Tips for a new Media Shout 3.0 user?

[cbccraig]

OK guys and gals, I looking for a little insight here. What is the advantage of using Media Shout (or any other worship software) instead of power point? I DLd the trial of Media Shout and have been messing around with it a little. You can't animate text, you can't fly in a word or two like a fill in the blank type sentence. you can't rotate any text. If you pull in a Bible verse and want to edit it you have to open it back up in another window. Sll kinds of stuff like BOBs, TEDs Boxer ets that you cannot searh the help section for. So far I have not been able to import any powerpoint into. It has locked up on me 3 times so far. This looks like it will take a week or two just to figure out how make it work. I'm no computer whiz, but I've taught myself Flash, Photoshop and Quark to name a few and media shout looks like it is not an easy pick up. Even if I get it going then I have to try and teach it to my pastor so he can create his sermon slides, and all my volunteers. They all already know how to use power point and any other church my pastor would need to preach in he can take his laptop and use power point. It looks like if you use a worship software package that church you went to would have to have the same program to be able to run the sermon slides. From what I can tell Media Shout is licensed to your location and that is it. So why does someone want to use one of these other programs, I fail to see any advantage. The trial version of Media shout is good for 21 uses. Well so far today with the lockups (and my computer is plenty powerful) that has used up 3 uses. I figure it's only good for about 2 days unless you didnt have any other work to do and could keep it open all day and work on it. But having to close it and reopen it later all the uses are gone very quickly. They ought to make it good for 30 days so you have time to work with it and can come to some sort of a conclusion. Anyway, I'm rambling...guess just showing my frustration with Media Shout.

[gwalker]

One of the problems with PowerPoint is that it doesn't handle songs very well. PowerPoint is OK if a song is always done the same way, but if the song leader throws in an extra bridge, verse repeat etc, the operator is left floundering and the audience sees his uncertainity. Worship software allows the operator to randomly access any verse, chorus and bridge at any moment.

[cbccraig]

you can do that in power point by just looking over in the view window on the left side and clicking on the slide you want. It might take a second, but it takes a second in Media Shout doesn't it? You have to figure out what verse the song leader is on first them find it...right? We go over our songs during sound check and very, very rarely do we deviate from that, so that is really not an issue. Any other advantages to worship software over power point? If that is the only advantage why the need to learn and teach a whole new program? I hope I'm not coming off as harsh here, but I really am trying to figure out if it is worth my time to learn and experiment with the various other packages.

[wjferguson]

Originally Posted by cbccraig

OK guys and gals, I looking for a little insight here. What is the advantage of using Media Shout (or any other worship software) instead of power point? I DLd the trial of Media Shout and have been messing around with it a little. You can't animate text, you can't fly in a word or two like a fill in the blank type sentence. you can't rotate any text. If you pull in a Bible verse and want to edit it you have to open it back up in another window. Sll kinds of stuff like BOBs, TEDs Boxer ets that you cannot searh the help section for. So far I have not been able to import any powerpoint into. It has locked up on me 3 times so far. This looks like it will take a week or two just to figure out how make it work. I'm no computer whiz, but I've taught myself Flash, Photoshop and Quark to name a few and media shout looks like it is not an easy pick up. Even if I get it going then I have to try and teach it to my pastor so he can create his sermon slides, and all my volunteers. They all already know how to use power point and any other church my pastor would need to preach in he can take his laptop and use power point. It looks like if you use a worship software package that church you went to would have to have the same program to be able to run the sermon slides. From what I can tell Media Shout is licensed to your location and that is it. So why does someone want to use one of these other programs, I fail to see any advantage. The trial version of Media shout is good for 21 uses. Well so far today with the lockups (and my computer is plenty powerful) that has used up 3 uses. I figure it's only good for about 2 days unless you didnt have any other work to do and could keep it open all day and work on it. But having to close it and reopen it later all the uses are gone very quickly. They ought to make it good for 30 days so you have time to work with it and can come to some sort of a conclusion. Anyway, I'm rambling...guess just showing my frustration with Media Shout.

It does sound like you have some issues with MS. If you need effects like animated text for the sermon notes then you're stuck with PowerPoint for the sermon notes. That's not a problem, though. You can run PPT and MS side by side with MS set to release control of the second display when it is minimized and you see the PowerPoint and do that stuff there. You don't have to retrain the pastor. Which is just as well, since they're notoriously hard to train, anyway!

Where these other programs really shine is the ability to sequence and coordinate media. Popping up scripture verses on the fly. Animated backgrounds (although I know of an add-on that makes that work in PPT, I've heard mixed reviews on how well it really works.) If you have a music leader who will be moved to add or substitue a song during the worship experience you'll get it up a lot faster in a worship program than in PPT. Some can play DVD clips seamlessly.

I've done it both ways, and I'll take the worship program any time.

If you're really so happy with PowerPoint, why are you even looking at worship programs?

