ProPresenter

We use ProPresenter for our slides as well as audio/visual cues during service.

Operation

Only Click Once

If it appears that something is taking a while to load after you click it, do not click again! Only one click is required and clicking multiple times will cause stuttering.

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
cmd+1	Toggle Output
cmd+2	Toggle Stage Display
cmd+3	Toggle Stage Display Preview
F1	Clear Everything (Blackout)
F6	Clear Everything (Go to Logo)
F2	Clear Slide (Leave Background)
F3	Clear Background
F4	Clear Props
F5	Clear Audio

Setup

Master Instance

The master instance of ProPresenter is what powers the main auditorium projection. We project at full 1080p but the bottom 1920x430 section is just solid black. Our effective projection is 1920x650. This setup allows us to use the area of the stage that is below the projection screen. There is also a TV on top of the booth which acts as a stage display (clocks, timers, videos, etc).

The display settings on the master ProPresenter computer should be that both the projector and TV are not mirrored and both running at a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p).

Displays

Projector

TV

The output should be configured to go to the projector and the stage display should be configured to go to the TV.

Display Settings

Placeholder: Network settings

Placeholder: Audio Hijack

Slave Instance

Placeholder: Network settings

Placeholder: Audio Hijack

Media Prep

Videos

The following ffmpeg command will prepare videos for our projection setup:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v "scale=1920:1080, crop=1920:650:0:215, pad=1920:1080:0:0" output.mp4

Breaking it down:

1. ffmpeg -i input.mp4 - ffmpeg will read the video file input.mp4.

2. -filter:v " - Specify video filters for ffmpeg.

3. scale=1920:1080, - Scales the video to 1080p. Lots of videos are still

   720p. This is not necessary when working with a video that is already

   1080p.

4. crop=1920:650:0:215, - Crops the video to 1920x650 (our visible

   projection resolution) cutting off the top and bottom 215 pixels. 0:215

   specifies the top-left corner of the crop box.

5. pad=1920:1080:0:0" - Pads the video back out to 1080p placing black

   bars in the remaining space. 0:0 specifies putting the video in the

   top-left corner of the resulting 1080p image, leaving 430 pixels of

   black bar on the bottom.

6. output.mp4 - Tells ffmpeg to write the resulting video file to

   output.mp4.

Pillar Box

Alternatively, use the following ffmpeg command to pillar-box a video for our projection setup:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v "scale=1156:650,pad=1920:1080:382" output.mp4

Slides

We have two targets for slides. One is the auditorium projection, set up for 1920x650 (shorter than standard 1080p). The other target is the live stream, which is full 1080p. To accomodate for these two targets, slides should be designed in Keynote in full 1080p resolution with 215px buffers on the top and bottom. The middle 650px is a safe area for text and important picture details. See the following example slide (red buffer zones for illustrative purposes only, they are not required in actual slide designs):

Creation of Adam Slide

With slides set up as such we will prepare two sets of images. The first will be the full slide graphics for the live stream. The other will be the middle section cropped out for projection in the auditorium.

Given a Keynote file set up properly as such, the first step is to export the slides to images. Open the Keynote file and go to File > Export To... > Images. Choose to export all slides with an image for each stage of builds in PNG format. We do not want to use JPEG for slide graphics. Choose any directory for output. The images output by this step are the full images which will be used for the live stream.

Now we have to generate the cropped images for projection in the auditorum. The easiest way to do this is to use ImageMagick. Open a terminal in the directory where the slide images are located and run the following commands:

mkdir -p padded
magick '*.png[1920x650+0+215]' -gravity north -background black -extent 1920x1080 'padded/%03d.png'

The first command will create a directory called padded to export the cropped/padded images to. The second command will crop out the middle section of the images (1920x650 starting at (0,215)) and then grow the images back out to 1080p with the cropped contents pushed to the top of the frame leaving the bottom 430px solid black. The images will be output to padded/000.png, padded/001.png, padded/002.png, etc.