Add an dedicated lower thirds output option
Having an additional video output option where lyrics could be formatted as lower thirds instead of centered would be extremely helpful for keying in with a basic video switcher. Distinguished from the main display and confidence displays. The foreground only option would be great, if it allowed different position and sizing of the text.
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Dr Mike Fariss commented
I cant find the place to vote but I need the lower thirds badly.
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Kevin Hutton commented
Adding some additional support for this, and want to say thanks for adding the Alternate Content option and NDI support. I was a big proponent of this in another feature request and I'm really stoked to see Proclaim moving towards being a fully fledged professional piece of software. I love using it, and it's great for volunteers. Thanks!
As others have said, the ability to change the format of Alternate Content slides would be awesome, the obvious use being lower thirds. I'm using alternate content for our lyrics and outputting foreground only to our stream. We don't have anyone except staff and service participants in the building right now, so I'm just formatting the lyrics as lower thirds on the main display so they appear that way in my stream feed. This is totally fine for now, but if/when we get people back in the building I'd love to format the main display "normally" with a separate look for the stream. There are a lot of workarounds for this, but for ease of use it'd be awesome to do it in Proclaim.
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Alan commented
Do we have a timeline on when this feature is to be added. I have been experimenting with the virtual screens, but I need to be able to edit text box layouts separate from the main screen for this feature to meet our needs.
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Anonymous commented
Completely support this, the way our building is set up, we have to have the lyrics in house at the top of the screen otherwise the congregation can't see them, but online the presentation and framing of shots it works better at the bottom. If we can configure the output of lyrics to be in a different place for the live stream output, it really would be a game changer. The new virtual screen setting makes very significant improvements, but this would take it to the perfect level!
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Matthew Van Zante commented
Seeing what everyone else has done, I thought I'd mention our solution.
1) We have reconfigured all our songs to use a max of 3 lines and send the same output to both the sanctuary screen and the OBS machine. We center the text vertically and horizontally.
2) On the OBS/Streaming machine we have two input devices for slides and the output from Proclaim is split to those two inputs. One of the inputs is configured in OBS as a standard full screen input, the other is configured with the signal shifted such that the lyrics only show on the lower third of the screen.
3) For our song lyrics we utilize an Outer Stroke of a slightly off-black color (such as #00DD00), and use a full #000000 black for the background color. We then configure the "Lyrics" OBS input to make that black #000000 color transparent. This allows us to have a "black" #00DD00 outline around our white text. However, because of the "chroma key" we can no longer use a fade transition and have just switched to no transition between song slides. We also have to be sure the OBS operator is no longer using the Proclaim Lyrics feed before switching to any full-color slides or things can look really strange on the stream. We utilize the full-screen Proclaim feed for the rest of the service for things like announcement or sermon slides. -
Zac commented
Agreed! We love Proclaim but as we start live-streaming the lack of this feature is the only reason I’m considering switching Pro Presenter.
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David commented
To Rick Bird; I find that 4 lines on a lower thirds is still quite legible, so that is what we are doing for the streaming so that we can keep paired outputs for the streaming and sanctuary (we are using foreground only for streaming and confidence for sanctuary as a workaround for now). It's a compromise, but I also find seeing as much of a verse in one block as possible makes it easier to understand the meaning of the verse as a whole rather than two lines at a time.
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Rick Bird commented
I have also wanted this feature as an additional output screen, but I wasn't sure how it would be practically implemented. Normally, we are projecting 4-5 lines of lyrics or verse or whatever. When we went to lower thirds for online only services (we no longer needed the regular projection) we found we needed to have only 2-3 lines in the lower thirds section. So I could never work out how running both at the same time would be able to queue the right lyrics for each display. I can't see a way to get around having two operators, one for the 4-5 line display and one for the 2-3 lower thirds display. We have also rec'd feedback from the online attendees that they would appreciate having lyrics, verses and sermon points on the screen as lower thirds once we are doing on site and online services again.
Anyone have any ideas on how to manage two sets of lyric screen outputs at the same time? I suspect this would be similar to those who do two languages at the same time? Maybe different sets of keyboard shortcuts? Or maybe the slides are divided in such a manner that the operator would just queue the lower thirds display and the full display would advance appropriately automatically?
Regardless, this would be exciting to see and really improve things. -
Robbie Bott commented
I know it’s not ideal, but as a temporary work around, we found another volunteer and now run two presentations one for FOH and one for livestream that is basically the same as FOH but formatted to lower thirds...
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Timothy R. Butler commented
Amen to this -- drawing on stream video from either the house screens or confidence monitors are not ideal at all in many cases. Lower thirds for words to songs, for example, are perfect on a stream and not good at all for displaying in the sanctuary. Basically, if Proclaim could add another tab for an "NDI Output" screen (I voted for NDI support separately) and then allow the NDI Output to be customized exactly like how the new custom confidence monitor option does, it would solve this and open the possibility of lower thirds for music, lower thirds for speakers, etc. It would be huge and essentially make use of functionality Faithlife has already implemented for confidence monitors.
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Jeromy Waunch commented
Agreed. Our renewal is up in around a month, and I am seriously considering moving to another program because of this limitation. COVID-19 restrictions have suddenly made live streaming an huge priority for us.
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Barefoot Rob commented
I agree, currently it makes it difficult to show lower thirds without changing how the front of house or the confidence monitors look, which isn't a good option! You have finally changed how we can make the confidence display appear, now lets continue those changes into the lower thirds for streaming. In the current situation that churches are in thanks to COVID-19, streaming is our only option, but soon that will change and churches that weren't streaming before COVID, will now be streaming after we can get back into our buildings, and it would be nice to have this capability from Proclaim.