Overview

This concludes our "Road to ProPresenter 4" as we've almost arrived! Steve Fee, an incredible worship leader and a great friend, has honored us by highlighting some of our most exciting new features in a video you can watch here.

Upgrades

Owners of version 2 or 3 may upgrade for 50% off the retail price of the corresponding license they own (Single to Single, Site to Site). The price to upgrade a ProPresenter 3 Single-user license to a ProPresenter 4 Site License is $599. To upgrade a ProPresenter 4 Single User License to a Site License is $500. For questions regarding how our licensing works, please click here.

All users who bought ProPresenter 3 on or after September 1, 2009 will receive a free upgrade to the corresponding license they paid for automatically when the final version ships.

ProPresenter Modules and Remote

All Advanced Module, Alpha-Keyer Module, or ProPresenter Remote owners will get an upgrade to allow these same functions within ProPresenter 4 for no additional cost. Please be sure to report back to us any problems you experience with our Beta so we can resolve them as quickly as possible. If you're unfamiliar with these products, you can learn more about each of them here:

• ProPresenter Advanced Module
• ProPresenter Alpha Keyer Module
• ProPresenter Remote

How To?

Want help learning how to use all the new features? Click here to see our new set of video tutorials for ProPresenter 4!

• Browse Videos

We also have a first draft of our manual ready for those who prefer to read documentation. You may download the PDF manual below:

• ProPresenter 4

What's Next?

The Public Beta release is done so that our customers can help us uncover any outstanding problems with the software before it is used in front of a live audience. This upgrade to ProPresenter is so significant, we're calling on our incredible customers to help us out. Your assistance testing ProPresenter 4 will benefit the ProPresenter community as a whole in helping us to deliver the most powerful AND stable solution possible.

The Beta requires a new ProPresenter 4 Unlock Code to eliminate the watermark. This was eMailed to all customers who have purchased the upgrade. If you should have received this and didn't, you may always retrieve all your codes from our code look-up function on our Support Page. Otherwise you'll need to purchase an upgrade to use the Pro4 beta. To get the Beta, you must login to our User Forum where you will be able to download it.

We thank you again for your patience, support, and encouragement! We'll continue working diligently to wrap up ProPresenter 4. All the kind words and enthusiasm never go unnoticed and make our jobs worth it!

ProPresenter 4 Interface Enhancements

We have made some great improvements, but you'll find it very similar to the ProPresenter interface our customers love Ñ with an intuitive layout that makes powerful presentation capabilities approachable and easy to use.

One of the biggest changes is the new Tool Bar where you can have instant access to all the most commonly used features of the program. This area is now customizable, so you can arrange the available functions in the manner most useful for you, as well as add your favorite or most commonly used extras (such as Song Select or the Renewed Vision Store).

We've also moved movie controls under the preview window and changed the location of the Announcement / Count-down window because of enahncements we've made to these functions (still available with a single click, however). Also seen here is the removal of the "Scripture" and "Media" tabs that were next to the playlist. We've consolidated our media where it should belong: down with our other visual media elements. What was formerly known as the "Backgrounds" bin is now called the "Video & Image Bin" since it houses all such media, background or foreground.

The Audio Bin has been moved out of the old "Backgrounds" bin and is now located in it's own dedicated column on the right side. Since there is no visual element to an audio clip, there's no real need for them to have a traditional thumbnail. Most all users viewed our Audio bin in a list manner, so having it on the right side allows for longer lists now.

These are just a few of the many improvements we've made. Suffice it to say, we've given these improvements a great deal of thought and are excited to share them with you. We hope you will enjoy ProPresenter 4 as much as we do.

Document Based

ProPresenter 4 is now document-based (prior versions relied on a single database for all presentations). This change means more information can be reliably stored within a single document and presentations can be shared more easily since each document is just a file within a folder. This facilitates the easy export of songs and playlists via simple drag and drop operations and also makes the new server synchronization capability possible.

With the new document model, you can now just drag and drop songs or entire playlists to the desktop (or any other mounted volume) to export them.

Multiple Libraries

Bloated song Library driving you mad? Are people from different groups within your organization changing the songs you've laid out in ProPresenter? There's a solution for this. ProPresenter 4 allows you to have multiple Libraries to segment your content. Now the Youth Department can have their own Library so changes they make to songs will not catch you off guard when Sunday rolls around.

Once a Library has been set up, it's easy to switch between them.

To create a library or add a new one to the list, just choose "Manage Library". A Library is just a folder on a local or external/remote drive. Choose the one you want and it will be added to the list.

