Just wanted to say that it has been a really long time since the last time I tried it. This time, I am now ready to use it for a live-trial in an actual service. thanks to Scott Alexander for giving me the 30 days again.
One of the biggest challenges for me was that our songs are all in Easy Worship, and were not exportable to proclaim. I don't know when it happened, but with the help of a third party public domain app, i was able to easily perform the import/export procedure; then import to Proclaim.
A second issue was that I was so familiar with powerpoint in creating slides for my messages, that it took way too long to get slides the way I wanted (I tried several times over the course of it going live so long ago). The current interface for adding, as well as the templates, etc, have reduced that time, though there is still a learning curve, but easily work-through-able (especially since I can import slides, with limitations).
The third hesitation I had was kind of a combination. we already had invested in the costs of song-presentation software, and it's upgrade, so it was a challenge to justify a monthly fee for something that we already owned. This remains a challenge for a small church, but I am willing to bite the bullet and pay for it myself, if I can get through a few services, actually using it. (and have entered the contest for free for a year, crossing my fingers)
I have a couple questions that I hope can be answered (if you actually read through my long introduction), please feel free to tell me it can be done, and I just need to learn how to do it (providing link to wiki/training, etc):
1. Importing pptx's is pretty straight forward for images, but videos do not come over, so... in powerpoint, when working with videos, it is a simple matter to trim a video to play only a section based on start and stop "bars" that can be easily adjusted drag/drop and my time. Is that available in Proclaim? (or do I have to manually edit videos before uploading)
2. Is there an easy way, when working with songs, to make the text all be of equal size? It tries to auto adjust lines, and I can create line breaks. the challenge is that some parts of a song are short (pre chorus, bridges, etc), and so the text is much larger in the field, though I want it to be the same as the verses/chorus. as mentioned, an easy way to do this? (very time consuming to make this aesthetic adjustment that Easyworship did flawlessly, automatically, without user-interface)
