how much text

[AlexH237]

I try to shoot for around 4...

[MPCC Media]

Ours are all typed in by hand, and it allows for better formatting. When we made the switch to EasyWorship, I spent a couple hours one night finding out what the best combination font, font size and margins were to make it so the longer verses would not auto-wrap and that it was still easy to read from the back of the room, even in bright lighting and maybe a bad background picture that was too bright. Our music director does a very good job of typing the slides, and I think that i have only seen one very obvious mistake on the text wrapping lately. We do the 2 or 4 line method. On rare occasions, we might bump to a 5th line just to prevent an odd slide from continuously showing up.
Now, I can't help you with your particular setup because each one is a little different. You just have to take the time to figure it out for yourself based upon what your particular needs are, the size of your screen, the length of your building and what is just plain easiest for the people to read.

[jregel]

I let the software (Words of Worship) sort it out for us automatically. It decides how many lines can fit on screen based on a particular font size and does the calculations automatically.

[hussra]

Our Rector initially expressed a desire to tend towards getting a whole verse on at a time, where this is possible and the result is readable, after experiences in other churches he has visited who display one line at a time, where he has suddenly been presented with lyrics he considers unsound but without the time to stop himself singing them

In practice I am tending to limit it to 4-6 lines nowadays. Yesterday was (all being well) our last Sunday of Easislides, the MediaShout disk arrived in Saturday's post...

Richard

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by jregel

I let the software (Words of Worship) sort it out for us automatically. It decides how many lines can fit on screen based on a particular font size and does the calculations automatically.

I can't imagine leaving that up to the software. It doesn't know how the song flows and where the logical breaks are.

The software we use, SongShow Plus, you can use page breaks or x lines per screen and I rarely use x lines per screen, unless I've been through the song several times and know that x (usually 4) will give me breaks where I want them.

And even them I've been burned by my own overtweaking. After settling on 4 lines per page on a particular song, I went back and put a line break on a line that I decided was too long. That threw the line count off and I didn't catch it.

So, for me, the control freak , hard-coding the page breaks is the way to go.

[Dan Rector]

We start with CCLI, trying to hit the 4 line per page/screen average, breaking it into multiple slides where the natural breaks are as much as possible. For the most part it only requires a page break hear or there.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by osborn4

So, for me, the control freak , hard-coding the page breaks is the way to go.

Hear! Hear!

[sempei13]

We do 1-2 lines. We also do imag, so that's partially why. I'm so used to one line that when I hear the end of a phrase I sometimes automatically advance if I'm not paying attention and there are two on screen--oops. I don't run lyrics as often as camera and switcher now.

Paul

[riafekim]

CCLI is great for getting the song in MediaShout so I don't hve to type it in. I then break the song down to no more than 4 lines. Our screens are kind of small so I like to get he font as large as I can.

[Pastor Tim]

I'm still trying to get this really sorted out, so we have been varying between 3-8. Because large font and ease of following are our major goals I'm moving toward trying to get about 4 lines on a screen with occasional variations based on the song.

I also discovered again what I already knew - preview is not always exactly what you think it is. For some reason MS showed all the lines on the screen in preview on one song, but chopped off the last one when projected. I was trying to get an entire verse of a hymn on each screen and it just didn't quite work out.

Pastor Tim

[jflash]

Originally Posted by Pastor Tim

I also discovered again what I already knew - preview is not always exactly what you think it is. For some reason MS showed all the lines on the screen in preview on one song, but chopped off the last one when projected. I was trying to get an entire verse of a hymn on each screen and it just didn't quite work out.

You might check the resolution you've got set in settings. I haven't had that problem in MS, but it was a fairly regular problem in SundayPlus back before we switched, and I ended up realizing I had the resolution set incorrectly for the display window.

[waynehoskins]

We do one verse or maximum 4-6 lines, whatever seems to fit the song and the screen best. All manual breaks, both line and page, partly from a control standpoint and partly because our software package doesn't auto-wrap. Sometimes we'll do more than four lines where two logical groups of lines work well on screen together; these are broken by some whitespace in between. (A perfect example is the song You Are Holy (Prince Of Peace) where there are two parts at the same time. It's rather bothersome, but that seems to be the best solution to that.

All our text is hand-entered, for good or bad. Much of it has been through one system conversion (which worked remarkably well but wasn't 100 percent perfect because the conversion programmer (me) was lazy and didn't take into account one or two relatively rare exceptions to the rules of the source data).

And for preview, we use a 9-inch throwdown monitor looking at the real output signal. It's not a look-ahead preview, but it's definitive when running through a set quickly before service to make sure it all sits right on the screen, and since we DSK this signal in the main switcher, the monitor is always hot even if the DSK isn't.