It’s now really affordable to upgrade your multimedia to a quality HD experience utilizing Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter software and the new Mac Mini from Apple.
ProPresenter gives you the ability to project user scalable media at almost any resolution that your equipment can output. With the Mac Mini, you now have two completely independent display ports. This is a new feature for the Mac Mini and for this reason, ProPresenter could not previously run on the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini now gives you both the mini-DVI port and the mini-Display port. Using the mini-Display port, you can send a full 1080i image using the VGA or DVI option.
If you are using an HD-SDI environment and switcher, it’s easy to get this unit into production with the Gefen DVI to HDSDI Plus Scaler. For example, if you’re using the Panasonic AV-HS400A, the Gefen DVI to HDSDI Plus Scaler will convert the output from the mini-Display port of the Mac Mini to a 1080p 29.97fps input for your switcher.
One more tip, if you plan to show HD video from your Mac Mini, it’s best if you play that media from a RAID0 drive. You can do this by adding something like the Lacie Little Big Disk and connecting it to your Mac Mini via the Firewire 800 port. This will give you the RAID0 speed needed to playback full res HD video. For, ProPresenter HD playback, I would suggest rendering your videos to 1280×720 H.264 mov.
The ProPresenter, Mac Mini w/ hard disk, and Gefen solution would cost you about $2,600.
John Walker
October 15th, 2009
Hey Gary I like this info. We run Propresenter here at Reidsville Christian in Reidsville NC. We have a Imac. We run Propresenter. The way our service goes we do the worship on Propresenter and the sermon on Keynote. Is there a way to run our sermons within Propresenter? We have video running to a projector and 3 monitors on stage. Please help.
Gary
October 19th, 2009
John…I need a little more info to answer your question. Please send me an email (link at the bottom on the front page of my blog).
The reason is that it depends on what you are doing with Keynote…(i.e. are you using the animations during the sermon) We do use ProPresenter during our sermons. We use lower thirds for scripture references and namekeys which are just transparent .png image files.
If you are just using stills, but you like to use Keynote to do the design of your slides…you can export those slides from Keynote as .jpg files and just put those images as slides in ProPresenter.
Check out this link..http://www.renewedvision.com/pro4.php
ProPresenter 4 will be coming out soon and it’s feature-rich. This may give you some more ideas as to what ProPresenter can do in your environment.
Amy
December 16th, 2009
Hey! We just made the switch from MediaShout to ProPresenter. Previously, we put together the sermons in MediaShout. Is this possible in ProPresenter? Most forums talk about Powerpoint and Keynote, but honestly we don’t want to have to type in all the Bible verses. I’d like to be able to utilize the Bible software in ProPresenter and build my sermons in ProPresenter. Is this possible? Thanks for your help!
Gary
December 20th, 2009
Amy, yes, you can do this in ProPresenter. You can just export your slides from PowerPoint or Keynote as JPEGs and pull them right into ProPresenter as slides. If you guys are using point transitions on your slides, you can’t really do that in v3. But version 4 is coming out shortly and it has this capability, I think. It’s in beta testing right now.
Since you just purchased ProPresenter, version 4 will be a free upgrade for you.
As for scriptures, ProPresenter does have this feature built-in just like in Media Shout. There are some free Bibles that you can download, but most versions that you’ll want to use need to be purchased.
Go here: http://www.renewedvision.com/store.php?item=bibles
They are $15 per version.