Stage & Confidence Monitor Ideas

Michael Cassell

Used ProPresenter for years and now switched to Proclaim because of licensing/hardware issues.

Here are some features that our worship team misses (mostly from the confidence monitor) from the setup I had in ProPresenter:

1. Slide count: I used to show the number of the slide we were on in the song in an x/y format so that they knew how much longer the song was.
2. Slide Type Bars:
   1. Current/Next Slide: I used to put a colored bar at the top and bottom of each slide corosponding to what the current (top) and next (bottom) slides were (Verse/Chorus/Bridge/etc). This helped the musicians know where they were and what was coming up within the song.
   2. Slide color: It would also be nice to be able to customize/change what color represents Verse/Chorus/Bridge/etc as blue and green are too close to distinguish sometimes for verse & chorus.
3. Wrap text/constant size: When the lyrics are typed in a single line, they automatically shrink the font size instead of wraping to the next line. This becomes a struggle to read at times, unless the lines are manually broken up.
4. Song Lyric Order: (it feels antiquated like OpenLP) Having to click in the right spot and type out (seems to be case sensitive too) Title, Verse 1, Pre-Chorus, Chorus 1, etc. in the song order, especially after importing from CCLI when it might not be in order, (ie Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Bridge). Having either a short hand (ie V1 C1 V2 PC C2 B[ridge] I[nterlude] E[nd] Bl[ank]) or a way to drag and drop icons (like ProPresenter) would speed things up. Im usually having to delete the whole order and then right clicking the drop down which makes it quicker but is not ideal.
5. Macro's: I used these heavily to execute different lighting/sound/video midi commands in the start/middle/end of a slide/song/video to help aleviate the amount of operators needed on a given day. I am able to do one at the start of a slide/video, but what Im looking for is the ability to activate one midi command at the start and another midi command say at 10 seconds to go of a sermon bumper; to unmute my pastors mic.
6. Lyric Title/End: The "Title" slide does not show the lyrics for the next/first slide like the other ones do (just the title on a small still image of the background). This makes it difficult for starting some songs right away. We would also have an "End" slide that would say "End" (that was invisible to the audince), so that it would designate the end of a song but they might still be playing an outro instead of just a blank slide.
7. Double click: Having to double click (at least on the left sidebar list) would help with accidental clicks.
8. Automatic Start: Being able to disable the automatic sermon start time would help when we're running a little late/having issues, while still maintaining an announcement loop going.
9. Alternate Screens:
   1. Multiple Screens: We run 3 screens (TV/Projector/TV) on our stage with the Projector displaying the lyrics and the two TVs displaying just the background. With ProPresenter, I was able to display a different video background on the TVs (except theyre on a splitter) than what was on the Projector (ie I'd have a video of a lighthouse on the projector and stormy seas on the TVs when we'd sing My Lighthouse). I've also wanted to do an "argument" video with 2 people on each of the tvs and Jesus interacting in the middle.
   2. Screen Orientation: Being able to switch an alternate screens background to rotate, flip horizontaly/verticaly, and then back to regular would also help with some backgrounds to "repeat" across multiple displays.
10. Timeline: Propresenter had the ability to record and playback slides, audio, & video clips on que all at the same time (we basically used it as karaoke, for when only our singers were available, but it kept our slide formatting the same for everyone).
11. Being able to trim the length of when a video starts and stops, especially if its a background loop (softloop).

I know its a little long winded, but these are some things I've come across switching from multiple presentation & design softwares.