Bill

[cbccraig]

Hey Bill, thanks for your insights about worship software. The reason I'm looking at other options is because other church members have visited other churches that are using other programs and talked to the techies who tout how great these various packages are. So they ask me why we don't use this or that? They are not volunteers themselves so I have no idea why they concern themselves with the matter. Anyway my pastor was preaching at a revival a couple weeks ago and took his sermon slides (50-60 slides per sermon is his norm) along. I also send our remote (usb interface) so he sould run his own presentation. Well the techie at this other church was unable to get his power point running for whatever reason I don;t know. He used Media Shout so he was showing my pastor a little about MS. My pastor in talking to me remarked that he might be able to do his sermon presentations quicker in MS. I had my doubts about this so for his benifit I am looking into it so I can intelligently explain the differences to him and others who ask why we still use powerpoint. We have a DVD player on a switcher hooked to the computer so if the need arises to play a DVD clip (rare) we can just fade from the computer to the DVD without changing projector inputs so the transition to DVD from PPT and back is seamless. No one seems to be a big fan of animated backgrounds and they see them as distracting so I don;t really see any reason to move away from PPT. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking some really nice feature that I wasn;t aware of. Since he creates his own slides (and it looks like they are easier to creat in PPT) and we very seldom vary from our songlist I see no reason to switch. My pastor gets by in PPT pretty well and since he is not computer savey at all I know I could never teach him MS. Thanks for your input, it means a lot.

[wjferguson]

You're welcome. As you've surmised, MS is not designed for slide production, and will not help your pastor produce slides more quickly. If you've got fairly vanilla slides and can live without animation, it does a pretty good job of importing them. I did have a glitch last week when someone presented me with a long slide show where the text from 1 slide wasn't visible. So I just ran it in PPT (viewer, actually).

And I actually use MS because of the feature set at the time I purchased it, I think that most of the others are easier to learn. (But not necessarily as powerful.) If you do decide to move to worship software, decide what features you really need, and buy the easiest one that does them all.

Bill

[[Admin] danroth]

The biggest benefits of moving to worship software are:

1) the ease of non-linearity - Want to change song order or add a new song or play an unscheduled video or show the Bible verse a speaker brings up? It's all easy in worship software.

2) The speed of doing many things. Once you learn how, putting services together is much faster. A simple example is an all-song song service, You click on each of the songs you want, click one button, and it's done... none of all the cutting and pasting that PPT would require. (And, as stated above, you could then change songs while the service is happening.)

[cbccraig]

Originally Posted by danroth

The biggest benefits of moving to worship software are:
.

2) The speed of doing many things. Once you learn how, putting services together is much faster. A simple example is an all-song song service, You click on each of the songs you want, click one button, and it's done... none of all the cutting and pasting that PPT would require. (And, as stated above, you could then change songs while the service is happening.)

In of mulling over the thoughts of Bill and Dan (especially Dan's #2 above I am starting to see some advantages as far as building the worship portion with something like MS. I know building the song slides in PPT is time consumeing. Can you break down the songs into shorter segments than what the verses are currently broken into in MS? Of course having to do this may offset any other speed advantage I might gain by using MS. As I mentioned earlier our screens are so low that when people are standing for worship you can olny put a couple lines at the very top in order for the people in the farther back rows to see them. THis is not that much of a problem when everyone is sitting for the sermon, but a definate problem when standing. When we get into our new facility (Nov 06) that problem would go away as we will have huge screens high enough for all to clearly see. So if I can really save time by using MS for the worship portion then go to power point for the sermon as Bill suggested. I'll do some more playing around before I rule anything out. Thanks guys, your the best.

[[Admin] danroth]

Originally Posted by cbccraig

Can you break down the songs into shorter segments than what the verses are currently broken into in MS? ...As I mentioned earlier our screens are so low that when people are standing for worship you can olny put a couple lines at the very top in order for the people in the farther back rows to see them.

Yes.
You can specify what section of the screen you want the text to appear in.
So really, you just specify what section of the screen and it automatically does the rest.

[[Admin] osborn4]

One of the other benefits of worship software in general is showing scriptures directly from the scripture database.

If you're looking for something that does songs as comes with with it's own slide show builder, you can take a look at SongShow Plus (SSP).

SSP comes with Slide Show Builder, which allows animation of text onto the screen. It's no PowerPoint, when it comes to controlling how things come onto the screen (e.g. no exit animations). But many users find it nice to have access to the same motion backgrounds and visualizations that you have access too for the songs and such. And the 3-d transitions that SSP comes with look great in a slide show.

If you want to stick with PPT, you can show those from within SSP. You can also show flash, videos and DVD clips. Of course,that's true for most worship softwar.

It's real nice to be able to define your DVD clip ahead of time, so that when you hit the show button, it starts where you told it and stops on time.

[cbccraig]

Originally Posted by osborn4

If you want to stick with PPT, you can show those from within SSP. You can also show flash, videos and DVD clips. Of course,that's true for most worship softwar.

It's real nice to be able to define your DVD clip ahead of time, so that when you hit the show button, it starts where you told it and stops on time.

How do you do that? I mean do you have the clip on your hard drive already edited to the portion you want to show? Or can it be a DVD placed in an external player with the play range defined within MS or SSP?

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by cbccraig

How do you do that? I mean do you have the clip on your hard drive already edited to the portion you want to show? Or can it be a DVD placed in an external player with the play range defined within MS or SSP?

The DVD needs to be in a DVD drive on your projection computer.