Free resources in more formats
We hope many of you have been able to take advantage of the free church resources we offer on OPEN.LifeChurch.tv. We’re always looking for ways to make those materials even more useful, and you’ve let us know that additional video formats would help. So, based on your feedback we’re beginning to provide our video resources like messages, openers, loops and more in two new formats: .mov and .wmv.
This means the files will be compatible with major presentation software like MediaShout, ProPresenter, PowerPoint, and EasyWorship. It’s especially good timing with the recent release of MediaShout Version 4.
Of course we’ll continue to offer video resources in the variety of formats already available on OPEN—these are just additions to help those of you using presentation software. You can find the new formats beginning with our recent series: Life. Money. Hope. with Dave Ramsey and every series moving forward.
What presentation software are you currently using at your church? Do you pull your videos into it, or just use it for worship lyrics and message points?
Visit 
Out of Media shout, pro presenter, and easy worship which do you guys use/recommend. Currently we are using easy worship but we are looking at pro presenter.
We are stuck in the 90’s. Still using PowerPoint for worship and announcment slides (occassionally embed a WMV into the presentation). Burn video projects to DVD and use our autopatch video switcher to send multiple sources to the projector. Keeping the video out of presentations keeps the files smaller which works better with our older (4 year) computers. We purchased MediaShout v.3 several years ago but never implemented because of the learning curve for our pool of volunteers who are already capable in PPT.
Leave it to LC.tv to find a great way to leverage technology, and the new file types will come in very handy. Having the Open content in WMV formats will be great for playback within MediaShout. The new version looks amazing…
Last summer we upgraded to an iMac and purchased Pro Presenter and dropped Media Shout. So far - we’ve been able to utilize any file format thrown at us… It’s been great! (BTW: For those who use Pro Presenter and Keynote together - we export our Sermon notes as JPG’s and import them into Pro Presenter.)
Hi Matt, at LifeChurch.tv we are using both Media Shout and Pro Presenter. I think it is important to use what your team is proficient with.
We use ProPresenter. Our volunteers have picked it up quickly. DVD playback is the only problem that we’ve had with it.
LC thanks for making your resources available to other churches.
we use pro presenter. thanks lifechurch.tv i’m using on your videos from the 30 days to live series this sunday (the one with larry in it)
Thanks Andrew.
We use Easislides…because we can’t afford any of the ones you guys are talking about. It’s free…and we just import our videos into it. It works fine. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles…but it is easy to learn and does the job for right now.
We use ProPresenter for our worship backgrounds / announcements. It’s so hard to find decent backgrounds that don’t cost a lot. We are very low budget…so the things you all are giving away is such a blessing to us.
Thanks for your open-handedness LifeChurch…it spreads.
We use Keynote because it’s affordable and powerful, and it’s a lot better than PowerPoint for creating slides. We would need to switch to a higher end program if we needed to have a live video feed behind projected text, but we’re not cool enough to do that yet.
We use Easy Worship. If you have to use people who are less than proficient on the computer - it is the way to go. You can show someone how to use it in just a few minutes. Thank you for the new file formats. That will decrease our production time down to almost nothing. You guys are really helping out the ‘little guys’.
Would love to go the Pro Presenter route… one day, one day…
We have used Media Shout, but had too many problems, so we have used Pro Presenter for the past year and love it. The only problem with both is that they do not handle DVD or large files such as the worship or teaching files. They both crash or freeze regularly. We have found that playing the larger files on a separate DVD player and using PP for all other announcements, smaller video files is the best solution for now. I know that PP is working with their program to try and figure out how to fix the large file problem.
We use SongShow Plus to present lyrics, scriptures, and sermon points. I’m not sure if it can embed video. We usually just play video through it’s normal player.
Looks like we’re the only guys that use LiveWorship
1st - Kudos for the free goodies - being a church in South Africa with a limited budget we appreciate all these types of resources.
2nd - We use EasyWorship mainly for song lyrics and Scipture Text, but we actually use a little free app called ScreenMonkey for videos and slides - worth checking out - http://www.screenmonkey.co.uk - it plays pretty much anything with the right codecs installed.
We use keynote and use multiple background videos during music part of the worship, for video testimonies, and promotional videos (all through keynote). We experimented this week with a moving video behind sermon notes and it worked well. Keynote works very well with our High Definition screens.
We use a combination of Keynote and ProPresenter. Often, song backgrounds are placed as a background in ProPresenter, but there are other times where placing the videos in Keynote with ProPresenter keyed over works better for our services. We would like to stick to ProPresenter only, but Keynote’s features in text and formatting masters is indispensable. We have exported these to ProPresenter as images, but then we run into issues with making quick changes.
We used Easy Worship for about 6 years, displaying lyrics, graphics, and video content all from it. We now use ProPresenter for all these same needs and like the extra power and features it offers. We run all video from ProPresenter, including the messages. But, MediaShout 4’s new list of features are very attractive and I hope ProPresenter implements some of those in their future releases.
Another free tool that we occasionally use is VLC Media Player. It’s very good at playing longer video files, DVDs, and internet streams. In fact I’m planning to use it next week for the Town Hall for Hope live stream. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
We use MediaShout 3 for everything except videos which we are able to quickly change on the fly seamlessly to a DVD player. We’ve just found the quality better but that means there are occasional clips that we’d like to use (from a computer format) that we don’t use unless we can somehow get it on dvd.
Not to hijack the threat.. but I see many great open resources coming out from lifechurch and wondering if you guys have a membership database? I found Church Metrix last week and looked like a great web based app for church attendance but we are looking for a web based app to store membership info. If not anything open that you can recommend for our church plant?
Thanks,
Craig
Pro Presenter is amazing for us. Handles the worship, announcements and .mov files we throw at it and the LC.tv teaching each week as a Network church.
Hi,
I am wondering why you stopped making the transcript of the message available?
Craig, you may want to try Fellowship 1.
John, we are still doing transcripts - we may be a little behind on it but we are fixing that situation.
Over at parkerville.net.au we use MediaShout 3.5 pretty successfully. We ahve had small glitches, but mostly it ahs worked really well. Looking forward to getting MS 4.0 and seeing how good the changes are.
At Hillvue we’re using Mediashout 4 and we’re generally pleased, but only because we’ve given up on relying on it for straight video playback since version 3. We do run video behind the text, but that’s about all. Occasionally we can download a clip that works well, but in general our video quality seems better and more reliable out of the DVD player we got from Best Buy. We don’t do much in the way of message points.
Hey LifeChurch.tv, we use Adobe Flash Media Encoder configured for Flash Media Server 3.5 for our streaming and I am curious what you guys use for your live streams. Do you use FME? What bitrate and codec do you use (ie kbps and is it .flv/.mp4/.f4v)?
we use propresenter….we do pull video in, however i think pvp might be better for what we are trying to achieve. this is all new to me.