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Video Focus: How to Feed your Church’s Presentation Software with Audio and Video Content

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The individual tracks of songs made available by IWL play out via Ableton Live software. Users can easily mute the tracks that aren't needed at any given worship service.  

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IWL's iwlLite program is designed to play from iPhones and the iPod Touch; a click track is fed through the left channel and an "enhancement" mix—designed to complement a band with bass, guitar, drums and keys — is rendered to the right. MPEG video of song lyrics also plays out via the Apple AV Cable.  

My last article (in the July 2009 Church Production) discussed issues related to image magnification (IMAG), focusing on how to get an IMAG system up and running — i.e., capturing and projecting—in a sanctuary. Quoting church media consultant Anthony Coppedge, the article suggested that live video from within the sanctuary is but one type of media that an IMAG screen should display. This article picks up where that article left off: How does a church fill its screen (and vibrate its speakers) when the live video feed of the pastor or praise band is not showing? Using some sort of motion-video background, how can a church make the presentation of Bible verses and song lyrics more engaging?

Savvy church media folks are aware of the many stock video and audio options available to their production teams. If your media team is like that of most churches, time is tight. There's generally not enough hours in a week to produce enough original video content —whether ambient or narrative —to play between live sermons and songs or as motion backgrounds for song lyrics. Likewise, there's not always time to teach the band a subdued instrumental that the pastor has requested to back up his sermon. With these challenges in mind, many companies offer video and audio clips and graphical elements that are designed specifically to enhance the worship experience. These clips may or may not be royalty-free, and most are designed to play back in popular worship-oriented presentation programs such as EasyWorship and Renewed Vision's ProPresenter. This article attempts to sketch out the current landscape of options for the integration and playback of worship-themed multimedia. 

Beyond PowerPoint
For many churches, Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint slideshow program powers their first foray into programming. But if you want to display motion backgrounds and full HD video, there are better options. For the Mac OS, Renewed Vision's ProPresenter allows a media director to play motion video of any format that plays in the QuickTime Player as a background for song lyrics. With the current Version 3, directors can even cross-dissolve between two different backgrounds while text is displayed over them. A new iPhone application (for iPhone OS 2.1 or later), ProPresenter Remote, allows a director to control the playback of ProPresenter (version 3.5.1 or later) on a separate machine via a shared wireless network.

For Windows users, EasyWorship is the dominant choice for song lyric and Bible verse playback (the software comes with King James, American Standard, and Reina-Valera Antigua installed, with other options available for free download). Again, motion video playback puts EasyWorship ahead of the PowerPoint option that very conveniently rides along with every Microsoft Office license. Better still, EasyWorship allows churches to incorporate existing PowerPoint presentations into the software for later playback MediaShout is another popular multimedia presentation option on the Windows side.

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Trevor Boyer is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He likes to write professional A/V and video production stories (like this one) that can be reported via subway travel.

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What a great idea!  I didn’t think I was that behind the times.  But when my son showed me what we could do to enhance our worship training with a simple i-pod, I was blown away.  I sure have a lot to learn.

Posted by Brucey on 09/22/2011 report abuse