Besides setting up the projection system for Discovery Services to project message illustrations, song lyrics, often times special video clips are rolled into our services. A powerful but portable switching matrix makes all these transitions as smooth as possible.

Our Setup

There are many ways to set up a projection system for a church. The system we have chosen to use works well for us, however, it may not work good for you.

We use a rear screen Da-Light Fast Fold screen with a small Sharp XG-NV2SB projector. As with most technology, what you buy today will no doubt be smaller, brighter and easier to use.

We feed the projector with a Composite Video signal. This is somewhat controversial because it doesn't take full advantage of the resolution of the projector however, if you design your graphics to be used at "video resolution" then everything will be fine. Many people opt to use the hi-resolution inputs on their projectors but they give up the switching matrix capabilities that we gain.

Every transition on our screen is smooth and transparent. We find that this creates the least distraction for the audience. We use an older Videonics MX-1 video switcher that is really easy to set up and also allows us to perform smooth dissolves to video tapes.

All graphics are supplied by Macintosh computers using Adobe Photoshop, and Powerpoint.

Strategy

Many churches opt to carefully plan every element of their service and create one "stack" of graphics that plays back in one long "slide show". This allows them to avoid having to dump out to an obnoxious menu system to load another song to sing, or the teachers support graphics.

We don't do that.

Because of our switching matrix we have the ability to smoothly fade to black between songs freeing up Mark Nunn, our worship leader to change his mind. Often times, Mark will feel lead, either by the Holy Spirit, or the clock, to add, delete or change the order or songs. If we had one continuous stack of graphics it would be much more difficult to do this. With our system we can fade to black change files and then fade up on the new song.