Shout vs. Easy Worship

We are considering a move away from Media Shout to Easy Worship. Anyone used both? Shout has been OK, but we continue to have glitches with moving backgrounds. The demo version of Easy Worship looks user friendly, and the text seems more legible. Any feedback would really be appreciated.

Larry

Originally posted by passion4media
We are considering a move away from Media Shout to Easy Worship. Anyone used both? Shout has been OK, but we continue to have glitches with moving backgrounds. The demo version of Easy Worship looks user friendly, and the text seems more legible. Any feedback would really be appreciated.

Larry

I have a question or 2 for you I use Media Shout extensively every week and I was wondering what types of glitches you were having?

[David H.]

We have never used Media Shout, but we have used other programs, and we would not trade Easy Worship for any other.

Revhtree

[[Director] Joseph B]

I've been using media shout for several years (been through 3 versions so far) and love it. Having said that however, I would also say that the BEST software is that with which you are most comfortable. It's much like the PC vs. MAC, MS Word vs Word Perfect, etc. With the current software & hardware able to do pretty much everything anyone would want, it comes down to finances and comfort. The more comfortable you are with your software the more you will do with it. I can do more with MS Publisher than some others can do with Adobe Illustrator (although Illistrator is "the better program") only because I've been using publisher so long and am very comfortable with it. While I lust after the new Adobe Graphics Suite, it's unlikey I'll be able to afford it anytime soon but I don't let it stop me from doing quality work.

If the program does all (or at least most) of what you want and you are comfrotable with it, it's the right one. Most every one of the church scripting programs has a free demo for you to try out and see which you like best. That's the best program for you.

[Richard Tarr]

I have been using Media Shout for a year and a half and have not had problems with video. I have seen it used several times for major events (Youth specialties, Worship Together concerts, and the Passion tour) while playing motion backrounds. I would be sure that your computer can handle the videos before switching programs.

[tommyboy]

Originally posted by passion4media
We are considering a move away from Media Shout to Easy Worship. Anyone used both? Shout has been OK, but we continue to have glitches with moving backgrounds. The demo version of Easy Worship looks user friendly, and the text seems more legible. Any feedback would really be appreciated.

Larry
www.passion4media.com

I demo'd both and chose MediaShout for the opposite reasons: Shout was more stable and used moving backgrounds better than EasyWorship. Have you tried the tech support for Shout? I have found it extremely effective.

Concerning the text looking better in Easy Worship: When I first tried it, I thought that as well, and I hear that from every EW user. However, once I changed the Shout font to Arial Black with a shadow, it looked identical to the EW output.

[David H.]

Tim where are you? We need some support for Easy Worship! Just kidding, I have to agree with Joseph B. you should use something that you are comfortable with if it does all the stuff the others do. Thats my 2!

RevHtree

[hoomar]

We use both in our church. One for the main worship center and another in our youth/children's church/theater building.

I agree that the biggest difference between the two seems to be the user interface. That being said, use whichever program you are most comfortable with.

We use Easy Worship in the main worship center while the teenagers use Shout. Why? Because that is what we are most comfortable with.

Now, I will say this...the youth use fewer volunteers to create and operate their media system, so there is more time for the fewer operators to get a good handle on Shout and its little quirks. However, we use numerous volunteers (many of them cross-trained) in the main worship building and find that the learning curve for Easy Worship seems to be much less cumbersome than Shout.

My main worship building presentation staff used PowerPoint, Sunday Plus and now Easy Worship and I can tell you that when the folks at EW decided to design a system, they did it right. They found out all the shortcomings of the other systems and fixed them making it stand head and shoulders above the rest.

No, I am not a salesman. But as the Media Director, I can tell you that having my presentation staff happy and not pulling their hair out on a Sunday morning sure makes my job a lot easer.

[Allan Lester]

We tried the demo versions of both, (actually all the ones on Tim's demo CD which was included in the registration package at his workshop!) For us, EasyWorship was just that... easy. I have now trained 3 separate individuals in the past month and each person was fully up and running in less than 5 minutes. I have never picked up a program as fast as I have EasyWorship. One of the girls that runs the computer on Sunday mornings is always bringing people into the booth to show them the program. She is totally excited about it. It definitely beats PowerPoint hands down.

I just noticed this past weekend that we never picked up the projector remote control other than to turn the projectors on and off. No more hitting the "Blank" button on the remote as we switch between presentations or try to pull up a song that was not in the original song list!

[hoomar]

Alan,
Don't ditch PowerPoint altogether. The power that lies in Easy Worship is its ability to integrate PowerPoint with its own features.

I would never consider showing sermon notes in anything but PowerPoint. And, I am able to import any graphic I want into a PP file and just click to get it up on screen.

Try this...create a PP show for your announcements...another for your "still slides"...and yet another for your sermon notes. Import those into EW and then integrate them all together with your songs and videos. You will find that a super powerful tool just got even better!

[Allan Lester]

I am sorry if my previous post implied that we ditched PowerPoint all together. Instead we do exactly what Marc indicated. We have one PPT presentation for the announcement loop and one PPT presentation for the sermon notes. Occassionally there are other presentations during the service that we load into PowerPoint.

We then load the PPT presentations into the set list in EasyWorship. We do use EasyWorship exclusively for displaying the words to the songs. This is so much faster and better than PPT it is truly amazing.

One annoying thing about EasyWorship is that there is about a 5 second lag when transitioning to a PowerPoint presentation. We can get around this by going to a black screen or going off live, then moving the PPT presentation to the live window, waiting for the hour glass to go away, and then going "live" with the presentation. If we ever needed to do quick transitions into a PPT presentation this would be a problem. Fortunately there is usually time in our order of worship to get these cued up so no one notices.

One trick we do that I learned from Tim's workshop is to make the computer's background screen something useful. That way when we are not "live" we have a useful image on the screen. Something other than one of the windows backgrounds that people are used to seeing at work during the week. I have posted my default background in the media exchange for those that are interested in seeing what we are using.

we looked at pp and my problem with it was the fact that whatever was on the screen in front of you was what was on the projection. then we tested media shout and that was a different world all together. the only advice i can offer is that if you are going to run either, make sure your computer exceeds the requirements. the only change to our computer was that we made a video card upgrade. the old card was a single with only 4 megs of ram and we upgraded to a 128mb dual video card and have had no glitches with the software at all. we do not use the audio on the software though. have found all other aspects of the software very workable. we now have 3 teams of operators that just do the computer. this software enables us to do both the music and the sermons without anyone knowing changes are being made without anyone seeing the changes. which was the reason we went with shout in the first place...

blessings ron