The Complete Beginners Guide to ProPresenter 7
Get Started with ProPresenter 7 with Help from Our Beginners Guide Video
ProPresenter is the top cross-platform live presentation and production software on the market. Created for worship gatherings, sporting events, conferences, trade shows, studio broadcasts, and more, Pro Presenter enables volunteers and experts to seamlessly display lyrics, slides, and media, making high-quality live productions easy. If you’re just getting started with ProPresenter, check out our Complete Beginners Guide video for quick and effective tips to start crafting your own presentations.
Video Transcription
ProPresenter is a powerful presentation program that allows you to display lyrics, slides, and media to in-person or online audiences, or both at the same time, and an easy-to-use interface. And in this video, I’ll walk you through everything that you need to know to create presentations and start using ProPresenter without any previous experience.
Now, ProPresenter is a feature-rich, professional live production tool. But don’t let these sophisticated options intimidate you from the easy-to-use and understand basic functions. The program was actually created with volunteers in mind to make it easy to operate and to control. So, you don’t need to really learn everything about the program to get started, you can start with the most important things you need and then add in other features and options as you get more comfortable with the program.
Now, ProPresenter is a cross-platform software program. So, what does that mean? It just means that I can run on a Mac or a PC and it runs great on both of them. And you can download that software for free of charge right now from the website ProPresenter.com. Now, we recommend and actually encourage everyone on your team including volunteers to download the software on their own computer so they can start learning at home and editing and creating presentations remotely. The only thing that you’ll notice is a watermark on any outputs from the program when it’s unregistered, but that watermark is removed as soon as you license the program.
Now, if you have questions about licensing or pricing or what’s best for your scenario or your situation, make sure to reach out to the Sales Team because they would love to answer any questions you have.
Now as we continue with this video, I want to encourage you to download the program and follow along, feel free to stop my video, stop me at any time and play with the features that I’m talking about and create the content that I’m showing you. You can also go to the tutorials page at ProPresenter.com and find more in-depth tutorials about all the features we’re covering in this video.
So, if you have more questions about Show Controls, or Screen Configuration, or Audio Routing, or Live Streaming, you can find tutorials there that will show you the steps to help you achieve what you’re envisioning. So, let’s dive in. Once you have ProPresenter installed and you open it, you’ll be brought to the “Welcome to ProPresenter” screen where you’ll see an overview of the program. If we hit continue, we’ll be brought to a screen to migrate existing information if you’ve used a previous version of ProPresenter.
Now, if you’re coming from another program that’s not ProPresenter, it’s often a good idea to rebuild your Library as you go. There’s no need to bring in every single file right away at the very beginning, you can just start slowly building one song, one presentation at a time.
Welcome Screen Overview
Now, this might seem overwhelming, but adding new songs and presentations doesn’t take long. And this can help give you a fresh start with this new program. Now, since we’re not migrating any existing information, we’ll just click Skip Migration, and here we can set up our screens. Now ProPresenter can have multiple different screens and we’re going to go in-depth on how to set up different Audience and Stage Screens later.
And so for right now, we’re just going to leave this information as is and hit continue. Now, in this next screen will see some different settings we have. In this first one, I want to point out is the house of worship integration. If you’re a church or house of worship, you’ll want to make sure that this setting is enabled. This gives you access to Bibles, Planning Center Online integration, and SongSelect integration to import songs natively inside the program.
Now, if you’re not a church or house of worship, you can simply turn the setting off to remove those features from the program. And then if we continue to our last screen, we can download some sample content which includes motion backgrounds, sample songs and presentations. You can also find more in-depth tutorials and register the program. Again, the only version of ProPresenter that needs to be registered is one that’s actually presenting to live audiences. So if you’re just downloading this to learn the program, or maybe create some presentations that you’ll share with another computer, you don’t need to register, you can simply just hit continue.
Interface Overview
Now let’s take a look at the ProPresenter interface which is laid out in a logical left-to-right workflow. Where in the left we can choose presentations from a Library or a Playlist. And then in the center, we can see the slides that are in that presentation. And when we click on a slide on the right we’ll see a preview of what’s currently being displayed.
Now, let’s take a closer look at that interface and how all of that exactly works. So, on the left side here, the first thing that you’ll see is our Library. And we actually have multiple Libraries right now, we have the default Library, that’s added automatically when you install ProPresenter, and then this sample one Library that was added when we installed that free sample content. And when you select the Library, down below, you’ll see all of the items or presentations that are inside of that library. So, our default Library right now doesn’t have any presentations, but our sample Library has all of these that came as part of our sample content.
And think of Libraries like a well-organized folder on your computer that only stores one type of file. A Library does just that, it stores all of your ProPresenter presentations in one place, and then allows you to see those presentations directly inside the program. And we can have multiple Libraries to help us better organize all of those presentations.
So maybe our default Library, we might want to right-click and rename that to maybe “Songs” or “Lyrics”. And this could be for all of our different songs or lyrics in one Library. And then the sample Library, we could rename that one to “Presentations”. And this could be for all of our teaching notes and presentations and announcement loops.
Now, you don’t have to have multiple Libraries, but if you want to for better organizations, you can.
Moving Presentations Between Libraries
And you can move presentations between Libraries simply by dragging and dropping them. So, I can take this announcements presentation, and just drop this into my default Library, and now that’s there. Now, a presentation is a collection of one or more slides. And these slides can contain things like graphics, or they could be song lyrics, or they could be a presentation with bullet points and teaching notes and that sort of thing inside of them.
To best utilize ProPresenter we suggest creating a new presentation for every part of your event or show. And the reason that we say that is because you have Playlists where you can organize all of your different presentations into easy-to-use and edit Playlists for each event or show that you’re doing.
Playlists
So, here we have a sample Playlist. And you’ll see in here, we have some Headers. And these are just visual separators that help us organize our Playlists. So, you’ll see a Header for “Pre Show”. And then we have a couple of different presentations in here. We have our announcements presentation, and we have a countdown presentation.
And next to it, you’ll see which Library each presentation is inside of. And then below there we have a Header. And then in here, we have all of the different presentations for that section. So we have a few different songs in here, and then we have another Header and then we have our presentation section with our sample presentation and some Bible Scripture.
So your presentations are stored inside a Library for long-term use. But those presentations can be added from any Library into a Playlist and you’re going to want to create a new Playlist for each new show or event that you’re doing.
Now one thing that you’ve probably noticed is that as we select a presentation, either from a Playlist or a Library, it shows up in this main view here. And this is our Show View where we get to see all of the slides in a presentation and select them during our show.
Now if you want to add a new slide to a presentation, you can go to the lower left-hand corner and add a new slide. We also have options down here for how these slides transition. Currently, this is set to a dissolve, but we can also set this to a cut or use advanced specialty transitions by clicking here and you can see all of the different options that you have available. Now, on the right side, we have different view options. Currently, we’re in our Grid View where we get a thumbnail grid, but sometimes it’s hard to see the text that’s on our slides and so we have an Easy View, which makes it much easier to see the text that’s on your slides.
