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Multimedia Software and Libraries
Exploring creative options for the sense of sight
Some of you may be too young to remember this, but once upon a time people believed that computers would actually save time and help us get our work done faster. Over the years, a basic formula for computer-related work become a harsh reality: Fast = More. The more powerful the tools, the more is expected of us. And this has led to some fine advances in church service technology. We have long since taken hymnals out of the hands of congregations, leading their eyes upward to a screen featuring the text of worship songs. Simple enough. Then we added nice backgrounds. Animated backgrounds. Soon the screens will sing with us.
Yes, the demand on churches to keep up with people’s hunger for new and exciting eye candy has compelled us to repeatedly upgrade our computers and software. But this isn’t about being slaves to the audience’s demands, but our own inherent desire to do better work and to find new and creative ways to present the gospel message. The formerly rigid backdrop of the sanctuary platform has seen the addition of cinematic white screens that are, in fact, the blank canvases for the church media department. The trick is not to get bogged down by the almost overwhelming abundance of resources available to us, but to instead observe the needs of our ministries and fill in the blanks with the right products.
To this end, Church Production Magazine has done some web surfing for you. We’ve found a number of excellent production companies that provide tools and content in the areas of graphics and sound, including presentation software, audio libraries, and video libraries. This includes both content presented in services and events, and in post production editing.
Presentation Software
Perhaps the most common way video is used in church services is through the projection of worship lyrics. While overhead and slide projectors have been replaced for some time by computer programs like PowerPoint, there are also programs created specifically for this task that both simplify the process and expand the presentation to include backgrounds and videos.
One popular program, Easy Worship, is designed to display songs, text, and videos through a user-friendly interface. It is clearly the goal of the developers of this program to offer the user every feature they can think of while still making it easy and intuitive to use. For example, Easy Worship can be set to play multiple segments of a DVD loaded in the computer’s DVD drive, avoiding the pitfalls of cueing and re-cueing the scenes while the fidgety audience waits.
There is also Media Shout, which generally does the same job as Easy Worship, but handles a bit differently. With about a dozen such programs to choose from, it is fortunate that there are free trial versions that can be downloaded and test driven to find the best match for the operators and the needs of the church service.
While Easy Worship and Media Shout run on Windows, Renewed Vision publishes software exclusively for the Mac. ProPresenter is their multimedia presentation software. They also have created ProVideoPlayer for video playback and mixing and ProVideoSync for multi-stream video for use in replicating the service at remote campuses on multiple screens.
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Michael Parks heads up the video ministry at Hilltop Community Church in Richmond, Calif. He has been involved in film and video production for 25 years and is the author of the blog “Close-Up on One” at www.churchproduction.com/michaelparks.
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