Ed Lockett came to visit us at Rock Bridge a few weeks ago. This is his story.

*photography by Jeremy Owens from our recent mission trip to Haiti

We recently did a ProPresenter 4 training for about 40 people here at Rock Bridge Community Church. Between the three campuses and various ministries, we have 22 machines currently running ProPresenter 3. In order to upgrade (which you should totally do if you haven’t already) we needed a large scale training to get people comfortable with the basics of the new program.

Most of the content of the training was provided by Stephen Proctor (@worshipvj www.worshipvj.com) so I won’t get into content too much on this post, but I do want to talk about setup.

Thanks to a little help from Renewed Vision, we were able to use an HD projector on a 16’ x 9’ screen in the center of the stage mirroring the laptop display while simultaneously using two 8’ x 6’ screens on the sides of the stage showing the output of ProPresenter. It was fun.

I used the USB-DVI device that Renewed Vision sells to mirror the laptop display and used the internal graphics card (MiniDisplayPort) to run ProPresenter’s output. Here’s the setup process (assuming you’ve never run the USB-DVI before).

• Run all your video cables to their respective places (I’m going to assume you know how to set up a projector) but don’t plug the USB-DVI device into the computer until you…
• Insert the disc, install the drivers
• Now plug in the USB-DVI device
• Using Display Preferences verify all 3 displays operating at optimal resolution/color settings and totally functional
• Make sure mirroring is off
• Arrange the displays in the following order (from left to right, if you don’t do this now it will make it more difficult to find the correct output later): Laptop Display (primary with dock), USB-DVI Display, MiniDisplayPort Display
• OPTION + Click & Drag the Laptop Display onto the USB-DVI Display (this should mirror the Laptop/USB-DVI displays ONLY)
  NOTE: Depending on your laptop display/projector resolutions you might have to find a “best fit” – I adjusted mine to only 1080 lines instead of 1440 to match the projector (this gave me letterboxing on my laptop display but I was ok with it – unhide your dock if you’re having trouble with it)
• Open ProPresenter 4
• Your screen might go black here as ProPresenter isn’t sure what display to use as an output and mine defaulted to the mirrored display on two different machines – Use CMD+1 to hide ProPresenter’s output
• Go to ProPresenter Preferences and click on the Display tab
• Make sure “Scale to Fit Output Display” is checked
• OPTION + Click & Drag the black “OUT” box to the MiniDisplayPort Display that you previously arranged all the way to the right
• Scale the ProPresenter main window as needed to see your screen on the projector

That should do it. You should be able to see everything you do on the laptop and still be able to see the results of that on the side screens. For the number of people we had at the training it really couldn’t have been better. I would also highly recommend bringing in Stephen Proctor to train your team. It fueled some great discussions on making good decisions with content not just how to use the software – which is where every good team needs to go.

A few notes:
The USB-DVI frame rate is around 20fps – noticeably slower than the built-in video card. That’s why I chose to use the USB-DVI device as the mirror instead of the main out. If you switch those you’ll likely run into performance problems playing video through ProPresenter – and nobody likes performance problems.

Always make sure the outputs/displays are working properly before you open ProPresenter. Troubleshooting is a pain if you don’t know whether it’s a system or a software problem.

I wouldn’t suggest doing this setup for anything live (why would you?) as it’s stable but just tricky enough to make me nervous in a live setting, but in my 2hr training we had no problems whatsoever.

I’d just like to add that Renewed Vision went the extra mile to test this out before I ever ordered the equipment. I sent a tweet out to fellow CTDRT members asking if anyone had ever tried to do this and got an unsolicited call from Renewed Vision’s @chriswheat offering his assistance. I told him what I thought would work and he ran off to test it calling me back to confirm.

If you end up using this setup or need any help with it, tweet it to me at @brian_holt, I’d love to see how you do it.

Welcome to the new site! I’ve been wanting to do a hosted version of WordPress for awhile now and could never wrap my head around what I wanted it to be. Do I want it to be a blog or a portfolio? Do I want to talk about ministry and leadership or family and personal growth? And then I decided to do it all. So I’m casting off all conventional wisdom (that says to be focused and narrow in scope) and launching www.theworkisneverdone.com.

The work is never done refers to the continual process of growth and development that God is leading me through. He is never content to leave me where I am, and I’m never content to stay there. I hope that these pages will encourage, challenge and inspire. Thanks for the visit.

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