Now you can also get to Easy View when you’re in Grid View by pressing the tilde (~) key on your keyboard and that will bring you to Easy View while you’re holding it. And you can still click on slides, and once you release the tilde key you’ll be brought right back to Grid View. And we also have an Outline View and we have settings for all of these different views that you can see here and you can change sizing for all of the views using the slider.
Now one thing that you’ll notice is as we scroll through our Show view area here you’ll notice that I’m actually scrolling through all of the presentations that are in my Playlist and that’s because by default, if we go to View you’ll see that continue as Playlist is selected, which means that we continuously scroll through our Playlist. Now, if we would deselect this option, you’ll only see what’s currently selected in your Playlist in this show view. And so if you wanted to see a different presentation, you’d have to select that, and then you can see that presentation there.
Now, if we select a slide in a presentation, you’ll see it show up in our Preview area. Now, above the Preview area, we have indicators letting us know whether or not our audience or Stage Screens are currently enabled. Now, mine are currently disabled, but I can easily enable one by selecting it here. Now, below the Preview area, we can choose which screen we’re actually previewing.
Currently, I’m previewing an Audience Screen called main output, but I could switch and preview a Stage Screen called “Stage Display” by clicking here and I can switch back. And then below there, you can see playback controls for any media that’s playing. So you can see we have playback controls here, I could hit the Pause button or continue playing that.
And then to the right of our Preview area, we have clearing buttons, we could clear all of our content, or we could clear individual layers. So I could just hit clear all and that would clear all of the content that’s currently being shown.
Using Layers in ProPresenter
Layers are one of the most important things to understand about ProPresenter. Now layers are independent places where content can be shown. Now, these are stacked right on top of each other to create the final output that you see.
Now, these layers actually can be split up on two different screens to create different unique looks. But we’ll talk about how that works a little bit later. First, let’s talk about how these layers work when you’re stacking them on top of each other. ProPresenter has six different unique layers.
On the bottom, we have the Video Input layer, and then above that, we have the media layer where all of your foreground and background media reside. And then we have the slide layer. Above that is the announcement layer, which contains its own media and slide layers inside of it and gives you the ability to send different slides and media to different screens. And finally, we have the props and messages layers.
Now, I know that’s a lot about how these layers are and which ones they are. But let’s actually see how these layers work in action.
So let’s start by selecting a slide and you’ll see it in the Preview area here. And next to the Preview area, again, we’ll see those clearing buttons where we can clear out or remove content from layers. And the large button we see here is clear all. And what that all means, is it’s clearing all of the different layers.
Next to this, we can see icons representing all of the different layers we just talked about. So, we have our video input layer, we have our media layer, slide layer, announcements layer, Props, Messages, and then we have one non-visual layer, the audio layer, so any audio that’s playing that also can be cleared independently. So, these are all the different layers and things that we can clear independently.
And one thing that’s really helpful is anytime you’re showing content on a layer, it will get highlighted so that you know which layers have content, and then you can click on it to remove content from that layer or clear it from that layer. And so if I wanted to clear the slide layer, I could click on this button and it will clear out that slide content.
Now, we can click on a slide and click on some media and you’ll see that the slide layer and the media layer are now active because they both have content on them. And they can be cleared independently. So I could clear out the slide content and my media will continue to play. I can also click through slides, and since this is all on the slide layer, it’s not interfering with that media. Or I could click on a new piece of media and it won’t change my slide content. That’s because they’re independent. And we can independently clear these.
So if I wanted to independently clear out the media, I could clear media and my slide content would stay. Or I can clear out that slide content or we can clear out all layers by clicking clear all and that will clear all the layers out.
Now, one thing that you might have noticed is that this slide actually has media content attached to it. And that’s because we can actually add media content to slides and we’ll learn how to do that a little bit later. And you’ll see that there’s a little icon here, indicating that there’s media attached to the slide. This makes it really nice for an operator because they can click on one slide and it’s actually triggering media and slide content at the same time.
And now they can click through a song, and that media content will continue to play in the media layer, while we click through slide content on the slide layer. Now, we’re going to continue to come back to the idea of layers throughout this video. But the key thing I want you to remember is that each layer is independent of each other.
So once you show content on a layer, it stays there until you send new content to that layer, or you clear that layer out.
Show Controls
Now, the next thing that we find in our interface below this Preview area and all of our playback controls, we have Show Controls. And this gives you quick and easy access to other commonly used features and tools that are used during live presentations. Here we have access to our Audio Bin, we have some Stage Controls and Timers. And then we also have access to those layers we are just talking about of Messages and Props.
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see our Media Bin, which is a central place for us to organize our media. And as you saw earlier, you can trigger it on the fly independent of what’s going on in presentations. And remember, this Media Bin, all of this media content is sent to the media layer.
And since that layer is independent of the slide layer in the presentations, it has its own transitions. So you’ll see here that my media transition is set to one second, and my slide layers transition is set to half a second. Or we could change this transition to a cut or use one of those advanced transitions.
Now you can organize your media content into different Playlists and folders, or you can add a Smart Playlist. Now, a Smart Playlist automatically brings in any media in a folder that you choose in your computer. So anytime you add media to a folder in your computer, it will automatically bring it inside of ProPresenter into this Smart Playlist.
You also have access in your Media Bin to Video Inputs. So we can go to Video Inputs, and we can set up and configure those, and we’re going to look at that more a little bit later. Now if you’re not seeing your Media Bin, it can get hidden. If you want to see it again, just press the “Media” button in the main toolbar, which shows and hides the Media Bin.
Navigating the Toolbar
Now, let’s look at the rest of the toolbar. We have the Store here where you can buy more media content. And then over on the left, we have a Search option. Now, this brings up our floating Search window where we can search all of the presentations in all of our Libraries. And you can drag and drop those into a Playlist directly from here. And this is a persistent window meaning if we click away from that Search window, it’ll be exactly where we left it.
So you might want to position it in a handy place to drag and drop items. And you can access that search window with Command+F or Ctrl+F which is a standard find command or search command in most web browsers or programs.
You can also search SongSelect in here, if you’ve logged into SongSelect in Preferences, so you can search different songs in there. And we’ll look at that a little bit later as well. Next, we have our formatting buttons where we can do formatting of songs or apply Themes. And then we have our different view options.
Using Editors
Currently, we’re in the show view, but we can go to our full-screen Editor to edit slide content by clicking Edit. Or we can go to our Reflow Editor. Now, this is a really handy editor for editing large amounts of text across multiple slides. And then if we need to go into Bibles to look up different Bible passages or import different Scripture, we can do that there.
And then under more, we have access to a bunch of other editors, our Stage, Theme, CCLI, Props, and Mask Editors. So we can get access to all of those under the More button.
Now as we’ve been looking at the interface, you’ve probably noticed that you don’t have to click on things in a certain order to show them. And that’s because ProPresenter is not a linear program, you don’t have to do things in a certain order for them to work, you can click on whatever you want, and it will show that content.
So, if we go in here, we can maybe click on this song and then we can go to the Media Bin and choose a new background, and then we could go to a Library and choose a totally different song and skip to the middle of it and click on some lyrics there. We can do all of that in any order that we want. So in Show mode, anything you click on will be shown. Now, you can still set up your event in order using a playlist, but if you need to make a change on the fly, you can do that at any time.
