I'll be doing some multimedia training at church on Saturday 10 Feb from 9 - 11. The training will cover projector and laptop setup, dual screen setup and use, using powerpoint (single and dual screen) and using opensong. We'll see what we can do to come up with some "best practices" so that this job is fun and not stressful!

Want to know how what parts to get to set up your own wireless network? The nice people at Simply Youth Ministry have written an article which does exactly that.

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I was doing multimedia at church last night - which right now means just projecting song words during worship. My software of choice is OpenSong, which is open source software written specifically for churches (plus it imports music directly from CCLI but until they get it working in South Africa we're stuck in the 3rd world). Sarah lent me her laptop for the service, which was great. I had lots of time pressure since we only arrived back from our weekend in the Berg at 5, and church started at 7. I got there at 10 to 7; Merv helped set up the projector (thanks Merv!!!) and Sarah Andrews helped me add in the songs that weren't already there.

Luckily I was working on a PC running Windows XP.

For some reason the PC didn't pick up the projector plugged into it. Weird. Strange. Merv's simple solution was to reboot the PC with the projector plugged in. Simple enough. (Unfortunately the service had already started and I was trying to get this working...as the first worship song started).

So I rebooted. Time was ticking. 2 minutes later I logged in, but dual screen still didn't work. Luckily Frank came up to me and showed me the simple process of getting dual screen working. All I had to do was press Function-F5 (or F3 or F8 - I'm not really sure which) then right-click on the desktop, go to properties, and click on the displays tab. Then I had to select the second screen, click "extend my Windows desktop onto this display" and it'll work. Which it did.

So simple - why didn't I think of that?!

And so we were good to go. My, how I laugh at my friends who use Macs. All they have to do is plug in the projector and it works. They're funny and obviously not as clever as they think they are.

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Thanks Andy - some excellent suggestions there! Especially the one about the electric drum kit - they produce absolutely no "stage sound."

In terms of software we need to purchase - one big consideration would be - do we want a database of all songs (in which case all we do is pick the song from a list and the lyrics appear on the screen) - or do we want to use powerpoint (which would be cheaper but all of the lyrics of all the songs would need to be typed in)? Question: are we a part of CCLI?

Earlier on I mentioned the website - when I first heard about the donation it was in the context of "multimedia" and I'd definitely view the website as multimedia. To use it properly we need to not just view as "oh, this is just an extra something we do because we think it's a good idea" but really look in to how to use it properly.

We probably also need to think along the lines of what else we could use the laptop for. It would seem quite a waste to purchase a laptop which we'd use once a week on Sundays and it would sit gather dust (and rather expensive dust) on a shelf for most of the week. I'm sure we could come up with more ideas - but the first one that pops into my head is to use the laptop for making videos - which are actually rather easy to do.

An idea would be to record all of the sermons, mp3 them and put them online on our website.