Propresenter versus Song Show Plus

[knowlan]

We are looking at adding an IMac for lyric/video presentation. I am leaning toward Propresenter, but some have suggested staying with a PC and using SongShow PLus. I would love to hear some feed back as to what works and what doesn't. I would prefer the IMac for stability and reliability. We have been using powerpoint, with a DVD player to play video clips. We would like to upgrade to software that we could have motion backgrounds (either prepurchased or created in house) to show under song lyrics. We also will need to play video clips for sermons, show announcement slides and have sermon notes during the message. I am looking for advice from those who have been doing this. Thank You.

[dtpuga]

knowlan,
We have been using ProPresenter at SSCC for about 2 years. We were using MediaShout and PowerPoint before that. We mainly switched due to the user friendly nature of Pro. I love the live song library, the ease of playlists, the ease of editing while live, and most importantly the ease of use for presentation. I like the point-and-click-on-the-slide-you-want thing.

Reliability is NOT something that ProPresenter offered 2 years ago, but the benefit of going to Mac and leaving MediaShout and Powerpoint behind were worth it to us. Last fall they released a version upgrade that magically repaired most of the reliability issues. We currently have occasional hiccups when editing songs but have NEVER has Pro crashed on us in a service. We use it in 7-8 one hour services a week, so I think that is a pretty good service record.

We use Pro for lyric presentation, sermon notes, announcements, pre-service loops, song backgrounds, video playback and I am sure something else I am leaving out. I currently am beta testing in their seed program and two new features on the way out are bible integration and DVD playback integration. We also use ProVideoPlayer from Renewed Vision in our services for more detailed loop playback control.

I love Pro, so my comments are going to reflect that. That being said, I have used PowerPoint, Easy Worship, & Media Shout a ton and SongShow Plus a little bit and felt like ProPresenter was a far superior presentation package.

Hope this helps,
-Travis

[worshiptrench]

Hey Travis, we are going ProPresenter.
Give your top 10 tips/things to remember/helpful hints for switching and using it.

[dtpuga]

Hmmmm... 10 things huh? I don't know, our worship guy handles a lot of the load now. I just put the sermon notes in, I will give it a run though. In no particular order:
1. There probably is a way to do that thing you are trying to figure out how to do. (Unless it is animating text.) Look in the menus, right click a lot.
2. Use the Apple/Command key... it 'enables' dragging slides and a few other things you will want to do.
3. Right clicking on a slide will allow you to make it "loop back to the first" in that 'song.' This comes in handy with automatic timed preservice loops and stuff like that.
4. In the format mode you can set timing for all or individual slides.
5. On the display tab in preferences there is a choice to play audio in background movies. Check this to save yourself endless frustration with playing videos from Pro and wondering where the audio went.
6. Experiment with the margin settings in the display preferences to find ones that look best. Make your other computers that you may use to set up Pro or anything else match the resolution and margins. (No more line break surprises.)
7. Create custom labels and colors to go with all your songs. It will help volunteers navigate more quickly.
8. If you use small fonts for worship or scripture references, consider putting a 'hint' to slide content in the label area to help your presenter.
9. Right clicking on a slide while you are live enables quick edit mode. A nice feature for catching typos and all that.
10. Pick a setup method and stick with it. Do you put each slide once and expect your volunteers to follow you? Or do you put everything in there as many times as it takes to get through the song? We have found our volunteers prefer to have each thing once and try to track. Just make sure you are consistent from song to song.

Hope this helps,
-Travis

[patdryburgh]

ProPresenter is, as far as I've seen, the best software to use. And, with the latest update, has even more fantastic features (playing dvd's straight from Pro, rather than switching from Mac DVD Player).

The way we set up our songs:

We put each part of each song in once. So, one verse 1, one chorus, one bridge, etc. We colour code these parts to be the same for each song (verse 1 - yellow, verse 2 - orange, pre chorus - cyan, chorus - blue, etc) so that our operators can visually see each part without having to read the labels (we label the first slide of each part).

To keep from our operators having difficulty following songs, we print out vocal scans each week for each of the songs we are doing. These scans are arranged in the exact arrangement that we plan to sing the song. This way there is no guessing on the operators part, and it is much easier for a worship leader to arrange a song in a Word .doc and print it than come into the office every week to update the order in Pro.

Another feature that we use every week is the ability to rehearse slide transitions into Pro along with an mp3, and then play the mp3 and let the slides change themselves. We use this for our kids environments where we sing along to canned music, and this allows our volunteers the freedom of not having to worry about getting lost in the song. It has been a great help!

Pat

[rthompson]

We have been a SSP user for many years and the program was the first one on the market. Here is some info about SSP. The basic editon has all the features Pro Presenter has and more. The professional edition has features no other program has basically encompassing many programs into one.

REAL VIDEO AND IMAGE EDITING: Just like Adobe or Final Cut from Apple. You do not need other video editing software. You can edit your DVD’s and live video also on the fly and have a watermark in the corner just like on TV of the Pastor or a image of your church.. You can take one mpeg video file and turn it into 30 by changing color filters, negatives, color levels, opacity, contrast and many more.

SSP is the only program with the slide show builder (More powerful than power point), announcement builder, image builder, outline builder and video chain builder which is seamless within SSP and does not open and interrupt your program like power point. You can add power point into SongShow Plus if you would like.

SSP has custom timers, custom water marks, 3D Transitions and Animations. We have created our own motion backgrounds with settings and visualizations. Clouds, snowfall, color motion, color waves, fire, fireworks and many more. For example you can choose snow fall and change direction of the snowfall, wind gusts, wind speed/color filters/negatives of the snow and much more.

SSP has the most support hours (M-F 6AM to 4PM PST) (Sat-Sun 7AM to 11AM PST) in the industry. You receive unlimited dial in support via the Internet for all workstations (unlimited) and projection computers at home or the church. You can visit our user forum at www.ssplash.com for more information about the program. The forum includes the developers and users from around the world.

The On-Demand training is accessible 24 hours a day for the next year via www.gofishmedia.net. The training is updated as new features are released every few months called New Editions (user driven). Currently they are on the April 2008 Edition (3 to 4 pages of bulleted new features in each release) not updates.

[dtpuga]

RHThompson, I am confused, you start out saying that "we have been a SSP user for many years," and at the end of your post you refer to "our user forum." Are you an end user or are you a seller? (I recognize you can also be both.) I think it is fair for you to let us know where you are coming from.

[rthompson]

Sorry for the confusion.

I am a user just thought I would add my two cents. I believe SSP does not have any resellers. It all depends on what your av team would like to run Mac or Windows. Other considerations are ofcourse are ease of use & alwasy company support. From what I have been told Propresenter is a easy to use and very stable program/platform which is very important when running your service on Sunday. Take Care.

[dtpuga]

Good stuff rhtompson...

Passionate users are what we love here. Passionate salesmen are OK too though, we just "listen" differently.

Thanks for your insight.