Screen Configuration
Now that we understand the differences between Libraries, presentations, Playlists, and we can see how to trigger slides and media, and other content and preview it. Let’s now move on to setting up our screens and starting to create some content.
Let’s start creating some presentations. Now, ProPresenter can have multiple Audience and Stage Screens.
Audience screens are used to show content to people viewing your presentation, either in person or online. Now, a Stage Screen is meant for people on stage or working behind the scenes. And Stage Screens can be set up to show other helpful information about your presentation for those people.
A typical setup would include a single Audience Screen for people in person like a projector, a large TV or an LED wall, plus a second display for a Stage Screen. Now, you might have a third screen for your live stream for your online audience. So, that would be an additional Audience Screen. Now, each Audience or Stage Screen can be set up to show different variations and versions of your content, giving you the flexibility to accomplish whatever your setup needs.
Presenting on Different Screens
Now, let’s take a closer look at how to set up these screens. To set up our screens, we’re going to go to the main Screens menu > Configure Screens. Here we can set up our Audience and Stage Screens.
Now, Audience Screens can either be a single screen, a Mirrored Screen, a Group Screen, or Edge Blended Screens. And each one of these screens needs to be connected to an output.
So currently, my main screen is connected to a Placeholder. But if we click on this list, you’ll see any of your system-connected screens. So this would be things like HDMI outputs, or display adapters, anything that your computer is seeing.
So if you’re not seeing a screen that you have hooked up to your computer, first make sure the operating system has seen it and then you’ll see it in this list inside of ProPresenter. You’ll also see in this list things like SDI outputs, they would be listed below here.
And then we have options for NDI outputs. This is a way to send video across the network. And this is perfect for sending content to things like OBS or vMix, or other NDI devices. And then we have an option to set up a Syphon Screen. This allows you to send video content from one program to another program on the exact same computer.
Placeholder Screens
And then finally, we can set up Placeholder Screens. Now, one great use for Placeholder Screens is our live stream. So, I’m going to add a new Audience Screen here, and I’m going to set this up as a new Placeholder.
And we’re going to set it at 1920×1080. And the reason we’re doing this is because our live stream screen doesn’t need to have a physical screen hooked up to it, it just needs to be a screen that we can encode and send online. So once we add that we can rename this. So I’ll rename this to live stream.
Now, if you want to learn more about Screen Configurations and even more of the options than I’ve shown here, make sure to check out the full Configuration Tutorial to learn even more.
Creating Song Presentations
Now that we have our screen set up, let’s create some presentations.
And again, a presentation can be a song, a slideshow, teaching notes, videos or other types of informational presentations. We’re going to start by creating a song and there’s two main ways that you can create a song. You can either copy text from a website or PDF or you can use the SongSelect integration to bring your lyrics in.
SongSelect integration only works with an active SongSelect paid subscription and requires you to log in inside of Preferences. But once you do that, you can bring in songs right from SongSelect directly into the computer.
Using SongSelect
Now once you’ve logged into SongSelect inside ProPresenters Preferences, you can use the Search function to search all of SongSelect. So, instead of searching our ProPresenter Libraries, let’s search SongSelect. I’m going to search for a song here called Goodness of God. And you’ll see all the options that we have available.
I’m going to click on this first one here and you’ll see a lyric preview of just the chorus that SongSelect provides. But once we hit import, we’ll get all of the lyrics of that song. You can also search by CCLI number. Now, this is the version of the song that I want, so I’m going to select to import, and this brings up our import dialog box.
Here, the first option that we have is how much text do we want on each slide? I want to have two lines of text on each slide because this works great for in-person audiences and online audiences. And I want it to break on line break instead of paragraph break.
And then we have our presentation settings what size is this presentation? So what size is each slide in the presentation? I’m going to go with 1920×1080 because that’s the size of all the screens I have set up.
And then we have an option for a Theme and that Theme is going to reformat and re-theme all of the text on each slide during import, so that we don’t have to do it manually afterward.
So we can go in here, and let’s choose this lyric style. And we’re going to go to this line, one that you can see in this other song here. So I’ll choose that one. And then we have an option of where do we want this presentation to be saved? Which Library do we want it saved to? I’m going to choose the default Library.
And then we have an option to automatically add this presentation after import to a Playlist. We can choose none or you can select a Playlist from below. Now, we could import the song right now, but instead, I want to encourage you to hit Edit first, this is going to bring you to the Reflow Editor. Now, in the Reflow Editor on the left side, you’ll see all of the text on every single slide. And on the right side, you’ll see a preview of what all of that text looks like on the slides, utilizing the Theme.
Now you’ll notice that our text has been broken up into different groups here. So we have Verses and Choruses and other Verse and a Bridge, and we can go through and edit these if we want to make any adjustments. Now the first thing that I see is that this course has a little bit too much text on it, and it’s not broken up the way that I want it to.
So I’m going to just put my cursor right here where I want to break up this line, and I’m going to hit enter to break up those two lines. And then after this line, I’m going to say insert Slide Break. And that’s going to move the text after my cursor to a new slide. And then I’ll do the same thing here. So I’m going to enter that text down to a new line. And then that slide looks the way that we want it to. We can do it here as well. So with every breath, and then we’re going to say, enter, and then after able, insert Slide Break, I will sing, and then enter of the Goodness of God.
So now all of our text for that Chorus is lined up exactly the way we want it to. Now, we have all of these groups in here. And you can change these groups by clicking the little drop-down icon and going to group and we can set which group each one of these is.
I’m going to actually add in two more groups that I think you should add into all of your songs as well. So I’m going to go to the end of my song, I’m going to place my cursor after the last word and I’m going to say insert slide break two different times. I’m going to hit the drop down for the first slide, and I’m going to go to group and I’m going to select intro and that will be for the beginning of my song. And then I’m going to go to this next one, and I’m going to go to group and I’m going to choose Blank.
And this will be for any time that I don’t want to show lyrics on the screen, I can just click on this blank slide. And you’ll see how we’re going to utilize all of that here in a minute. But now that our song is all set up, all of our text looks the way that we want to, we can say import.
Song Arrangements
Next, we’re going to create an Arrangement for our song because just like a band that has Verses and Choruses, and they play them over and over again, in different places, we can do the same with our Presentation. We can have a Verse section and a Chorus section and a Bridge section and re-utilize those pieces to create an Arrangement of a song, and we can have multiple Arrangements of songs.
To set up an Arrangement, let’s go to the top right-hand corner of our presentation and you’ll see the Arrangements button. When I select that, you’ll see all of the groups that we set up in our song. So we have verse, Chorus, Verse, Bridge, Intro, and Blank, those are all the pieces that we have of our song. And then down here, you can see that we’re currently in the Master View, but we can set up a new Arrangement. So I’m going to click on this and say new Arrangement, we’re just going to call this our Default Arrangement, and hit okay.