Web View

In this modern day, so much information and content is on the Web. ProPresenter 4 allows you to easily share a live web page with your audience. The software provides a web browser within the interface that is mirrored to the output display — without all the extra interface pieces such as address bars, bookmarks, and other distracting elements — so the focus remains on the content of the page itself.

You can also use this feature to easily display content from YouTube or to present any Flash-enhanced websites.

Library Synchronization

Ever struggle keeping the Libraries of multiple ProPresenter stations in sync? Now there's a solution for that. ProPresenter 4 offers the ability to synchronize to any central repository, whether it's a local drive or over a network. A central repository is simply a ProPresenter Library that is made available publicly on a network that other machines can access. With this in place, every system on your network can upload and download song files across the network and so changes made on one machine are available to all machines on your network.

The Library Synchronization feature resides in ProPresenter's Preferences panel, but is also available as a Toolbar icon. In this panel, you identify what server you want to synchronize with and where the Library folder is located. You can opt to just download, upload, or do a bi-directional sync.

In all cases, ProPresenter will compare the contents of each folder, present what files are more recent, and allow you to choose which files you wish to replace either locally or remotely.

Messages, Clocks, and Tokens

ProPresenter 4 offers an enhanced messaging window that's still simple to use. Now you can save multiple sets of messages that you can quickly access and send to the screen. These messages can contain dynamic data, so formatting and editing custom messages can be quick and easy.

Looking at the full message window, dynamic data is managed by a new element we call Tokens. As evident by their names, Tokens are placeholders for variable data such as clocks, timers, and text. You can interlace static text with Tokens to expedite data entry for your operators.

When clicking on the Messages button the first time, only the variable fields for the selected Message are seen for quick configuration and firing to screen.

We've also added several different types of clocks. There's a system clock, an elapsed time clock, and multiple countdown timers that you can give custom names. These clocks can be set or started in this panel or in the messages window.

Customizable Video Attributes

Do you want to set a new in or out point for a video? How about changing that background loop from green to blue without having to edit it? Now with customizable video attributes, it's no problem!

This new capability in ProPresenter 4 adds a great deal of flexibility on how you work with videos. Now you can customize the thumbnail of a clip, modify it's in/out points, speed it up or slow it down, scale it, flip it, customize the volume level, and change it's hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness.

You can even have mulitple instances of a clip in different play lists and customize each one, so one clip could have many versions. It's also a good place to find details about a clip such as it's name, location, size, format, length, etc. This is all done via the new Cue Inspector window which allows you to save these settings for the video clip or image.

Templates

Templates were a highly desired and often requested feature. ProPresenter 4 satisfies this demand with a robust mechanism for designing and applying templates to any Presentation in your Library. Any slide you customize can be saved as a template.

Through a process we call "Refactoring", you can apply this template to a single slide, a whole Presentation, or a group of Presentations in one step. Templates can even have varying resolutions since "Refactoring" is smart enough to figure out how to resize text and object location accordingly (otherwise 50 point text on an 800x600 resolution would appear much smaller when placed on a template with a resolution of 1280x1024).

Clicking the Edit Template Group menu brings up the Template Editor where you can edit and place elements.

Props Layer

This sophisticated new props layer opens the doors to a whole host of possibilities in the all new ProPresenter 4. It offers a solution to that long sought after feature request... "How do I put a my church logo as a graphic bug in the lower right corner?"...and so much more! A prop can remain on stage for just one slide, multiple slides, or for the entire presentation. This layer is independent of other layers allowing props to be triggered at any moment for any length of time, and props adhere to transparency settings for those graphic formats that support them.

The Props panel is readily available by clicking on it's icon in the main ProPresenter menu. From here, it's very easy to see what props are on or off and trigger them accordingly.

Clicking the Edit menu brings up the Props Editor panel where Props can be created, edited, and saved as seen below. Depending on the power of your machine, you can even do a picture-in-picture (PIP) by playing a video or run a live feed into a prop.

PowerPoint Importing

In ProPresenter 4, you can import PowerPoint documents directly into the program. In the past, this has been a manual process requiring you to copy and paste text from each PowerPoint document to a new ProPresenter presentation or export all your PowerPoint slides as JPEGs and import these images. ProPresenter 4 automates this process for you in one simple step!

