PowerPoint 2010 vs ProPresenter

[Arlin]

Right now we use PowerPoint (2007 & below) for our worship presentation.
Our users are familiar with PowerPoint & we are pretty proficient and capable.

BUT, as we incorporate more and more video into our services, PowerPoint just does not handle video well.

I got a new computer with PowerPoint 2010 which DRAMATICALLY improves video in PowerPoint.
Video can be easily inserted/embedded.
Start and stop points can be edited.
Text over video & video over video is supported.

So, now I am wondering, should we upgrade to PowerPoint 2010?
Or would we be better off going straight to ProPresenter?

I have toyed with ProPresenter 4 a bit, but its workflow is SO much different than PPT, I am not sure how well received it will be by our volunteers...

[chazman14]

Have you tried out MediaShout and EasyWorship? It is best to try a bunch of different things before committing.

[Arlin]

Yeah, I am looking at others like MediaShout & EasyWorship too. I was concentrating on ProPresenter because it just seems to have the most steam lately...
But, honestly, the more I work with ProPresenter, the less I like it.

I think EasyWorship might be my front-runner right now, but last time I looked at it, I was not impressed with editing slide layouts & flexibility (like adding pictures & arranging text around the pictures)... but that might be a holdover from PowerPoint's editing flexibility.

I think MediaShout might be the most PowerPoint like of the bunch, so I plan on taking a closer look at that too....

But, back to my original post, I was sort of just wondering if PowerPoint 2010 had caught up to some of these other options and if it is a more viable contender with those other options now...

[bggowing]

If you're happy with PowerPoint 2010 and your volunteers are happy and proficient with it then why change? Any worship software is going to be different than PowerPoint and if PP 2010 handles everything you need to do I'd stay with it.

PowerPoint is linear while ProPresenter is by design non-linear. That doesn't mean you can't set it up to be as linear as PowerPoint and I do that for our youth volunteers. I really like the flexibility of ProPresenter compared to the other products out there. MediaShout has always been a resource-intensive application from my viewpoint and use.

[Arlin]

We are NOT on PPT 2010 yet. We actually use a mix of PPT 2007 & 2003, and we are not totally happy with it... videos can be a pain.

PPT 2010 might solve most of our issues, but then we would need all volunteers to upgrade....
EasyWorship's site license system ($400) would probably be A LOT cheaper, and it might give us some more capabilities (looping video backgrounds).

Besides, most all of these worship software can include a PPT file for playback anyway...

[TechPastor]

I would definitely move away from PowerPoint.
If your people are not technically adept I would go to EasyWorship - you can teach them the basics in 5-10min.
If the editing ability is more important to you I would recommend ProPresenter or MediaShout but keep in mind the learning curve will be higher on these products.

I had my team evaluate/play w/ EasyWorship, ProPresenter, and MediaShoud and they felt that ProPresenter and MediaShout was too technical for them to jump to from PowerPoint so we chose EasyWorship. Now that they have become proficient and are looking for more advanced editing/graphic abilities we are planning to move to ProPresenter but this took us three years to get to this point.
Work with your team. If your team is frustrated they won't stick around to help out.

[bggowing]

One thing to be aware of when evaluating worship software is to determine who is going to be putting the order together and how they use it. While the more complex software like MediaShout and ProPresenter are initially a bit more involved to learn, depending on who is putting together the order, it is possible to dumb them both down to where all the volunteer has to do is hit the space bar to advance to the next slide.

[bcastle]

We currently use Easy Worship in the booth and our pastor uses PPT for his sermon outline. Importing PPT files into worship is really easy. We are now getting to adding video over text( had to upgrade graphics card). I havent used propresenter or mediashout, so i can only speak of my experiences with EW.
I like that it has 4 versions of scripture that I can easily add as well as a song bank already included. if you have a ccli license with song select you can take advantage of importing new lyrics directly into the scheduler and song database with one button, but you have to have access to the internet on that computer.

One of the main reasons I like EW is that I can have basically unlimited licenses, so long as it is for church use. Ie our church computer is loaded with it, my laptop has it and both our other sound guy has a copy and minister of music has a copy. this way we can do stuff at home and bring it on a flash drive or email it to ourselves and download it when we get to church.

As for slide editing, i dont do much of it. i pick a picture/video i like and click and done. I just dont like spending an enormous amount of time editing every aspect of a slide doing that. But to each his own. EW works for me, but if i wanted to do more editing, i guess i could with EW or really do a good job in PPT and then load it to EW. Ideally you dont want to have to edit on the fly your large portions of your program if you can avoid it, but you can easily enough. I've done it for typos i've found, but im rather quick with a computer.

Again I havent worked with the other softwares, but EW is very easy to run, I know our sound team likes it and it met our current needs. We may upgrade as we get more technical savy with video streaming and what not, but I dont anticipate outgrowing this program for at least another 2 yrs unless we get a huge in flux in our budget.

I am very happy with the ease that I can teach volunteers and would recommend it for anyone.

[Arlin]

Actually, in moving away from PPT, I am most worried about graphics layout & arrangement customization. That is really easy in PPT, but it seems tweaking the layout in others is not as straight-forward.

Also, advancing slides during the service seems easiest in PPT to me... the operator just has to use the keyboard arrow keys 99% of the time... mouse can be used to jump around if needed (using the presenter view).
Is this possible in EW? When I was trying EW out, I like it, but at the end of each 'presentation' (I think that is the term), the mouse was needed to advance.
Can arrow keys be used to advance through the entire thing?

[bcastle]

When we do a ppt sermon, the slides look the same and display to the projector the same. you can not edit the ppt slide in EW. you would essentially have to go back to ppt, edit, save and then update the presentation in EW, but the operation of the slides is arrow key or mouse click.

as for being able to simply hit the down arrow from one scheduled event to another ie from song to song. you can't. you can either click once on the next song to get it to the preview button to get it to the preview section and then click the live button to go live or you can simply double click the song in the scheduler section to go live immediately.

We used to make one ginormous ppt file with our songs and sermon in the same file but it was a headache copy and pasting songs.

EW basically lets you take any medium video, audio, scripture, online stuff and present it. Our pastor still operates out of ppt and it plays nicely with everything else, but for the shear ease in importing new songs from song select is ridiculously easy. (literally find the song, click lyric and then import...done) plus the song database feature is cool.