I’m learning more each day about how to get things done with the Mac.

ProPresenter looks great on the screen.

I’m getting used to ctrl+clicks and cmd+clicks.

We have made a full migration to Mac for our worship experiences.  If you recall from my earlier posts, I wasn’t prepared to swich to keynote, so I was still using MediaShout for the sermon notes.  Two weeks ago on Saturday, our media pc lost a graphic card.  I had two options: drive 60 miles round trip to pick up a $100+ graphic card, then put the sermon together or learn keynote.

We took the keynote option.  Man is keynote easy to learn and use!  If only there was some way to jump around in the keynote script without losing transitions it would be the perfect program!

A few more “glitches” I’ve found with ProPresenter:

1. If you switch to a different song in your playlist to check something, when you switch back to the song you were on, ProPresenter starts back at the first slide.  This is probably by design and not a glitch.  But again, I’m so used to MediaShout being able to do whatever I want behind the scenes and return to what I was doing.

2. If you disable the last slide, you don’t get the copyright info.  I’m gonna call this one a glitch.  I remember some from my programming days, so I can understand why ProPresenter would react this way, but still it’s a glitch to me.  You must move the slides around so the last slide is active otherwise the copyright info doesn’t show up.  I haven’t tested this, but I assume the same is true if you disable the first slide and want to show the copyright info on the first slide.

ProPresenter did crash once on us.  It was the last slide, on the last song, of the last service our second or third week using it.  It hasn’t offered up any kind of hiccup since.

All in all I’m really happy with the transition.  The learning curve was steep and I wasn’t real sure it was the right move for us to transition for a while.  But after using it and relearning a work flow, we’re settling into a groove and I am LOVING the results.

I’ve gotten some good feed back from a lot of people I don’t know and RenewedVision themselves!  Thanks to everyone interested in our little switch story.  I’d be happy to share my thoughts with anyone who wants a few more of them… just drop me an email.

Final thought, I have to say it speaks very highly of a company willing to pay attention to what their customers are saying about them and respond.  It’s a level of service you don’t get often and it goes to show they really care what their customers think.  Thanks RenewedVision for what you do.  Can’t wait to see what’s next for ProPresenter.

The transitions were all fantastic.  The videos all played on queue and best of all the program was stable and didn’t crash.  I’m not sure how to even react when a computer doesn’t crash or glitch on Sunday morning.  It was refreshing.

We did still use MediaShout for the teaching slides, but I’m eagerly awaiting the day we can move that over to the Mac as well.  I’m still not sure it was worth the 10 hours of prep time, but man was it easy to use during the live presentation.

I’m sure the prep time will only get faster as we get acclimated to the Mac in general.  I’m sticking to my last assessment that the two biggest things I really want out of ProPresenter is: 1. a way to toggle hiding disabled slides, and 2. custom margin settings per slide or per presentation.

I mentioned previously about my concern over the cross fade on switching slides where the text didn’t change.  I’m beginning to think that might not be so bad.  It does show some transition, a visual clue that you need to sing it again.  Someone told me it would be ok.  They were right.  I think I can probably get used to that one.

I know I should just suck it up and get a real mouse.  That will greatly help with my right clicking issue.  However Mac isn’t just the control+click but the command+click as well.  Might as well get used to the keyboard and 1 button mouse combo.  Because one of the two shortcuts are going to get left out if I get a two button mouse and then I’m going to have to get used to the shortcuts anyway. Then again, I can see how that’s poor logic.  The truth is, I love the little onmi-directional scroll on the Mac mouse.  I’d miss it.  I’ve never seen that on another mouse.  If I find one though I’m buying stock. Haha.

I’m not sure anyone even noticed the change over.  No one said anything to me anyway.  However, I noticed every single issue I had with MediaShout and how it presented on the main screen was addressed.  Even if the audience didn’t notice the change over this week, over time they will get accustomed to this gold standard.  After a few months, if we went back to MediaShout, I bet the audience would notice the step backwards.  We have raised the bar and it’s only a matter of time before it’s noticed.

Thank you Renewed Vision for what you are doing!

Now please fix those two things.  Haha.  I know you’re listening, you’re good like that.

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!

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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!

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