Presenter

by Nigel Swinson, Website Ministry Leader from 2002, Carrubbers Christian Centre. September 2003

Early in 2001 Carrubbers Christian Centre installed two screens and projectors and looked forward to saying goodbye to hymn books forever! Before this goal could be realised, we needed to find an appropriate program for displaying the songs on the screens. While the obvious choice is to use Microsoft's PowerPoint, or some other such presentation package, we were glad to be introduced to a special purpose package called Presenter created specifically for projecting songs on screen for use in church services. After seeing the professional way in which we were able to display the songs, we have been asked many times what program it is that we use, so thought that a review article here would be well received.

Why PowerPoint isn't enough

There are several difficulties that you will encounter if you try to use PowerPoint to present the songs to the congregation:

Specific Song Presentation Applications

Fortunately there are custom applications out there designed explicitly for presenting songs. The program that we use is called Presenter which is created by Discovery Systems who are connected to Hillsongs Christian Fellowship which is where worship songs such "Beautiful Saviour" and "Every day" were written. There are other programs out there such as VideoPresenter which may be better, but it is Presenter that we are happy with and familiar with and hence is the subject of this article.

High level design

When you open presenter it has two windows. One is the output window, and the other is the control console. This is designed so that if you have two graphics cards on your computer, then you place the output window to the secondary monitor (which is sent to the projector), and the configuration console on the primary monitor (which is what the operator looks at).

It can be run with just the one graphics card but it is much much much harder. Remembering too that projectors only really need 1024x768 in hardly any colours it would be madness not to spend the £20 needed to add a cheap second graphics card to your system.

Operating modes

While you are running presenter, there are three modes that you can operate in:

The console

The actual presenter console is split into a three main sections:

There's also a built in editor button which brings up, the song that you have selected. Or else you can send the song to your favourite text editor.

Then finally there's the options button. All the songs are stored in plain-text, so to change the font-size, colour etc., you just change the settings in the one place.

You can see screenshots of Presenter at the Discovery Systems website.

Song files

The actual songs are all stored as text files beneath one directory on your hard drive. Different categories are stored in different sub-directories so you could have Carols, Hymns, and Choruses in separate folders for easier searching. Each song is in it's own plain-text file and can be edited in any text editor from Notepad to Microsoft Word. In the file, any line preceded by a "." will not be shown on the screen. The first line is the name of the song, the file name is the reference number and a blank line indicates a new page. So a song would look something like this: 

My Example Song
.i This is the copyright information for the song.

.1
The blank line indicates a new screen,
ie the first screen.
The .1 says that this is the first verse.

.2
This is the second verse,
If a line is too long, then it will be wrapped.
.
The above . says that you want a line break,
but not actually a new screen.

Verdict

So what do I think of it?

Good points:

Downpoints:

Downpoints of projection in general are:

There are also some things which are problems with projection in general, not with Presenter itself, so while it is worthwhile mentioning them here, it would be unfair to Presenter to attribute them all as downpoints of the program itself. Interesting as you will see, with most of the downpoints, presenter was flexible enough to allow us to find some way to mitigate the problem:

Conclusions

Presenter represents an affordable, and professional way to present songs during meetings with a minimum of distraction. It is so easy to use I'm confident I could train a computer literate user in under a minute to use the program to get through a service in an emergency! This level of usability reduces preparation time, is flexible, reduces stress for those who are operating the computer and most importantly reduces distractions during the service making it easier to focus on our Heavenly Father :o)

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