Using Sunday Screens in ProPresenter

Most church production teams don't need to buy better gear. They need to learn how to run better visuals. My name is Ezra Cohen and I lead the team here at Sunday Screens, where we help thousands of churches steward their screens with excellence by creating visuals that cover you from welcome to close. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up your worship backgrounds like a pro so that they actually flow with the dynamics of your worship set.

Our visuals work with any type of screen in any presentation software. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to get started using ProPresenter. I've already imported visuals from our collection, Light of the World, but this works exactly the same with any look you choose. Now, right off the bat, you may be wondering why there are multiple visuals that look so similar.

Well, since we all know that verse one energy isn't the same as chorus three, our collections come with dynamic layers that allow you to flow with worship. So, what this does is it lets you start with a more minimal look in a verse, then add a little more energy in the chorus, a little more in the bridge, and then maybe even a fourth or fifth layer in the final chorus, all while keeping the same core look.

So, here in ProPresenter, there's two ways that we can set things up. Either we can leave these visuals down here in playlists in the media folder and then just click through in between lyric changes, or we can actually bring these visuals up next to our lyric slides and build the sequence as you go to fit the arrangement you know your band is going to be leading. When you use this approach, you'll really start to notice a powerful shift in how your screens feel more connected to the worship moment.

Also, just a quick pro tip so you have the smoothest transitions possible. So, right here in ProPresenter, you see that there's this little area where you can customize whether you're going to do a hard cut in between visuals or a crossfade. And if we select crossfade, we also have the option to adjust the amount of time that that crossfade transition will take. So, what we recommend as a pro tip is you actually leave this top area set to hard cut, because this is where you change your lyrics and you want to be able to change those as fast as possible to help your audience read along.

But down here where you run visuals, you want to change your crossfade settings to at least 1.5 or two seconds at the minimum. Sometimes even three seconds, depending on the visuals. This will let you have super smooth transitions between dynamics, but super quick cuts between lyrics. All right, so now let's bring all of this together with a real life example of how to execute this in your service.

[Live worship example]

All right, I hope that was helpful to see a real life example of Sunday Screens in action. You can see how powerful it is when visuals and music are working together during worship. So, three quick things here as we wrap up. Number one, using dynamic layers from Sunday Screens allows you to flow seamlessly with worship.

Number two, make sure your visuals have a minimum 1.5 second crossfade for distraction-free transitions. And number three, just wanted to throw this out there: be sure to use the recommended codec and resolution that's best for your screens. ProPresenter suggests using H.264 for the best playback. Keep in mind that every collection works exactly like this one.

So, with hundreds of looks to choose from, there's always something ready for your services this Sunday. We're cheering you on as you steward the screens in your church. And if you have any questions for us on how any of this works, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time.