In Part 1 of this article we explored Contrast, Alignment, and Font Choice. You can start there and catch up.

The Purpose of Backgrounds = Enhance ? Distract

The whole purpose of backgrounds - loops or still graphics - is to add visual interest to the screens and to break up the monotony of plain black behind the lyrics.

On the flip side, many churches drank the kool-aid and now believe that worship can’t happen unless there’s some sort of motion - whether abstract or video - behind the lyrics. Backgrounds were never meant to become the focal point of the music set (unless of course you want them to be the focal point on special occasions). If at any point in time they become the focus, pull a “Heart of Worship” and get rid of them for a time. They cannot become a crutch.

Some things to understand:

• Black backgrounds aren’t bad. One ministry in our church uses black backgrounds with their logo tucked in the corner very effectively.
• Loops aren’t bad. But like guns and matches, it’s not the object, it’s whose hands it’s in that can cause trouble.
• Still graphics aren’t bad. You could use one background for the entire set that fits in with the message/series. I’ve seen this done really well.

Use backgrounds in ways that empower the focal point. On songs that call for nature shots like “How Great is Our God”, use nature shots. On songs that call for something else, use backgrounds in that vein. But NEVER force backgrounds or use backgrounds out of place.

An artistic eye is of the utmost importance. Let art and appropriateness decide their use. Putting an accountant at the helm may mean you have someone perfect for looking for details but may make horrible artistic choices. Then you have someone like me who can’t pay attention to the screen due to the service going on in front of him. The balance of the two is to get your art guy to set the presentation up and have your details guy run it.

Here’s the test to see whether or not the backgrounds are enhancing the lyrics. The preferred answer follows in (parenthesis).

• Do you ever catch yourself wondering why a particular background was chosen? (no)
• Is the text set apart from the background so that the text is easily read? (yes)
• Does the text brightness contrast the background brightness? (yes)
• Do you leave it up to your volunteers to randomly choose backgrounds? (no)
• Does the speed/tone of the background match the song? (yes)
• Does the material in the background match the song? (yes)

KISS: Keep It Super Simple

Three sub-tips in this one. All focus on simplifying what is presented to the audience so that they can follow along and not get lost.

Break at logical points. Periods, commas, and musical pauses are all good places to begin new lines. The reader is already breaking in their mind so back this visually. For example, notice how awkward the breaks are on the left compared to the right where the lines break the way the song is sung. See how the odd breaks slightly disrupt the natural flow we expect. Fix this and you’re one step closer to great presentation

Don’t put too much text on each slide. We tend to limit the lines per slide to 4 for lyrics. Occasionally we might have 5 if they are short lines. Our goal though is to break them up as much as possible in order to give the audience less to sort through when looking at the slide. It helps them to find where we are in the music quickly. Again, compare these two for examples of too much and just enough.

For sermon notes, “make it look great” is the rule. If it looks like too much, it is.

Simplify the formatting. I know this may give some masters of the English language heart attacks, but try to remove as much punctuation and other extraneous formatting as possible. No, I ain’t promotin’ bad use of the English language. I am suggesting that the use of logical line breaks as stated above replaces the punctuation and formatting. The other formatting I mentioned may include italics, underlines, and quote marks. In addition, use sentence case. Do not use all capitals. The readability of the test decreases greatly with all caps. It’s just a bad idea.

Summary

When it all comes down to it, God must be worshipped. One way is through song. Our job on the media side is to do whatever it takes to see to it that we have prepared the way for God to be worshiped. Laying all opinions aside, let’s make sure that slides are designed with that in mind.

Full HD support and beyond

ProPresenter fully supports any resolution right out of the box. At no additional cost, you can playback Standard-Def, all forms of High-Def, as well as ultra-wide resolutions for multi-screen installations (as seen on our home page with David Crowder). NOTE: For higher resolutions of HD content, faster systems may be required; call us to talk about your specific needs.

ProPresenter also supports Quartz Composer documents (called compositions). This is an advanced graphics rendering system that is based on mathmatical computations rather than images. They appear like QuickTime movies, but are FAR smaller in size and can even accomodate external inputs (audio, video, etc.). While not for the faint of heart, you can learn how to create your own from many sites on the web (i.e. MacTech.org).

Text editing and spell check

Editing text is easier than ever before with in-line slide editing. This means you can either go to the slide editor to make changes OR right-click on any slide and edit the text within it directly (eliminating the need to leave Presenter mode). With this also comes spell-checking and a greatly enhanced playlist and library which always remain present for quick program changes. Making global changes to font, size, color, etc. of a whole song or multiple songs is a snap and nearly instant!