Now for our Default Arrangement on the bottom row, you’ll see the actual Arrangement of the song, and the top row is all the pieces we have available. So, I’m going to start my song with an Intro, we’re going to say Intro, Verse, Chorus, and then we’re going to throw a little Blank for a little instrumental after the Chorus, and then we’re going to do Verse 2, and then we’re going to play the Chorus again, and then we’re going to go to maybe two Bridges, and then to another Chorus. And then we’re going to say a Blank at the very end of the song.
So we’ve dropped all of those pieces in and you’ll see how it’s created our whole song for us, and everything’s exactly in the order that we want it to be. And we can create multiple of these Arrangements. So all we have to do is go back over here and say new Arrangement, and we could create another Arrangement that is a little bit different.
So we could say all Arrangement and say okay, and for our alternate Arrangement, we’re going to say this is Intro and then this is just a Chorus, Bridge, Bridge, Chorus. And so we’re just going to set that up that way. So now we have two different Arrangements of our song all ready to go for us. Now we’re going to create one more song but instead of using song select, this time we’re going to copy some text from a PDF, but you could also copy text from a website or another type of document.
So here’s a lyric PDF that I actually downloaded from Planning Center Online, but it’s laid out like a lot of lyrics that you’ll find online as well where you have headings for each section, or verse one, and then the text in verse two in the text, and we can just drag-select all of that text and then I’m going to hit Command+C, or Ctrl+C on my keyboard to copy.
And then we’re going to go to ProPresenter and then we’re going to go to file, import text from clipboard because our text we’ve copied is now on the computer’s clipboard. So we’ll say Text From Clipboard. And then this brings us to our import dialog box, where we have all of those same settings that we had before using SongSelect.
We can choose how many lines of text do we want on each slide? How’s it broken up? What size is it? What theme are we using? Where do we want the Presentation saved? And again, instead of hitting Import, we’re going to hit Edit instead. And this will bring us back to our Reflow Editor.
Now, one thing that you’ll notice up here is that the title was given the word Intro instead of the name of the song. So, I’m going to type in the name of the song, and then we could add in other information we want if we wanted to, like our CCLI information or copyright date, who the artist or author is, but then we can go down here and we can start editing the song.
Now, you’ll notice that some of these slides have too much text on them. So again, we can easily edit these. So, I’m going to add a line break here, and then I’m going to add a slide break at the end. So, I’m just placing my cursor where I want to hit enter. And then if I want to add a slide break, and actually for this one, we want to combine these slides.
So, I want to lay it all down, lay it all down at the empty tomb, I want on that previous slide. So I’m going to put my cursor at the beginning of this line and hit delete, and it will delete this slide break here and put those two slides together. So, I’ll hit delete on the keyboard or backspace, and that will combine those two slides together.
We can do the same here.
So we’re going to hit enter, to put that on a new line, and then say insert slide break, and then we can say lay it all down, lay it all down. And then we’re going to say delete at the empty tomb. And then we’re going to put this at the empty tomb on its own slide. That’s how it works with this song in particular.
And then we have more options, we could go down to this course and fix this, if he conquered the grave, then there’s nothing too great. Insert slide break, Watch What He Will Do. So we have our lyrics all lined up. And again, we can go to the bottom here and add those two slide breaks, we’re going to say one of these, the group is going to be Intro, and the other one of these groups is going to be Blank.
And again, this is going to be really helpful for us when we’re creating Arrangements because we can create our Intro at the beginning of the song, and then we can insert blanks whenever we need them. And this Intro one that we haven’t fully talked about, but I’ll show you how we’re going to really utilize that in a little bit here. So, we’ve gotten all of our pieces ready, and so now we can say import. And that will bring in Watch What He Will Do. And now we can go and create Arrangement.
So again, our Arrangement button is right here. So, I’m going to select Arrangement and we’re going to create a new Arrangement. So, I’m going to click on Master and say New Arrangement, we’re going to say Default and hit okay. And now we can start putting this in order.
So I’m going to say Intro, Verse 1, Verse 2, and then we’ll say Chorus, and then we’ll do a Blank, and then we’ll do Verse 3, and then we’ll do a Chorus. And then we’re going to do a couple of Bridges, I think there’s three of them. And then we can say a Chorus. And then we have a Blank at the end of the song. And actually, we need one right before the Chorus. So we have all of these in here.
So, we can see how that’s all laid out. And again, the magic of Arrangements is if I go and edit one of these sections, it will edit it in every single one. So if I broke up this Bridge a little bit more, it’s going to break it up every time we use it. So, we can actually go back to our Reflow Editor.
So, I’m going to click on Reflow, and we’re going to go down to our Bridge. And we’re going to say you better get ready for a miracle. Insert slide break, you better get ready for the joy, you better get ready for revival, because it’s coming. Slide break there, because it’s coming. It’s coming.
So we’ve gone through and just added our text to the different lines. But when we go back to our show view, you’ll see that Bridge that we added some more slides in, now every single Bridge is the same way. We didn’t have to go and edit each individual Bridge, then this is where it becomes really powerful and really helpful to use Arrangements.
Now, let’s utilize this Intro segment. And a great thing that we can put here is some media that we want for the song. So we could take this background here and just drag and drop it onto that slide. And so again, when we click on the slide, it’s going to trigger the slide layer which has those white bars on it, and it’s going to trigger the media layer with that background. And then as we click through our slides, you’ll see that that media layer continues to play as we click through all of our different slides.
Creating a Slide Show
The next presentation we’re going to create is an announcement loop or a set of slides that we want to automatically play before an event and these are incredibly easy to create.
To create a new presentation for our announcement loop, let’s go up to file and then go to new presentation. Now, this is going to ask us to name this presentation. So, I’m just going to call this announcement loop. And then we can choose a Theme for our default formatting, choose what size the slides are, and choose which Library it save to. Once that’s all set, we can say new to create that new presentation.
Now, I’m going to add my content by just sliding this interface over and opening up this folder that I have here with a bunch of images in it. So, I’m just going to select all of these images and drag and drop them right inside ProPresenter. So you’ll see it’s created new slides for every single image automatically for me, and then I can right-click on that first one, and just say delete to get rid of that one because we don’t need it anymore.
Now, I want these to automatically go from one to the next. And the way that we do that is by enabling this presentation to be a slideshow.
So, we can do that by clicking on this arrow icon, which is our slideshow button. And then we can choose how long do we want each slide the last. I’m just going to choose five seconds. And now each slide will last for five seconds and then automatically go to the next one. And when it gets to the last slide, it will automatically go back to the beginning. So I can click on this and you’ll see that it’s lasting five seconds, we have an indicator here showing how much time is left on each slide. And this indicator can actually be clicked on to stop the Timer from happening. So if I wanted to stay on that, I could just click on that, and now the Timer has stopped, and this slide will just stay on screen.
Now if I want to continue the slideshow, I can either click this slide or click on the next one. And now it will automatically advance to the next slide. We can also stop the slideshow by clearing all of our content, but that will remove the slides as well as the Timer.
Audio Playlist in Announcement Loops
Now, I want to an Audio Playlist to play with my announcement loop. And so in my Audio Bin here, you’ll see I have a Playlist called “Walk in”. And in this Playlist, I have a bunch of different songs.