Under the Import Menu is the option to import a PowerPoint document. From the dialog box that appears (shown below), you'll see three selections to choose from that automate the importing of a PowerPoint document into ProPresenter 4. Each option creates a new ProPresenter presentation and populate it with slides according to the option selected. The first creates slides that are JPEG versions of each slide (thus retaining the formatting and layout precisely as they appear in PowerPoint). The second option extracts all text elements from each slide of the PowerPoint document and creates corresponding slides in ProPresenter 4 with the text from these elements. The third option brings in all objects, including graphics, that appear in the PowerPoint slides.

As in ProPresenter 3, you can run PowerPoint at the same time as ProPresenter 4 for more advanced slide shows. With these new options, however, it has never been easier to create a ProPresenter presentation from a PowerPoint slide show. You can even import multiple PowerPoint documents with any of these options in a single batch process.

Stage Display

ProPresenter 4 will ship standard with a highly customizable Stage Display feature. Now you can share and communicate with the people on stage using a third independent display from ProPresenter.

The customizable view allows you to display the current slide's text, next slide's text, clocks, timers, notes, and even an alert message in a layout you configure. Text can be enlarged for easier readability and fields can be arranged in a manner that best suits your team. This view will not provide video playback, but will show still images of backgrounds as a preview of what is shown to the audience.

While this feature will be standard in ProPresenter 4, it will require an additional video out. You can now take advantage of a secondary graphics card installed in a MacPro, or use a USB video output device which will work on most any Mac. This will be sold separately on our website for less than $100 (details available soon). Then just run the signal from this card or adaptor to your plasma on stage or rear wall projector.

New Presentation Views

A common request of our users was to be able to see the slides of every presentation in the playlist in one contiguous view. We listened and we delivered. Now when one presentation ends, you can continue to the next with ease. It was a good idea and is now available in the all new ProPresenter 4!

In addition, we decided it would be nice to view presentations in a more linear fashion. Our new list view is also capable of viewing presentations in a contiguous manner.

Live Scripture with AutoFlow

Presenting scripture is easier than ever with the new live update capability of ProPresenter 4. Simply select the Book, Chapter and verse from a pull down menu, or type the search range manually. This enhancement lets you dynamically build scripture slides during a presentation in the case where you get an unexpected "live" call out from stage. If your speaker wants to reference passages on-the-fly, you'll be ready to add scripture in the format you want, quickly and easily.

Along with improved display of verse superscript and reference options, a template is used to generate the verse layout. If a verse contains more text than will fit into the text box of a single slide, the remaining text will be flowed into a new slide. This greatly simplifies the job of keeping scripture properly aligned and formatted on each slide, especially when utilizing lower third backgrounds!

Search results can be saved into presentations. When a verse range is found, just click the "Create Presentation" button to create all the necessary slides. In addition, ProPresenter 4 gives you the ability to add previous or next verses to a saved document.

Advanced Timeline

The Song Automation capability of ProPresenter 3 was the first of it's kind in the worship software market, offering the ability to easily pre-sequence slides to an audio track for synchronized playback. We wanted to make it better.

In ProPresenter 4, the timeline feature has a new interface that is intuitive and easy to use. Create a timeline based on a manually entered duration, or link the timeline to an audio file to set the duration automatically. You can zoom in and out on the timeline to better visualize your presentation and edit from a macro view (minutes) or a micro view (seconds). Sides can now be dragged and dropped onto the timeline to create cues, and each cue can be moved around easily to precisely adjust when they are triggered. Cues can also be created in the traditional ProPresenter manner by starting the timeline (again, with or without a soundtrack), pressing "record", and clicking on slides in sequence.

We've also added the ability to apply an offset to all slides at once (for example, if you want to display each slide a 1/2 second earlier so the audience will see the text a moment before a verse is to be sung).

There's more features to the timeline, but we'll leave those for another, um, time.

Feature Spotlight 1: Display Engine with Multiple Objects per Slide

The heart of ProPresenter has always been its display engine, and with the all new ProPresenter 4, you have more display capabilities than ever before. Let's start with the slides — now you have the ability to put multiple objects on the slide so you can arrange it the way you want - with multiple pictures, video loops, and text boxes that give you precise control of alignment, style, leading, spacing, and margins. All while maintaining the incredible ease-of-use you've come to expect from ProPresenter.

Advanced Typography and Object Layout

Object layout and typography have been completely re-engineered and now mirror many of the capabilities found in traditional desktop layout programs. Adjustments for kerning, leading, line color, fill color, corner radius, shadow (angle, length, and radius) are a few examples. It's now a breeze for ProPresenter 4 to create and display many elements at a time offering a great deal of flexibility over what any one slide can output.