MediaShout vs ProPresenter, Round 5

I’m glad to see that Renewed Vision is actively adding to the feature list in ProPresenter. Mike’s recent posting inspired me to write about one of the features unique to MediaShout that I love to use.

Above is the screen you get when you insert a “Script Control” type cue into the MediaShout script. If you want to loop through a series of announcements (stills or videos, or any other type of cue), and then automatically start a video (opener or countdown) at a given time, you can do so with two script controls. The first control tells the system to loop, the second has the box marked “Start Action At:” with the appropriate start time.

This means that I can start the announcements and then go backstage to talk to the worship team or whatever, and even without my presence the announcements fade out and automatically begins the opening video (which then cues me that I have x minutes to get back to the booth).

MediaShout vs ProPresenter, Round 4

Question for you ProPresenter fans out there:

On Wednesday nights there’s a group that meets in the room I volunteer at. They watch a 35 minute clip that’s on a DVD and then break out into small groups. I’m trying to simplify my life by capturing the DVD clips and converting them to H.264 format. This would be particularly useful next week because I will be absent, and they are showing 2 clips from 2 different DVD’s. So my preference would be to have the clips on the hard drive ready to go in ProPresenter rather than have my substitute mess with switching discs, etc.

So, last Wednesday, I tried running my H.264 clip. It was 640×480 and encoded at 1200 kbps. I figured this was a reasonable quality for a standard definition projector, not too high, not too low. I watched the first five minutes before hand, everything looked good. So the event starts, I click the video. And about 10 minutes in, the audio and video get out of sync. After a few more minutes it got so bad that people started coming up to the sound board to see if I noticed (Yes, I did, thanks). I ended up switching to the DVD mid clip.

What’s weird is that the video on the local computer display was fine, it was the projector feed that was horribly out of sync. I’m thinking it was just too high quality for feed for that computer. Am I right? How low can I go without noticeable loss? Any other recommendations?

When a program like ProPresenter or MediaShout runs the video in two different places at once (on the projector’s output and on the preview display), it takes quite a few computer resources to pull that off. That’s why MediaShout defaults to not showing the video on the local display, it only shows the thumbnail (along with Play/Pause, seek bar, etc), but there is an option to turn it on if you think your computer can handle it.

Does ProPresenter have any such option to turn off the local preview? Would it help in this case?