You can add new Playlist by clicking here and you can add a Playlist or a folder. You can have multiple Playlists, and you can just drag and drop in different songs, you can set them to shuffle and change how long the transition length is. We can also right-click on the songs and set what the playback behavior is. So do we want this to stop, loop or go to the next one?
For this ‘Walk In’ Playlist, I want it to automatically go to the next one. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to drag and drop a ‘Walk In’ to the first slide here of our announcement loop. And you’ll see it’s added a new icon saying that there’s a new action on the slide. Similar to how we added actions of media to slides, we added an action for an Audio Playlist. So now when I click on this slide, it’s not only going to start that announcement loop, but it’s actually going to start playing the audio tracks.
I’m going to click on this Audio icon here, and it will show me the shuffle controls, the playback controls for those audio files. So you can see this is playing, and you can see the meters here showing that that audio file is playing back. And we can actually pause the audio independently or we could clear the audio if we wanted to.
Now, the nice thing is when this loop’s back to the beginning, it’s not going to re-trigger this first song to start over again, it’s going to allow it to continue to play. So even though it’s triggering that Playlist at the beginning, once it started, it will just continue to run it won’t restart it every single time, which is really helpful and exactly what we want.
Creating Teaching Notes & Adding Scripture
Next, we’re going to create some teaching notes including some Scripture passages and we’re going to be using the Vivid Theme that you can get for free at renewedvision.com. Let’s create a new presentation for our teaching notes by going to File > New Presentation.
We’re going to name this “Notes”, and then we’re going to set a Theme for these notes. And we’re going to use this Vivid Dark Theme. And I’m going to start by choosing this Title and Subtitle. But we’re going to use multiple of these as we create our teaching notes. So, we’ll select that we could set the size, and we could change which Library this presentation is saved to. Now, we can say new to create our new presentation.
And the first thing that you’ll notice is that this slide does not look like the Theme that we just selected. And that’s because there’s no text on this slide.
To add text we need to go into our Editor. So we’re going to click on Edit from the main toolbar. And this brings us to the big full-screen Editor where on the left side of the screen, we can see all of our slides that are in our presentation. And when we select a slide, we’ll see all of the objects that are on that slide. So this one has multiple objects, it’s got a Title text box, a Subtitle text box and a background fill color.
On the right side of the screen, you’ll see our shape Properties, our Text Properties and our Build Properties for each object. So, I’m going to select this Title and we’re going to update this and we’re going to put something really obvious like notes in and we’re going to say my amazing notes go here.
And so we have our Title here and if we wanted to add more objects to the slide, we could click this large add icon to add in new text boxes, different shapes, media, video inputs, and even webpages. But if we want to add in another slide, we’re going to click this add icon.
So if we click on this one, we can add a new slide. And if we say add new slide, it will add a new slide using this exact same Theme. But I want to use a different Theme. So I’m going to go down to Vivid Dark, and I’m going to choose a new Theme. And I’m going to choose this ‘Statement’ Theme. So, add that one, and now we have this text box that we can paste some text into.
So I previously copied some text, just some generic text about Lorem Ipsum, and you can see that added in there for the statement. So we have another nice-looking slide, and let’s add in one more. So we’re going to go in here, and let’s add another one with a different Theme. And this is going to be a list.
And for our list Theme, we’re going to say points, and then we can start adding in our points. So we’ll say. So we’ll say, point one, point two, and point three. You could add in as many points as you want. Now, I do want to adjust this text. So I’m going to go to my text properties and I’m going to change the size of this. So, we’re going to say 60 for the size, and we’re going to maybe make this a little bit bolder and go to medium just so it’s easier to read.
And so we have points and our points here. Now, I actually want these to animate or transition on one at a time. And we do that through our Build settings. So with this text box selected, I’m going to select Build, and then we’re going to add a new build in. So the way it’s transitioned or built onto the screen, so we’re going to add a Build In.
And for this, I’m going to do a push. And I want this to push from the right side in. So we’re going to say from right and it’s going to slide each one of these over. And then we have a delivery option here. Do we want this to be all at once, or we can do it by bullet. So we’re going to say by bullet, and now each bullet point will come out individually.
And you’ll see down here at the bottom that we have three different transitions, and each one of these is going to happen on a different click. So, let’s see how this works. We’re going to go back to show, we could put up our title here. And then we could go to our statement. And then when we get to points, you’ll see that this slide has these indicator icons underneath it saying that it’s a multi-click slide. So, when I click it the first time, it’s just going to show points in the background, and then when I click it again, it’s going to animate on point one, and then point two and then point three.
So it’s really easy to add in these transition options to make dynamic and engaging slides. Now, let’s add some Scripture to these notes by going to Bible. So, if we go to Bibles in the main toolbar, we can see we have a few different options here. And the first thing that we want to set up is what Theme we’re using. So we’re going to click on options, and here we have our Theme options.
So, I’m going to choose the Vivid Dark Theme. And we’re going to go with this quote Theme which will be perfect for Scripture. So, we’re selecting that one. And then we have some options here of how many verses should be on each slide, and if you want to see a reference. So right now we’re going to get one verse per slide, and we’re going to show the reference on every single slide. We also have options to add free Bibles or purchase Bibles.
So we can do all of that here. And then we can go over and the next thing that we need to do is choose which text box the verse text is going into in which text box the reference text is going into.
And so we can go in here and we want to say that the verse is going to go into this, quote text box, and the reference will go into that name text box. And these yellow boxes show us where in the Theme that text box is, so it’s easier to know which one you’re selecting. Now with those selected, we can go and look up some Scripture.
So, I’m going to just do John 3:16, and hit enter or return and that will add in that passage. Now, we can actually just click this to show it right from this interface, or we can actually add this into our teaching notes.
So, what we’ll do is we’re going to go down to the bottom left corner here, and we’re going to say save as, and we’re going to say copy to selected presentation. When we do that, it’s going to automatically add in this slide to our teaching notes. We have other options here to save this to a playlist or save this as a presentation. Now we can go back to show and when we go back, you’ll see that our John 3:16 passage has been added to our teaching notes. So it’s really easy to add that in. And now when we click on that, that’ll be there we can switch between these different slides and see all of that for our teaching notes.
Now, since we can create these dynamic presentations right inside ProPresenter with bullet point reveals and scripture passages and really everything you need, there’s no reason to continue to use programs like PowerPoint. Instead, pastors and teachers, and presenters can create their presentations right inside ProPresenter and they can do it from home when they download ProPresenter.
Exporting & Sharing Presentations
Now, I’m going to show you quickly how you can export those presentations to share with other users. Now to export these teaching notes to send to another user, we can select a Presentation and then go to File > Export. We have a few different options here, we can send a presentation or a Presentation Bundle.
The difference between these two is that a Presentation Bundle includes all media inside the presentation. So if you have images or videos or anything like that in the presentation, it will be included in the bundle. But the file size for that bundle will be much larger. A presentation only includes the slides and the text, but it does not contain any of the media. But if you want to make sure it sends exactly the way you created it, make sure to select a Presentation Bundle.