Importing & Exporting

Adding songs to your library should be quick and painless, so ProPresenter makes use of two different methods of importing song lyrics fast. You can import text files individually as you always have, or as a batch into ProPresenter 3. The ability to import directly from the clipboard is also still available. Simply look-up the lyrics from any song on the Internet, whether through SongSelect, Google, or any other website. Either download them as text files to import later or select the text of the song in your Internet browser. Switch to ProPresenter and select “Presentation from Clipboard” from the File menu or import from your downloaded text files. Every line of text will automatically be imported as its own slide. In addition, if there are labels in the song for Verse, Chorus, or Bridge, these will automatically be interpreted by ProPresenter as slide labels for easy identification in your presentations. Version 3.0 adds the ability to label one or more slides with a particular color for grouping together common portions of a song (i.e. chorus, bridge, etc.) for easy visual identification. You also have the ability to export songs as well as playlist with similar ease.

What is ProPresenter?
ProPresenter has been the preferred lyric presentation system for churches and ministries around the world for years. Now with a fresh new look and incredible new video engine, ProPresenter has never been easier or more spectacular. ProPresenter 3 has been completely re-written from the ground up and is now a Universal binary which means it fully supports both PowerPC as well as Intel processor Macs natively. Thus, it’s very fast and very responsive. The whole program is scalable to adjust to any size display and allows for slides and backgrounds to grow or shrink easily. This looks beautiful on all those new Macs with high-resolution displays and comes in very handy when you want to see a lot of slides or clips at one time.

Dynamic Scripture Look-up                

Quickly search your favorite version of the Bible for one or more verses for nearly instant display. So when your Pastor makes an unexpected call for a verse, you’ll be ready with the built-in database of bibles. You can also save sets of looked up scriptures as well as format found verses into a sequence of slides by paragraph, verse, or custom delineation.

Video Playback

Video playback has never been better as we’ve incorporated the video playback engine of ProVideoPlayer into ProPresenter 3. Now you get gorgeous, high-quality cross-dissolves between backgrounds while text is displayed over them. Whether you’re using background video loops or foreground presentation videos (i.e. a sermon), you’ll find ProPresenter’s video playback functionality outstanding. Most any video you can play in QuickTime Player can be played smoothly and reliably within ProPresenter. Unlike some of our competitors, you can switch video backgrounds as often as you wish within a song, and even switch them dynamically on the fly!

Video Playback Interface

Plus, when playing back foreground presentation videos, the operator has accurate elapsed and remaining time indicators to make the smoothest transition possible to the next cue of your program. Foreground videos are different than background videos in that they may contain an audio track, will remove any text overlay, and don’t loop. They are depicted by the movie camera icon in the top left of the slide.

Song Automation

Song Automation

Now you can add an audio track to a song and sequence the slides of that song to the attached audio track! A new audio tab has been created where all audio clips will be stored. As an added bonus, sound effects can also be stored and triggered here to create foley functionality (such as funny noises, laughter, applause, door slam, etc. - as denoted by the pink speaker icon vs. the green tune icon).

This is a fantastic solution for any environment without a band, such as a children’s program, a small church, or traveling ministry. After connecting your Mac to your sound system, ProPresenter becomes your all-in-one audio, lyric, and video playback tool!

For those without ProPresenter try using iTunes to simplify the audio aspect of your service.

ProPresenter Overview II has even more information about this amazing software.

This article was originally published on The Worship Community.

If you are part of the growing community of worship leaders, there is a good chance that you are at least mildly acquainted with loops. Loops have, to varying degrees, become an important tool to many modern worship leaders. From simple drum loops to full-song sequences, artists such as Steve Fee, Chris Tomlin and the David Crowder Band have integrated loops into their songs.

From the standpoint of a worship band, loops can be very useful as they can be used to compensate for a lack of musicians (a very real and prominent issue in many churches). This can mean recording in a real instrument (such as a lead guitar part) or sequencing out an instrument using any one of a number of virtual instruments (such as those found in Reason or Kontakt). Using these tools will also allow for the use of non-traditional instruments such as vintage synths, a glockenspiel or various types of percussive instruments.

Further, the use of loops allows a worship band to more accurately perform another artist’s song - some songs, like Steve Fee’s “We Shine” would likely sound lackluster without a loop behind it.

Many worship leaders avoid the use of loops for a number of reasons, one being the perception that running loops requires sophisticated know-how and equipment. The reality is, running loops is relatively simple and specialized equipment is not necessarily required. If need be, loops can easily be played from an iPod, for instance. While many loops must be set to a click track to be used (therefore requiring in-ear monitoring and a metronome), most percussive loops do not require a click track to be used, and can be monitored using a stage monitor.

