EasyWorship 2009 - First Take
We’ve been using EasyWorship 2009 in our worship service for about a month now, so I wanted to post some of my initial thoughts on the upgrade from the previous version. A few of the new features we just don’t use yet (like VJ mode and scheduled playback). But there are two new features that I’m excited about that the team at EasyWorship delivered:
- Display Foldback - we have a stage projector in our system, and often we’d like to do different things on the two projectors. Now we can. Well, we will, anyway. This feature requires an outboard “black box” from Matrox which basically makes your computer only see one projector (but the image is twice as wide). We ordered the Matrox DualHead2Go, and once we get it in, I’ll let you know how it goes. My big concern is that currently we do some things outside of EasyWorship (videos, powerpoint, etc., for various reasons) - with the Matrox we may have problems doing that since it’s set up as a single second monitor from the PC. I’ll be watching this closely and plan to post how we overcome that obstacle (probably in the forum). One more note on the Matrox: we ordered the digital version since we’re running widescreen. Our new resolution to cover both projectors will be 2560×720.
- Full Screen YouTube Videos - EasyWorship did a really good job integrating other media into their software, including YouTube content. The built-in internet browser now connects to SongSelect lyric service, too. Previous versions were a bit glitchy I felt, so this is a really nice upgrade. Two things need to be noted about this: First, make sure you preview your content as YouTube traditionally is lacking on video quality. Second, and more importantly, just because YouTube content is “available” and easy to show using EasyWorship, you still need to obtain permission when using YouTube videos. People often think because the content is available it can be shared, but that’s not true (without permission). That being said, EasyWorship has done a great job with it’s online feature and the interface updates for importing and using media (videos, graphics, audio, etc). Adding a YouTube video to the service schedule is incredibly easy and it works really, really well (so far).
I’d love to hear your feedback on these or other features in EasyWorship 2009. I’d like to extend this conversation to our forum, where I created a topic for this post. See you there!
