I push all the buttons around here.

This week is the first live use of ProPresenter at NMCC!  I’m scared to death.  This transition hasn’t been easy at all!  I’m still struggling to adjust from PC to Mac.  It’s so rough we’re still going to use MediaShout for our teaching slides tomorrow.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though.  Last time I talked about why we were switching.  Today I thought I’d bring up a few of the tweaks we did to the Mac, as well as how we’ve taken steps to transition so far.

3rd Party Apps

We needed a few 3rd Part tweaks to make the Mac work exactly the way we wanted it to work.  First, our media booth is out in the open.  In the rare case that we needed to reboot, that awful gong when a Mac boots would be very distracting.  So I installed a little hack called StartupSound.prefPane and it allowed me to mute the startup sound.

Also, we’re using this awesome little program call MPEG STREAMCLIP from Squared 5 to convert all our old mpg’s to mov’s.  This really saved me a lot of time!  Not to mention the mgp weren’t looping well at all.  Conversion was necessary.

ProPresenter

I’ve struggled so much with ProPresenter.  I didn’t realize how much I was dependent on some of the features of MediaShout.

I’m really struggling with how ProPresenter implements their song “database” (using the term loosely).  It was so simple to build songs in MediaShout.  But now it takes forever for me to copy and paste the songs into slides in ProPresenter.  Not only that, but if we decide not to sing a verse or whatever, my options are delete it or disable it.  Those are terrible options!  If I just disable them they are still there taking up space in the slide view.  If I delete them I have to type them in all over again when I need them.  That’s a sorry database.  Just remembering the last way we sang the song doesn’t mean you can call it a database.

One feature I think might help my frustration with this behavior is perhaps a toggle to show/hide disabled slides.  Anyone else think that’s a good idea?

Another issue I have with ProPresenter is that I can’t have back to back slides of the same thing without the text dissolving.  For example, say the chorus of a song fits on one slide.  If we sing the chorus twice, than we see the slide fade out and fade back in, but no txt has changed.  We don’t like skipping around in songs if we can help it.  My volunteers like being able to space bar through an entire song without having to jump around or wait.  When they run out of text on one slide, they advance to another, even if it is the same text.  We can’t do that with ProPresenter because it still transitions.

Time will tell how this one will turn out.  Some people have commented they like the slight fade.  It’s a visual clue they need to sing the words again as opposed to nothing changing.  I’m not sure I’m a fan, but I might get accustomed to this behavior.

Another frustration with ProPresenter is the inability to adjust the margins per slide or presentation The margin settings are global.  I read somewhere that they might be working on this one though.

Keynote

We aren’t ready for Keynote yet either because Keynote isn’t forgiving when it comes to jumping around in a presentation.  I tried setting up the teaching slides in ProPresenter, but after 30 minutes messing with one verse I gave up.  This is why we’re sticking with MediaShout for now.  Maybe I should put the teaching slides in Keynote then export each slides as a jpg, then import them into ProPresenter.  That will give us a little more flexibility with the teaching slides in case we have to jump around.

This week, we’re going to go ahead with ProPresenter for everything except the teaching slides.  We will still be using MediaShout for those until we figure out how to make this work well for us or until we get used to it.

I know I’ve been pretty down on this whole transition.  It’s been much harder than I anticipated.  But I have to say, it’s still going to look pretty good.  A lot of my frustrations aren’t just with ProPresenter, but Mac in general.  When hommie is all about the right click, it’s very hard get acclimated to command clicks and option clicks and keyboard shortcuts.  I’m getting there though.  It’s a big transition.

Wish us luck.  Here we go!