Writing loops, however, requires a greater investment of both time and money. The worship music community has latched onto two particular programs to serve their loop writing needs: Ableton Live and Propellerheads’ Reason. Both are capable of loop-creation, but have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ableton Live, as the name suggests, shines through in the live situation - it is stable and efficient in its ability to trigger loops, trigger the metronome and running softsynths live. Ableton Live 7 has a strong set of instruments and effects, giving the user a relatively large set of tools to write and perform with.

Reason, on the other hand, is more finely-tuned as a writing and sequencing environment. Not only does it have a large selection of instruments, but its advanced instrument and effect routing allows for the creation of very unique sounds. Reason, in contrast to Ableton Live, provides very few provisions to those wanting to run loops and sequences in a live situation.

As an emerging trend, we are beginning to see loops and sequences finding their way into modern worship. Not only are loops able to enhance the sound of most worship bands, but they are able to give smaller, struggling worship bands the kind of relief and assistance they are looking for.

Open your software of choice. Add the lyrics. Play.

So is the preparation of the typical church using lyrics presentation software. It works. The lyrics are on screen and God is sung to and about. But what if a few simple treatments could be applied between “Add the lyrics” and “Play” to take these good presentations and turn them into great presentations?

Praise God “what if” is a reality. Here are a few things to try.

Go Bold for Contrast

A thin font usually finds itself blending into the background. Even with a stroke/outline and drop shadow, the weight of the characters contrasting with the background is what makes them stand out. Even thin white text on a black background still doesn’t create enough contrast to really stand out. Try using the bold face of whichever font you have chosen and see if it becomes more readable. Now, if it looks bad bold, start looking for a new font. Whatever the case, contrast is the goal.

See these images. On the left, a normal slide. On the right, the same font bold. Of course, the bold is easiest to read but notice how much the text pops and lends itself to readability.

Branch Out

A typical church will most likely use one of these fonts - Verdana, Arial, Trebuchet MS, Lucida Grande, or (gasp!) Times New Roman. If I may suggest (beg), don’t use these ever again. There are so many other amazing fonts to use. Why use one that is seen so often that it has lost its punch? We never want to be so crazy that we distract or lose readability. We just want to add that edge of newness to relieve the stagnancy that can so easily creep into churches.

If you’re lost, look through the many free font sites on the interweb. My personal favorite is DaFont.com. Start in their “Basic Sans Serif” category. It’s got some thick, easy to read fonts your church can use to help the onscreen lyrics stand out.

If you want to learn more about typography and all the “why’s” for what I suggested and more, read the book The Non-Designer’s Design and Type Books, Deluxe Edition by Robin Williams (not the actor).

Here are some personal favorites on the left. And on the right, some fonts I’d suggest avoiding like the plague. Avoid them mostly for their unreadability but also because of their overusage and frequent bad usage. They, in a way, scream unprofessionalism.

Align to Center? Left? Right? Justify? Top? Bottom? Middle?

Do what looks best in your situation. I’m a center/middle guy (like above). But in our main services it seems to work best left/bottom. Our youth use center/middle. My last church was left/middle. It’s all preference. I will say that right aligned may work for something that is read like sermon notes but the inherent lack of readability of right aligned text causes problems for lyrics because of how fast they have to be read.
The tip here is to just try new things. Try different arrangements of text and see what best fits your church/event.

You are now ready to move on to Part II of “Good to Great: Onscreen Lyrics and Notes” as we explore choosing good backgrounds and simplifying the text for maximum readability.

Written by Chris Moncus

Chris Moncus is a design and photography nut. He spends his days creating media for St. Simons Community Church and operating Aventia Media. He is married out of his league to a beautiful lady named Amanda.

Block objectionable websites from your computer.

Trying to monitor your family’s computer in an open area isn’t enough. Take control of how your family’s computer is used, even when you are not at home or unable to monitor it.

Benefits:

Effectively blocks offensive and objectionable websites from your Windows computer(s). The filter is not currently available for Macintosh computers.
Internet protection for families, office staff, and schools.
5 easy steps to signup and download the software.
Inexpensive: $4.99/mo, $54.99/yr with household discounts.
Free customer service and free software upgrades.
Time controls: Determine when and how long the Internet can be used.
Select different levels of blocking based upon age.
Create safe lists or black lists - websites that will always be allowed or blocked.
Download the program onto additional computers for free.
Selectively block Instant Messaging (IM), Internet Chat, and more.
For maximum protection use the Accountability service (monitoring) and receive reports on Internet use. The Filter is only $1.50/mo per user if added to our Accountability service.

