ProPresenter users

[collintowne]

Hi,

Can anybody who has been using ProPresenter or ProVideo Player tell me how they are liking it. I am looking into getting this software for our church, but want to know why it might be better then MediaShout, Keynote, and PowerPoint.

And also, is it possible to put words up in front of the video on PVP? I really like the feature of Grid Mapping and Tiling. We have 2 projectors side by side that we use on a really wide screen and it would be great to be able to combine the two into one large image. I would just like to put words up on it too. Or maybe my question should be can you do Grid Mapping in ProPresenter?

thanks, collintowne

[inworship]

We've been using both and we are transitioning to ProPresenter. Mainly for one simple reason. It has never glitched or crashed on us. It is Mac based, so I have my opinions as to why ;). Media Shout has always been very unstable for us. We are running media Shout on a dual core 4ghz w/2 gig ram and it has crashed and glitched. it drives me nuts. ProPresenter has not failed us in 6 months in any way. I ike that ProPresenter allows me more options for different video formats and Media Shout is limited there. Media Shout is really good at taking many different elements and integrating them. ProPresenter is the same, but a much simpler interface.

I have not worked with ProVideoPlayer, but based on what you are talking about, I believe that it is capable. The renewed vision guys are always available and may have some good answers based on usage ability.

[fmckinnon]

Hey,
We use ProPresenter and ProVideoPlayer - but I don't know much of anything about the video player - Travis, our in-house Tech Moderator will likely chime in today at some point and answer that one!

[dtpuga]

c-town,

You can not add text in PVP to 'key' it over video and you can not tile in ProPresenter unfortunately. If you ask the guys at Renewed Vision I think they would tell you that the reason is that those are two different programming needs. If you want tiling go with PVP and if you want text over video, go with ProPresenter, I think the choice to tile a lyric over multiple screens is rather rare, albeit creative.

There are a couple of simple options among many. You can play video as backgrounds in ProPresenter, even have it change automatically with each slide, and it will lat the text on top. (Obviously it will do still images too.) You can also coordinate slides with music and stuff.

The second option is what we do in our sanctuary and youth rooms. We have two iMacs, one with PVP and one with Pro. We send them both to an Edirol V-4 mixer and 'luma key' the black BG from Pro out and lay the text on top of the PVP source. This lets us have more control and less stress. One person can track with song lyrics while another worries about video play back and the like. If you want to tile, you could tile the PVP feed to multiple projectors and just put the V-4 or other mixer in line with the Pro iMac on one feed. We did something similar to his at a retreat last winter and had some pretty cool results. Youth kept trying to figure out how we were making things work.

As for Mediashout, PPoint and KeyNote... Mediashout is good if you are not into reliability and flexibility, its just not our bag baby. PPoint has its advantages, mainly being that tons of people know how to use it. The disadvantage is that its been rather buggy in its history. The Mac Office 2004 build was pretty stable for us though. In presenter mode it can give decent control but if you find a problem in the middle of the show it make you face a difficult decision. Close the show and fix, or endure the error and head on? Keynote produces a great look, I am just not a fan of how it 'presents.' I was spoiled by PPoint even and how I could scroll through a show and bounce from slide to slide at will. I haven't discovered that capability in Keynote yet.

The DISadvantage of ProPresenter is that it doesn't offer animations and things like that. I asked Brad at Renewed Vision about that and he kind of grinned and said, "yeah, well, there are some great programs out there that everyone already has that do that. We wanted something different." Our volunteers and staff have grown to love Pro. Sermon notes are a breeze to set up. We just copy text from the email our pastor sends us and paste it in Pro. It formats it and everything for us. We create a couple of sermon series slides to use for backgrounds and 'blanks' and just bring up whichever one fits the situation behind the text. People are able to see all their slides, add songs on the fly, edit on the fly, add nursery announcements on the fly AND have the stability that is unmatched in presentation software that I have encountered. (And thats just ProPresenter, PVP rocks for so many OTHER reasons.)

I don't know if this helped you much at all. Please let me know if you have more questions. We LOVE ProPresenter and ProVideoPlayer and will help however we can.

Travis

this post is too long, sorry

[collintowne]

Thanks for the lengthy response Travis. I love long replies! some questions about your post.

1. What's the difference between using the single Mac with ProPresenter to run images or videos in the background with lyrics on top vs. the 2 iMacs and mixer? Is the end result the same? Or is this so you can use effects like grid mapping?

2. ProPresenter animations. Do you mean builds for bullet points and things like that? If it doesn't do that, that's a bummer. I'm sure there are workarounds for it like creating new slides that have the new bullet and the previous bullets, and make a new slide every time you add a bullet, or use keynote or something like that.

I really like the idea of a video mixer. We don't have one, and we need one. How do you like the V-4? Do you think Edirol is the way to go for video mixing?

thanks for the advice.

collintowne

[dtpuga]

Good questions Collintowne...

Answer 1: The difference for us is two main things. One is it lets our lyrics person focus on lyrics and not worry about loops too. There is the option in Pro to set a video as a background loop for a slide also. That can work too, we just like the added features and flexibility with two separate sources. Second is the mixing capabilities within PVP are FAR superior to really any other software based video presentation I have seen. You can change speed, direction, transition time, hue, saturation, brightness & contrast ALL on the fly. You can mix two videos over each other, set in and out points for looping and tile video live as well.

Answer 2: Yes. I mean builds and things like that. You can still color and size fonts differently within one slide but there are no text formatting options like bulleted or numbered lists. When I need them I use multiple slides as you described.

As for the Edirol V-4... Yes, we really like ours. We have two that we use. It is a very simple and reliable mixer. (As opposed to the Videonics mixers that I have also used.) The keying features on it are nice and it has some clever built in effects that we have really not tapped into. At a summer youth event I have produced for a few years we have even chained two together. We mix cameras in one and then take the camera feed and two computer feeds into a second V-4 that then sends to our main displays. I HIGHLY recommend the V-4 for 'affordable' video mixing. They also make a cheaper model, the V-1, that is still 4 inputs but fewer features. To me the price break is not worth the feature drop. Look into it for yourself and see how it fits your needs though.

Hope this helps,
Travis

[collintowne]

I don't know anything about video mixers, so this looks like a great start. thanks.

ct

[collintowne]

Hey Travis,

I was doing some more research about the V-1 and V-4. Their input format is S-video or the RCA yellow video inputs. Coming from a computer, which is VGA or DVI, how do you connect your macs to your V-4?

thanks man,

collintowne

[dtpuga]

Apple sells video adapters that are high quality and very affordable. I recommend using them. An iMac and a MacBookPro will use a different adapter. Just verify whether or not you have a mini-DVI or a DVI output and go here...

For an iMac:http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=57EBFE0F&fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/cables&nplm=M9319G/A
And for a MacBookPro:http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=37C2CFC3&fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/cables&nplm=M9267G/A

Both adapters send RCA and S-Video and are $19, we use a TON of these around here and they have never let us down.

Hope this helps!
-Travis