Now the one thing that can’t transfer is fonts that you use. So if you’re using a specialty font on your computer, you need to make sure that same font is installed on the presenting computer that you’re sending this file to.
Creating Playlists
Now, that you’ve created some different presentations, we can put those all together in a playlist for our show. To add a new Playlist, we’re going to go to File > New Playlist. We can also access this by hitting this add icon in our library in the Playlist area. We’re just going to call this event and this playlist right now has zero items. We’re going to add these from Search, but you can also add these from a Library.
So I’m going to click on Search, and we’re going to go over to the ProPresenter’s Library Search, and we can see all of the different items that are currently in our Library. I’m just going to move this a little bit closer over here. And we’re going to just start dragging and dropping different items in.
So, we’ll start with our announcement loop, and then maybe we’re going to do a few songs, we could add in Goodness of God that we created earlier, ‘Watch What He Will Do’, maybe we’ll add one from that sample Library, ‘Good Grace’. And then we could add in our teaching notes. And then we’re going to end the day with another announcement loop. So we have a few different items in here, but let’s make this a little bit better organized by adding some Headers in. So I’m going to add a new Header in here. And for this Header, we’re going to just name this one ‘Pre Show’. And then we can add in another Header, and we’ll name this one ‘Music’. And then we can drag this and put it in its place.
So now we have Pre Show with our announcement loop, we have Music with some songs. And now we need to add in communication. So we’re going to add in another Header, and we’re going to name this one “Communication”.
And we can move this down between Good Grace and notes, and then finally, we can add our last Header here, that’s called “Post Show”. And we can move that down to the bottom. You can also change the color of these Headers by selecting a Header, and then we can click on the gear icon here and choose a color. So I’m going to choose a blue color for our Music, and then maybe for our Pre Show, we could choose that one and do a purple color. And then for Communication, we can maybe make that green. And you can choose whatever you want.
I’m just picking some colors here and then for Post Show, we can go back to that kind of purple color. So, now we have a few different Headers in here that are colorized that help break up our Playlist and help us easier see what’s happening in each section.
Navigating Playlists & Presentations
Next, let’s talk about navigating and controlling Playlists and Presentations. So the first thing to know is that when you select an item in your Playlist, if you hit the Down key on your keyboard, it will send you to the next item in the Playlist. So, I’m slowly jumping down my Playlist through different items by hitting the up or down key.
If I hit the right arrow on my keyboard, it will go to the first slide in that presentation and I can continue hitting right to go to the next slide. I can also hit left to go to the previous slide, and space bar also sends you to the next slide. Now, song presentations with groups like Verse and Chorus, you’ll notice that they have hotkeys that are attached to them. And that’s what this A and C and S mean in the corner of the slides. So if I press the C key, it will jump me to the Chorus of the song. If I press the B key, it will jump me to the Bridge of the song.
And then we have our A, S, D and F keys for Verse 1, Verse 2, Verse 3 and Verse 4. So if I press S, it’s going to jump to Verse 2. And if I press A, it’s going to jump to Verse 1. We also can press I for the Intro. And if you want to, you can actually jump to a specific slide. So if I wanted to jump maybe to slide 10, I can type in 10 on my keyboard and hit enter and it will automatically jump to that slide. So, there’s multiple ways that you can navigate your presentations.
So far, we’ve focused on creating and showing content on our main Audience Screen. But earlier we talked about how you can have a screen for people on stage or behind the scenes to see what’s going on. So let’s look at how to configure and set up your Stage Screen.
Stage Screen Configuration
Now before we can configure our Stage Screen we need to make sure it’s set up properly. So, just as a reminder, if you need to set up a stage screen, go to Screens > Configure Screens. And then in the Stage section, make sure it’s enabled and that you’ve added a Stage Screen, and that it’s linked to the proper output. Whether it’s a system display or SDI output or whatever you’re using for that Stage Screen, make sure it’s configured and linked up properly there.
Now, once that’s all set up, we can go over to our Show Controls, which is beneath the Preview area over here, we can click on this tab here, which has an icon of a little guy at a podium. And this is for our Stage Controls. And you’ll see that we have our Stage Display. So this lists out any Stage Screens that we have. So we have one Stage Screen, and then it shows you which layouts currently being shown on that Stage Screen.
And then at the bottom down here, you actually have an area where you can send messages to your Stage Screen, if you have the proper Stage Message text box added to your layout. Now if we go back up, we can actually see all the different layouts we have available for this Stage Screen. So if I click on this, we could switch between layouts. But right now we only have one layout. So, let’s add some new ones by clicking on Edit Layouts. And this brings us to our Stage Editor.
Now the Stage Editor looks a lot like the Slide Editor that we used earlier. The differences over here on the left side, we have our Stage Layouts. But again, down here at the bottom, we have our objects, and when we select an object, we can see our different Shape and Text Properties. But the biggest difference is when we go to add a new object to a Stage Layout, you’ll see that we have all of these different unique options.
We can add in current slide text, or maybe a current slide preview image or current slide notes, or next slide text or preview image or notes. We could actually add in full-screen previews of what’s on a different screen. And we could add that in so we can show our main output or our stage display or our live stream screens. We can see exactly what’s going on on those screens. You can add in chord charts or Stage Messages, Planning Center Live, you can add in different Timers or System Clocks, you can add in exactly what group is currently being shown in an Arrangement, or what label is on the current slide or the next slide.
Or if you’re streaming or recording, what’s the status of that. So there’s a lot of different options here that you can add in. Now instead of creating those on your own, you can easily add in a pre-built layout by hitting the add icon here, and instead of choosing a blank layout, we can choose one of these pre-built layouts. So, let’s add in this presentation info and progress layout.
And this layout has a lot of different helpful information. So it’s got a large clock here, it shows exactly how many slides are remaining. And how many slides are total, shows you the current slide text, the next slide text, which group you’re currently in, and what groups coming next, the name of the current item in the playlist that you’re in, and the name of the next item in the playlist. So you have a lot of different helpful information in this layout. And you can adjust layouts if you want to. So maybe this current slide text and next slide text, we want to remove these clocks and just have this text be even larger.
So we can just drag-select all of these items down here at the bottom and hit delete, and we can move maybe the next slide text down a little bit and then make this current slide text even larger. And so that will make this even bigger. And the reason that that text scaled up is if we click on our Text Properties here, you’ll see that there’s an option to Scale Text Up or Down to fit the container.
So, this is one of your text settings that you have for any text box, but it’s really helpful for Stage Screens. Now let’s add in one more layout here. So let’s add in another layout, and we’re going to go to this current Slide Preview with Timers. And so when we add this layout, you’ll see that we have some Timers at the top of the screen here. And then this is our current slide. But this is actually just the current slide image, it’s not a live preview. Now we can change this by going to our shape settings.