Visit www.covenanteyes.com and use the promo code: behindworship to receive 30-days free.

To learn about internet accountability read this article: Covenant Eyes Accountability

Surveys show at least 70 percent of men and 21 percent of women struggle with online pornography. Internet pornography and the secret life it creates can destroy relationships, families, and marriages. Escape the temptation by removing the secrecy of the Internet with Covenant Eyes Accountability software.

How does Internet Accountability work?   

Covenant Eyes software monitors a person’s Internet use and emails a report of all websites visited for Accountability Partners to view. Accountability Partners are trusted individuals selected by the member to review reports and discuss how the Internet is used. Reports are emailed to the Partner or viewed online from our Member Center.

Who are Accountability Partner(s)?  

They include parents, family, trusted friends, mentors, coaches, husbands, wives, pastors, clergy, counselors, or other trusted and concerned individuals who are committed to helping the Covenant Eyes user.

Because reports provide scoring, Partners and users can easily identify questionable websites, searches, links, and more. The report shows trends for websites viewed and bar charts that show the times of day and night when the Internet is used. Covenant Eyes is simply the strongest, most frequently updated accountability service available.

• Monitors web activity and emails reports to selected individuals. (Accountability Partners.)
• Internet protection for individuals, families, office staff, and schools.
• Easy 5 steps to sign-up and download the software.
• Inexpensive: $7.99/mo per user, $84.99/yr with multiple user discounts.
• Free customer service and free software upgrades.
• Download onto additional computers at no extra charge.
• Extremely difficult to bypass. Partners receive an email if software is uninstalled.
• Recommended by Focus on the Family.

Visit www.covenanteyes.com and use the promo code: behindworship to receive 30-days free.

For more information on internet filtering, check out this article on Covenant Eyes Filtering Software 

The MicPort Pro will offer you a few options not normally available on portable USB-XLR converters. The MicPort Pro gives you the standard ability as a microphone preamp for recording  live tracks into your recording software, and as the monitoring system. The MicPort Pro has a headphone jack built in, with a separate control knob for volume. The device also has a phantom power switch for all your phantom power needs. The overall size comes in at 4 1/2″ by 1′” and is obviously made for portability.

If you want more information about CEntrance’s MicPort Pro visit their website at www.CEntrance.com

How would you like the worship leading in your church to be transformed into something fervent and relevant? How can your worship team benefit from learning biblical truths to shape their perspectives for worship? How can teamwork improve your worship leading? Where does your team need to grow spiritually and relationally? 

As a worship leader, I was blown away by the ministry of WorshipTeamTraining. Their focus is to: Inspire, Create, & Transform.

Worship Team Training is led by Branon Dempsey. After serving in various worship ministries for 16+ years,  Branon has been called to reach the Church at large by providing worship leading clinics to aspiring worship bands & young artists. The vision of Worship Team Training is for worship teams to become authentic leaders of worship and in so doing, to deepen their relationship in following Jesus Christ.

Worship Team Training provides creative and innovative music/worship teaching programs to worship teams and leaders. With WTT?s workshops and resources, church worship ministries learn how to sharpen their skills, nurture their hearts, and quantify their strengths so they can lead worship in a relevant way. Our goal is to supply hands- on training to music teams and leaders so they, in turn, can inspire their worshipping communities as they share the message of the Gospel. 

“The joy and breath of our ministry is to mentor worship leaders in their ministry journey as they become fervent worshippers and followers of Jesus Christ.”  Branon Dempsey 

Belkin International Inc. has announced a new connector called BreakFree. These connectors will detach under extreme tension thefore protecting your guitar or amp from cables being tripped on/pulled out. Belkin claims the connectors will “provide a noise-free dynamic sound without any degradation in audio quality.”

The theory behind BreakFree connectors is to eliminate cables from damaging your instrument in the event your cable is stepped on. It also claims to eliminate the popping that occurs when cables are accidentally unplugged from a live amplifier. This is accomplished by a magnetic tip that you insert into you instruments 1/4″ jack, then attach the connector to your cable. It works similar to the mag-safe power adapter on new Apple computers.  This also make guitar swapping seamless without the hassle of shutting down your amplifier, or placing it into standby mode.

I recently broke a 1/4″ plug off into my guitar while performing. The cable was stepped on, and the rest is history. I will be trying out BreakFree connectors as soon as they become available to purchase. Belkin set a release date for September 2008, so hopefully they will be out soon. The price is $19.99 for the 1/4″ magnetic tip, and the accompanying 1/4″ magnetic connector. You will be able to buy extra tips for $9.99 a pack (two per pack). This will be for those with multiple instruments for fast switching.