What is ProPresenter and what is new?

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.

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!

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.

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!

Bundled stills, and video clips

ProPresenter 3.0 comes bundled with a small sampling of songs and still images as well as a premium set of 56 video clips! We've selected an excellent variety of clips from several leading vendors for you to begin using with your purchase (including 8 high-definition clips). Purchased separately, these clips have a value worth the cost of the software alone!

We have five fantastic partners helping us to provide some of the best clip samples in the industry. When you need to augment your clip library, be sure to browse through their vast libraries of top notch, top quality footage.

Artbeats	a Luna Blue	WorshipFilms
Highway Video 12 Inch Design

To view a snapshot of the bundled clip library, click here

Note: We are transitioning our sampler library from a physical DVD we mail to on-line download for immediate delivery and convenience. More information will be available soon, but rest assured new orders will have access to sampler content in our new online distribution system! This system will be available in the next few weeks. The clips included are subject to change or be withdrawn without notice. Bundled sample clips are specifically licensed for use in Renewed Vision products ONLY and cannot be used in any other application without the express written consent from the manufacturer.

Importing and 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.

Background cues and Foreign Languages

The new Pro allows you to cue a particular background when clicking on a slide. This provides the ability to pre-program a song or presentation so the operator, who is busy following the words being sung, doesn't have to worry about doing this. Perfect for volunteers!

In addition, there is full support for double-byte characters which allows the display of languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and others. Also pictured is the ability for a slide to have a label, color, or both.

PowerPoint and/or Keynote

How do I import PowerPoint or Keynote slide presentations? Both programs support exporting a presentation into a sequence of JPEG images. Once this is done, you can import all the images into a ProPresenter presentation as "Foreground" slides. Transitions and slide will be lost, but this works very well for integrating a slide show directly in ProPresenter.

An alternative to this would be to simply run either Keynote or PowerPoint concurrently and simply switch between the two applications on-the-fly. ProPresenter works great with other applications, so you can feel confident that running both on the same system will not cause any stability concerns. The added benefit of doing it in this manner is that you will have the ability to edit and your slide show will run exactly as expected. After all, what runs a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation better than application that created it? (see our ProPresenter FAQs page for more information)

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!

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.

DVD Playback

Use ProPresenter for all your DVD playback needs! You can create as many clips as you like from any disc by navigating the DVD and setting in and out points on any part of it to define a new clip. These clips will then be saved in your DVD bin for easy, random access. This great new feature also prevents the need for a separate DVD player, which conserves space as well as the precious input port a DVD player consumes on your switcher. This is particularly ideal for small and traveling ministries eliminating one extra piece of equipment to buy and carry around.

Live Camera / Video in Support

Live video in is now supported by ProPresenter offering you the ability to take a live feed from FireWire or SDI. While this feature is convenient and well priced (included free), it does have some drawbacks with respect to latency (delay). It's best suited for overflow rooms or small services where you may have a single camera cost is more important than latency. It's not recommended for larger, multi-camera venues that are served best by a multi-port switcher. Please see our FAQs page for more detail.

Countdown Timer Built-in

Service countdown timers are cool, but a pain traditionally. With ProPresenter, that's all changed. No longer do you have to find, purchase, download, and manage countdown videos that are usually short (5 minutes) and have to be fired at the right moment. Now you can easily type in how much time you need and hit go! The timer will be composited over any background you want which works great with timed service announcement slides. Even better, the countdown timer is smart. You can just tell it when you service starts and it will automatically compute how long until the service begins. Duration is no longer an issue either. It can be 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 days for all we care!

More features coming...

We are looking to implement numerous other requested features as well as solutions to the complicated issues you face. As always, our goal is to create solutions for the ministry using technology to make Houses of Worship the best, most creative environments around. The year ahead for ProPresenter will remain very active and exciting!

Who should use ProPresenter?

Any church, ministry, or organization that wants to greatly simplify the display of lyrics and/or video during worship.