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Renewed Vision releases preview of Pro Presenter 3.0
Posted by | Posted in Applications, Related Products | Posted on 12-21-2006
If you’re a church who has been trying to use Keynote to present song lyrics on a projection screen, only to be disappointed with no looping backgrounds or text editing on the fly…or you were patiently watching for the release of MediaShout for Mac only to see it eventually dropped before it was even released, then this story will interest you.
Sure, Keynoteuser.com is a site for all things Keynote, but once in a while a VERY cool Mac program comes along that we can’t ignore. Pro Presenter is one of those programs. It’s built mainly for holding a library of song lyrics and allowing you to fire them to a projection screen in a non linear fashion. There are actually quite a number of apps out there that allow you to do this, but frankly, the best of the bunch all run on Windows only (you can see a collection of said apps here).
While there are several Mac apps built for this specific task, some of them haven’t been updated in a while, and some of them have issues with performance (such as jerky video when it’s displayed behind text). Others are hampered with bad interfaces that just make the apps barely usable at best (we personally felt that Pro Presenter 2 had a hard to use interface). Pro Presenter 3 might just change all that.
Built from the ground up as a native Cocoa app, it’s already Universal Binary, and the interface is a vast improvement over the last version. Some of the incredible features are looping video backgrounds that are independant of the text that’s showing on top of them. This means you can easily fire different videos at will at any time during a song without having to edit the actual song settings, just click and fire. There’s also the ability to edit slide text on the fly without opening an editing window. You can even click on another slide to fire it to the screen and then continue editing another slide without missing a beat. The only other app we know of that can do that is LiveWorship and it’s not Universal Binary yet.
Okay, can you tell we’re excited about this app? Though it’s still only in the beta/preview stages, we got a chance today to test it out on a dog of a machine (a G4 dual 867 with a 128 meg Radeon 9800 card and dual 1680×1050 displays) and it performed beautifully. This means on a brand spankin new MacBook pro or 24″ iMac it should run without any problem.
Pro Presenter 3 is available now as a preview release from $399 to $799 (depending on how many venues you’re going to use it in), and there are also upgrade prices from version 2. This is an app to keep your eyes on, we think it’s going to only get better.
$400 for a church app? Whats HAPPENING? This is sick! the app is only a 8mb download, that is not alot of code. Of course they need payment for their work so they can feed their kids but $400? for 1 freaking lisence! it is just plain stupid, i would recomend this app to my church if it wasn’t for the total ripoff!
I agree it’s a bit expensive (though it’s right in line with the other big church apps)…but don’t forget this is the preview, and it’s not by any means finished. Purchasing a single app that can run text over video and fire all kinds of things to a screen is still cheaper than buying a video switcher with good keying ability, so for some churches the price might be fine. My only complaint is Easy Worship has a whole church license for this price, where Pro Presenter charges even more for a site license.