Transitioning from SSP to ProPresenter 5!

[tyler1012000]

Hi Everybody,

Sorry if this is long but a little bit of background. After five years working in the media dept. I took over as media director at my church in May. Since the beginning we've used SSP and due to current issues with the software/pc we're using I've been coordinating with our technical director and we've finally gotten to the point where we're going to make the switch from PC to Mac and from SSP to ProPresenter.

While this is exciting I'm having trouble on coming up with a plan on how to implement everything smoothly. Such as training on a new computer system and new software when SSP and PC is all majority of us have ever known. We have five people that will need to be trained and was curious if anybody else has gone through this transition and how you went about tackling it so it went as smooth as possible. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks and God Bless!

[katanna]

We are about to go through the exact same transition (except it is from MediaShout to PP5). I have been an active ProPresenter user since PP3 (at a previous church) and am also curious how to do the training. (I am not worried about the transition; my understanding of ProPresenter makes this the easy part for us.)

How do you guys organize your ProPresenter training when you have a group of peeps new to the software?

Matthew

[tyler1012000]

Good to know I'm not the only one! We've not actually ever had to train a group of people at the same time. Unfortunately, we don't typically have a lot of change with who works in the department. We typically go over the program with who we're training they'll watch a few services and then I'll let them take a stab at it. Obviously, that proves to be a little complicated in a case like this.

[rjwalker]

FWIW, my pet peeve with some trainers is they get to know a program, and when training forget that when they say "Click on the dodah" and then immediately click on the dodah, everyone else is still looking for the danged dodah and they're off leaving everyone befuddled.

I use a lot of screen shots with circles and arrows ("and a paragraph on the back..." -for the old times here )

[petereit]

Our approach to training was to get everyone to install ProPresenter on their home computers and walk through all the training videos on the ProPresenter site. Having PP on everyone's home computers also let us distribute all the lyrics entry duties. Everyone accesses a shared Dropbox account where we keep all our lyrics files synced. Within a week or two everyone was an expert.

[mjl5007]

Chances are good that we'll be going through a similar transition from EW2009 to PP5 at our church in the next 6-12 months, and we'll have the same challenge of training all of our operators.

Mark, I love your idea of having everyone install the trial on their home computers and walking through the tutorial videos, but I have a couple of questions.

• Are the Mac and Windows versions similar enough that those with only Windows machines at home will still get the benefit, given that we'll likely be running Macs at our venues?
• As a software engineer I've been using multiple monitors at work for years and, having seen the benefit, also have multiple monitors on my computer at home, which would make experimentation with the PP5 trial pretty similar to how it'll really be set up at church. However, most folks are going to have a laptop or only one monitor at home. How will their training experience compare?

[katanna]

Originally Posted by mjl5007

Are the Mac and Windows versions similar enough that those with only Windows machines at home will still get the benefit, given that we'll likely be running Macs at our venues?

The guys at RenewedVision try very hard to keep the two sides as similar as possible. From what I understand there are very few differences, most of them being on the technical side. To get more info I would suggest searching and/or asking at their support forums (which are extremely good): http://forums.renewedvision.com/forum.php

Originally Posted by mjl5007

As a software engineer I've been using multiple monitors at work for years and, having seen the benefit, also have multiple monitors on my computer at home, which would make experimentation with the PP5 trial pretty similar to how it'll really be set up at church. However, most folks are going to have a laptop or only one monitor at home. How will their training experience compare?

When you say you use multiple monitors, do you mean you have one monitor as your "operator" view and the other as your "output" view? If you are just using the second monitor to view the output then the at-home experience is not much changed. You can always see what your output is in the top left of the screen, and if you ever want to go full-screen all you have to do is press Command-1. (I am not sure what the Windows equivalent key-press is but I am sure it is there.) This toggles on and off the output screen which, if you only have one monitor, will show up full screen on your monitor (or however your settings are set).

Matthew

[tyler1012000]

Well, I think we've come up with a plan. The biggest pain is moving songs over. We have about 600 that will need to be imported then edited. That will come in time.

As far as getting everybody trained, I've sent out an email w/ the link to download PP5 and have encouraged them to begin experimenting with it. We're then going to have a training session next Sunday afternoon to go through setting up a service. After that we're going to begin phasing it in on Wednesday's and then go to Sundays. Still hoping for a smooth transition.

I have an additional question that has come up. I am curious if everybody keeps all of their media in PP5 (Videos, Images, Backgrounds) or if you just keep your most common ones in PP and then keep the rest in another location on the pc. Just curious on how everybody does it as it's been mentioned that keeping everything we have in PP could be confusing. Just open for thoughts. Thanks guys.

[petereit]

Originally Posted by mjl5007

Mark, I love your idea of having everyone install the trial on their home computers and walking through the tutorial videos, but I have a couple of questions.

• Are the Mac and Windows versions similar enough that those with only Windows machines at home will still get the benefit, given that we'll likely be running Macs at our venues?
• As a software engineer I've been using multiple monitors at work for years and, having seen the benefit, also have multiple monitors on my computer at home, which would make experimentation with the PP5 trial pretty similar to how it'll really be set up at church. However, most folks are going to have a laptop or only one monitor at home. How will their training experience compare?

Yes, the PC and Mac versions are similar enough. I have entered lyrics and formatted slides on my PC at work, saved the file to our DropBox folder, pulled it up on our Mac at church and ran with it without even needing to tweak it.

Even if you're running on a single monitor, the preview window in ProPresenter works fine for showing you the basic output. 99% of what you need to learn in ProPresenter is done from the main control screen.