Viewing Plans

Access your Planning Center Online plans directly from the Song Deck.

Plan Items

Plan items appear as two types of cues: Lyric cues (songs) and Comment Cues (all other plan items).

Visit our Knowledge Base article to learn more.

• v4.5: Better SongSelect Integration (see our FAQ article)
• Mac: OSX Lion compatibility

LEARN MORE & DOWNLOAD

MediaShout Version 4.5

MediaShout for Mac

To install NIV 2011 in your copy of MediaShout, please see the following Knowledge Base articles:

• Installing NIV 2011 in Version 4.5
  
• Installing NIV 2011 in Version 3.5 
  

Online Training

Using interactive online technology, we will design a 90-minute MediaShout training session for you and your team. Training can be customized to your skill level and emphasize specific areas of the program to help you make the most of your multimedia ministry.

On-Site Training

This is the ultimate training experience for your team. Our expert trainers will come to your organization for a day of hands-on MediaShout training. We’ll cover everything from the basics to advanced features, creatively using media to minister to your audience, visual worship leading, and of course leave plenty of time for questions. 

Interested? Call us - 888.829.7168

If you're interested in learning more about these personalized training opportunities for your team, please give our sales team a call at 888.829.7168 and we would be happy to share more information with you and even schedule a training session at your convenience.

We had our first service with Media Shout last night, and it worked great!  Thanks again for letting us have it.  With a couple of elements not coming together until an hour before service, it was real easy to import them to the script, and our principle slide guy was able to master the basics easily, and was performing like a pro by the end of the service.

Victory Base is home to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, as well as US Government civilian employees, and civilian contractors supporting the mission here.  Thank you for your continued prayers for those of us here, and our families back home. 

Thanks again, and here are some photos of our service. 

If you would like to learn more about how MediaShout is helping our military stationed overseas, please contact marketing@mediashout.com. 

SHADOW
Let’s face it, the foreground and background layers aren’t really layers in the physical sense. They appear together on the same flat display surface, their light reaching our eyes at the same time and angle, so the brain’s primary depth-perception triangulator thingy (yup, it’s a medical term) perceives no difference in distance.

But our doodling ancestors figured out another way to convey depth. When an object (say, a saber-toothed tiger) stands between a light source (fire) and another object (cave wall), it leaves a silhouette of itself on the second object. After changing his loincloth, an observer of this phenomenon figured out that if he added a silhouette to a painting of the object, said object would appear to jump out from the surface he painted it on. The fake shadow was born.

Adding a shadow effect to text can do the same thing: The silhouette of the letters help the brain perceive the letters themselves as separate from background the shadow is cast upon.

OUTLINE
Like real ones, fake shadows don’t help much if they and the objects they mimic don’t sufficiently contrast with the background. When a shadow effect isn’t enough, you can add contrast by outlining the text or softening the background.

The text outline effect is an easier fix, but it’s also easier to use poorly. Choose the thinnest width necessary to make the text readable above the background. The wider the outline, the harder it is for the eye to see differences in similarly shaped letters. The color should contrast with the text and the background. Go with black if you can, and avoid bright colors that call steal attention from the characters themselves. And don’t forget: What looks good on your computer’s display may be a blur to someone sitting in the back row trying to read that billboard-sized display your painting with MediaShout.

PICTURE
Many great pictures are just not meant to play a background role. Even effected text gets lost in the details, and characters that stand out in one place disappear in another. If you can’t use a more text-friendly picture, try tweaking the one you’ve got, using your favorite image-editing tool (mine is Photoshop Elements).

For example, if just some of the words are hard to read, reduce the contrast. If the readability problem spans most of the page, try darkening it by placing a semi-opaque layer over it, and then adjusting the opacity till you get the best look.

If this causes the picture to lose important details or changes its mood too much, you can use another trick to get some of it back: Assign the original, unaltered version of the picture to a blank page that appears before the first page of text, which uses the text-friendly version. Even if the blank page appears for just a second or two, the brain will continue to “see” what’s obscured in the altered picture.

Another trick can work if your display is large enough: Resize and position the picture to one side of the frame so that the cue’s base color appears as a fat margin next to it. Adjust the text margins to fit the text within this space. With the picture on one side and the text over a solid color on the other, the words will remain readable without taming the picture into dullness.  

Yet I see lots of ministry presentations with great pictures but poorly formatted text. Their creators seem to forget that text intended for display requires a different kind of formatting from text that’s intended to be read up close in documents, emails, online, and so on. And since that’s how most of us create our presentations — up close, on our own computer monitor — what looks good in preview may not look that way on the big screen when it counts.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Use these simple tricks to make sure the text in your presentations’ message support, lyrics and announcements looks great and reads well to the audience:

Keep text big. The minimum readable font size depends on display resolution, room size, lighting, and other factors unique to your venue. So the only sure way to determine what’s too small is through a real-world test: Display a screen containing several lines of text of descending size, over a typical background. Set the room’s lighting to match less-than-ideal conditions, and then sit in the last row to read it. Note the size of the smallest readable line, then increase that number by about 10 percent. That’s the minimum font size for your room.

Go easy on fonts. On any given screen, and among multiple screens in a series, pick a solid header font and a simple, crisp, readable body font, and stick with them. Stay away from abstract and ornamental fonts, which are harder to read and may not hold up well when displayed at a lower resolution or in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. With very few exceptions, using more than two or three simple, readable fonts just clutters up the screen and makes readers work too hard to decipher the message.

Let words breathe. We humans are a sympathetic bunch. Just looking at a picture of someone standing in a snowstorm makes us feel cold. Even stranger: Just looking at a page or screen of crowded words makes us feel crowded. (A handy trick if you’re illustrating a message about anxiety or, say, the lack of personal space in Hell.) But if you’re trying to inspire a sense of God, a boundless faith, a hope eternal, then give the words some breathing space and your audience will breathe easier too. You can do this with wider margins, fewer words per line, and fewer lines on the screen. Need room for more words? Well, that’s what we created multiple-page cues for.