Here, you’ll see that the fill is set to current slide image, we can change that from a current slide image to a screen preview. And we’ll change that to our main output. So, now this is going to preview exactly what’s being shown on our main output at all times. Let’s actually make this much larger. So we’ll just make this really big and have that take up the whole screen here so that we can see everything that’s going on. And then we can maybe remove some different objects. So, I’m going to get rid of this video countdown because we don’t need that. And I’m going to get rid of some of these labels. So we’re going to get rid of all of these different labels that we have because those will be hard to see on our screen that’s at the back of the room. And so we’ll move our System Clock maybe over into this corner and our segment Countdown Clock over into this one.
Now, to make those stand out a little bit better against the background, we could add a fill to those so I’m just going to add a fill and set that to black. We’ll click on our System Clock and add a fill to this one and set that one to black as well. So those will stand out better amongst this live screen preview that we have going on, we also can rename this.
So instead of having this name, we can just call this screen “Preview”. So now we have a few different layouts that we can utilize. So if we go back to show, and the first thing that I want to do is change out what we’re previewing here. So, I want to preview my Stage Screens instead of my main output. And let’s go over to a song.
So we’ll go over to Watch What He Will Do, and we could click on the slide, and you’ll see that it’s currently showing our current slide and next slide, because that’s what’s selected here in our stage area. But we could change this to a screen preview, and it will show exactly what’s on the main screen, but we’re also getting those clocks in the corner. Now I don’t have a timer running, and so that’s why we don’t see anything there right now.
But we do see our system clock. And then we could go over and we could change this maybe to presentation info in progress. And this is where we see all of that different helpful information. So we have 30 slides remaining, or out of 32 slides, this is our current time. This is our current slide text. This is the group that we’re in.
And so as we move through, you’ll see this is the current group, and this is the group that’s coming next, here’s our current item in our playlist. Here’s the next item in our playlist. So, we have a lot of different helpful information that we can see in that layout.
Actions
Now, instead of asking your operator to remember to switch between these different layouts we have in the show controls area, you can automatically switch between these when you click on a slide. And this is done through actions that we saw earlier.
Now actions can be things like triggering background media to play. But it can also change things like stage displays. And you can add multiple actions to a single slide. And these actions allow you to control a lot of different things inside of the program and make it much easier on your operators to control and change all of these different settings. Now, we’re going to look at the Action Palette here, and we can find that by going to view and then down to Action Palette.
And this shows you all of the different actions we have available. So we have different clearing actions, which are just like pressing these clearing buttons to clear out our different layers, but then we also have Media Actions, which is like dragging and adding media item to a slide or Audio Actions or Audio Playlist Actions that we saw earlier.
You can also trigger video inputs, and then we have our interactive actions. And this is where we could add in a stage action. So if I drag and drop this Stage Action to this slide, it’s going to add a new icon here saying that this slide has multiple actions. And what we can do is we can say we want our Stage Display to change to be our current and next slide music stacked for this presentation.
So anytime we’re on this presentation and we click on this Intro slide, we’re doing multiple different things, we’re starting up a background in our media layer, and we’re changing our Stage Screen to be the right layout for music.
Now, we could do a different layout for our notes. So we could click on notes, and then we could go over here and we could again drag and drop a stage action to our notes. And for this one, instead of being our current and next slide stacked one, we could say screen preview. And so this will give a screen preview to whoever’s on stage. And now it will automatically change as we go through our different things.
So, that’s why in our songs, we have that Intro on every single song because on every single song we want to have on our Intro, an action to change our Stage Screen to make sure it’s on the right view for the people on stage.
So, again, we can add in this action by dragging and dropping, or the way that I found this to go faster is by right-clicking on a slide and then we can say add action, and then we can go to stage, and then this will pop up that same pop-up dialog and we can change this to current and next slide music stacked and hit done. We also have the option that we can just drag and drop. So if we go to another song here that needs a stage action, so I think Good Grace needs one, we can go in here and we can drag and drop this on this first slide. And it will add in that layout that we currently have selected.
And then as we go through our presentation, so if I go up here and click on these notes, you’ll see that our layout changes over here and in our Stage Display, and then we can go back to a song, click on that.
And it’s going to change that layout on our stage screen. And on our main screen, it’s actually showing that background and then we can start showing our text. And so we’re triggering multiple actions to happen at one time.
Looks
Now, presenting content to in-person audiences can be very different from showing content to an online audience. But that’s where Looks come into play, because with Looks we can automatically reformat our slides to be different for an online audience versus an in-person audience. And we can also choose which layers inside of ProPresenter we want to show to each audience. So we can only show maybe the slide layer to our online audience and not the media layer, so we don’t show that background. So we can choose which layers are shown to each audience.
Now, to set up and configure Looks, we can go up to the Screens menu > Edit Looks. Here, you’ll see all of the different Audience Screens that we’ve set up.
So we have our main output and our live stream. And these are two different Audience Screens that we set up. And then below there, you’ll see all of the different layers that are inside ProPresenter, and which ones are enabled for each screen. Now the default look, all of the layers are enabled. But we can create different presets and change what’s enabled on each screen. So, let’s add a new preset. And for this look, we’re going to call this “Music”, so it’s used anytime that the band is playing any music.
And we can choose what layers are enabled on each screen. So on our main output, we don’t want to see the video input, we never really need to see that on our main output. So we can turn that off. We do want to see the media and slide layers. And we might want to see the announcements layer. So we’ll leave that on. I know that we don’t want to see props, and we do want to see Messages. So we’ll have all of those layers enabled.
Now on our live stream screen, we’re going to leave the video input layer on but we’re going to turn the media layer off because we don’t want to see these backgrounds covering up our entire live stream. So we don’t want that on. So we’re going to turn that off, we’re going to leave our slide content on. We’ll also leave our announcements layer on just in case. And we do want our Props layer on, and then we want Messages turned off because we’re going to use Messages for in-person content and Props for online content. And we’ll talk about that more in just a little bit.
So, now we’ve altered all of these layers and chosen which ones we want enabled and disabled. The other thing that we can do is automatically reformat slide content on different screens. So, if we click here, we can apply a Theme automatically as we click on slides just to this one screen that’s different than the text that we see here.
So if I go down to my vivid dark theme, I’m going to choose this lower third lyrics, and now it’s going to use that Theme for any slide content on my live stream screen when this look is being utilized. So we’re going to say make live, and that’s going to use my ‘Music’ Look on my main output in my live stream screen. So let’s see how this works. So, if I click on this text here, you’ll see on my main output, my text looks like this. And if I go to my live stream screen, my text looks like this.
It automatically reformatted it and changed it different than my main output. That way, we can have centered text in the room and lower third text for online. Now to see how this works as we click on stuff, I actually created this handy Operator View. And this will show us both of our screens at the same time. So I’m just going to expand this. So now we can see our main output on top and our live stream screen on the bottom.
If you want to learn more about making an Operator View, I have a whole tutorial all about how to create one of these. And they’re really handy, but it does require more computing power, so you need to make sure your computer can handle it. So let’s click on this background. And you’ll see how that only shows on the main output because the media layer is disabled on the live stream screen and its’ enabled on the main output. And then when I click on our text, you’ll see the slide layer is normal on the main output. And then it’s got this altered Alternate Theme on the live stream screen.
