enhance.
Now I’ve been really down on Media Shout. I need to give it some props.
It allows us to create a start to finish linier order of worship. This makes it super easy on volunteers. All they have to do is push the space bar at the right time and they can run the entire service and NEVER push another button. That we liked.
The song database is awesome! I am dreading the song layout in ProPresenter. I haven’t worked with it much, but the first impression isn’t good. I’m gonna miss how easy Media Shout made it to edit a song and its play order.
Since we are going to use Keynote for the message slides, I’m going to lose the ability to easily insert Bible verses. I’m going to miss the built in Bibles in Media Shout. They saved me a ton of time and typos!
So, that’s our switch story. I hope to blog at least 2 more times on the topic: one to talk about what it’s like getting the feel for the Mac, ProPresenter and Keynote, and another to talk about post implementation gratitude and gripes.
If anyone has some wise words for me through this process I’d love to entertain them!
Did you look at other Windows options? I’m not against Mac for media, but we’ve successfully used EasyWorship on a Windows box for years and not only does it do amazing transitions and have excellent-looking text (two of the big reasons we went with it years ago), but it’s also very good at its core feature set, even though it doesn’t have every bell and whistle. I can’t speak to Quicktime playback but we’re using DivX primarily with good results (we have a volunteer who would know the Quicktime side better). When we produce video in-house it’s made on a Mac and converted to DivX for playback in EasyWorship.
I’m less involved on a week-to-week basis than I ever was right now with that stuff but I put EasyWorship into place and was the primary runner for a couple of years. I know a few people including myself would be happy switching to ProPresenter here, but we have at least four main auditoriums, all of which run EasyWorship and can easily share content. Replacing all of those at once would be a big project, and replacing some of them would ruin the inter-compatibility.
Interesting to hear your MediaShout issues…I haven’t used it personally for more than 5 minutes but those were a bad 5 minutes a couple of years ago, and someone I know has been under-impressed with more recent versions! But thanks for the specifics, that could be very helpful at some point!