And as we click on content, it’s automatically reformatting that as we go and changing that to a lower third. So it’s a really, really handy way to alter what content you’re seeing on each screen without having to manually do this. And we can control all of this easily and change which look is being utilized with actions. So just like we added the Stage Action to this slide, we can add an Audience Look Action.
So I’m going to right-click on the slide, and I’m going to go to add Action Audience Look and we could add a music action. So, we have this little Mr. mustache guy here, he’s used for Looks, and this signifies that when we click on the slide, not only is it triggering the slide, it’s also triggering some media, and it’s changing our stage layout, and it’s changing our audience look. And if I go to my teaching notes, we could add a different look here. So I’m going to right-click on this slide and go down and add Action Audience Look and I’m going to set this as default so we can see the difference. So if I click on this, it’s going to look exactly the same because our default Look if we go back to screens and Edit Looks, our default Look, everything’s exactly the same, but our music Look, so as soon as we click on this, our music Look is going to be different.
We’re going to have our media content on the screen and nothing on our live stream screen. And then when we click on our text, you’ll see that it’s different on the two different screens. We didn’t have to remember to change that, it automatically happened when we clicked on the slide because it has multiple actions. And again, you can know if it has those actions by the icon shown in the corner. Now, there are a few other layers and Looks that we saw there that we haven’t really utilized yet, we have our Messages and our Props layers that we were talking about.
Now, Messages is a way to send dynamic information to Audience Screens, things like Clocks, or Alerts or dynamic titles. And Props are persistent objects that can be shown at any time, things like lower thirds, or corner graphic bugs are examples of Props. And you can learn more about both of these in other tutorials. But let’s see how this Prop works and which screens it shows on. So if I click on this, you’ll see that currently, this is only showing on the live stream.
So I could click and show this content and you’ll see that in-person, this Prop is not showing. But if I go to my teaching notes, and we click on this, will remember that Props are enabled on all screens. And so now that Prop is being shown on both screens. But if I go back to the song and switch between Audience Looks, you’ll see that that Prop gets taken away. So that makes it so I can show that Prop content just to my live stream and not to my in-person screen.
Announcements
Now, the last one that we haven’t talked about is the Announcements Layer. This is an alternate destination for presentations, which allows you to show two different presentations at the same time on different screens. Now, earlier, we made an announcement loop. But what if we wanted to send that announcement loop to our live stream but not our in-person screen? We could do this using the announcements layer.
Now the announcements layer contains both a media and a slide layer together in one. And if we look back at our layer diagram, you’ll see that it’s above our regular presentation layer. This means that if we’re showing slides in the regular presentation layer, and then we show some slides in the announcement layer, it will cover up the presentation slides. Now, we can tell a presentation to be on the announcements layer versus the presentation layer by changing its destination.
So, if we go to the announcement loop here, we can go up to the right-hand corner of this presentation, and we’ll see the destination target here. Right now it’s set to the default of presentation. But if we change it to announcements, now when we run this presentation, it will be on the announcements layer, not the presentation layer. So, I’m going to start this content, but I’m also going to go start a song that’s playing on the regular presentation layer. So we’re going to play this content here, and you’ll see that if I clear my announcement content, you’ll see underneath it we’re getting our presentation layer content.
And so again, we can show different content on different screens by showing this announcement layer, and then we could go to Screens > Edit Looks and say I only want to see that announcements layer on my live stream screen and not on my main output. So I could turn that off here. And now we’re seeing this announcement loop showing on our live stream while maybe we’re practicing on our main screen in our main room before an event starts. This is another great way that you can use a Lobby signage. So, this could be your Lobby signage, where it’s showing the announcement loop, and then on your main screen you’re running content, but people outside of the event don’t need to see this content that you’re running inside the event.
Video Inputs & Streaming
Lastly, let’s look at Video Inputs and how we can utilize those Looks in our Audience Screens to set up our live stream. To add your Video Input, let’s go to the Media Bin and at the bottom you’ll see Video Input.
Now, we’re going to add a new input, but instead of adding it directly, we want to go to our input configuration first, which you can also access from Preferences. Now, inside Preferences > Input tab, you can see different video and audio inputs that you can add in. I’ve already added a Video Input but if you don’t see one, you can click here to add one.
And now we need to set the device source for this Video Input. Now, you might have a built-in camera or a video input of some sort. I’m going to choose this NDI input from my video switcher. And so here we can see some different footage coming from the video switcher. And if we want to set up audio settings, we can do that as well. We can also set a custom thumbnail for this. So we can use this as our thumbnail or we can maybe wait a second, we got this little guitar shot here.
We’ll use that as our thumbnail, and so now that’s been captured and that will be the thumbnail in our Media Bin. So, I’ll close this out, and now we can go back down and we can actually add in that Video Input. And it’s going to use that thumbnail that we just selected. Now, when we trigger this Video Input, you’ll see that it’s showing on our live stream screen, but not our main output. And that’s because of Looks. If we go back to Screens > Edit Looks, you’ll see that our music Look that’s currently live, only the Video Inputs enabled on the live stream screen, not the main output.
And again, we have that altered version of our presentation layer. So if I click on some text, you’ll see how we get main center text on our main output, and we get this nice lower third on our live stream. So we can do some really cool stuff where we can have this nice graphic going on here, and we have our lower third text on our live stream exactly the way we want it.
So now that we have our live stream looking the way we want, let’s actually configure it. And we can do that by clicking on the Live button above our Preview area, and let’s go to Capture Settings. Now we have a few different options here. The first one is the source. So which source do we want to stream or capture. And this is where we can choose our live stream screen. So we can choose our audience screen of live stream, and then we can choose the destination. Do we want this to be recorded to the disk? Do we want it to be streamed to a normal RTMP source, or do we want to send a resilient stream with Resi?
Now we can go to our RTMP settings just so we can see how to set everything else up, so we could add in our address whether this was for YouTube or Facebook or another platform, you could add in your stream key, you can set what bitrate you want to encode in and you have an option to save a local copy.
Also, you have options for audio routing to make sure the right audio gets sent to your live stream. Streaming has other important details like audio routing, bandwidth requirements, Resi configuration, and other things that are important for you to understand. So, while this is how you can easily create your stream, I would highly recommend that you check out those other tutorials about those subjects before you go live.
Closing Comments
Well, let’s look back at everything we’ve talked about.
We learned how to navigate the interface and create presentations like songs and slideshows and teaching notes. We learned how ProPresenter uses layers to show content on your screens, and we learned how Looks can help take that content and choose which layers are shown on which screens or which versions of layers are shown on your different Audience Screens.
We also learned how we can show custom versions of our content on stage screens to help those onstage and behind the scenes see exactly what they need to. We also learned how to add actions to our slides to make it easy for our operators to control multiple features with a single click.
And we learned how to set up our live stream. Now you know the basics and you’re ready to present like a pro. But we’re just scratching the surface with many functions and capabilities of ProPresenter. So make sure you check out the many other free tutorials on the website to take your experience even further. And if you have questions, make sure to join the tens of thousands of other ProPresenter users in our Official Facebook Group. And for official support, make sure to reach out to the support team at support.renewedvision.com.
