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For years I’ve been pretty frustrated with the state of things on the Mac when it comes to serious lyric and video presentation software. I saw a demo of MediaShout once and have wished ever since that they made a Mac version. Heck, the developer even uses a Mac with Final Cut Pro to edit video! Over the last year I have scoured the internet looking for a good solution to controllable lyric and video presentation. The ONLY option that included video was Prolgue! Worship Leader, and to be honest, it seemed buggy and slow, and the video system was lousy. Then I found Oratorio late last year. It doesn't do video (yet) but it was incredibly easy to use, it can auto size your lyric text, saving you a ton of formatting time. Plus, the library function can quickly get you out of a sticky situation. But I was still forced to use another machine and a video switcher to show video, and loops were out of the question…until now.
Enter Prologue! SundayPlus, The new updated presentation program from Grass Roots software.
When my review copy arrived, I knew I was in for something different. I am used to downloading programs off the net, obviously with no printed documentation. SundayPlus arrived in a box containing some cute little packs of Jelly-Belly jelly beans (probably to butter me up!) a small plastic document holder and a cool black CD case containing the software, registration card and a nice little instruction manual. The manual was made for the windows version, but it is easy to follow and has a Mac info sheet stuck inside the cover.
Pop in the CD and run the installer. The installer and the main program run in OS 9 (and Classic), but the help program was created in Flash and runs fine in OS X. Run the installer and you can install the program and optionally some demo video, song, and background images. Knowing that usually the free stuff that comes with a program is lousy, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of most of the images.
Once installed you'll notice one draw back of using Macromedia Director to author programs: tons of files. The Prologue folder has no less than 47 files in it, including the program.
Idea for Grass Roots: Clean up the amount of files in the ProlgueSP folder, or do what Microsoft does, put a few items and an alias/shortcut to the app in one folder, and the real app and all the extra files in a sub folder. Just finding the application icon in the sea of files can be a task.
When you fist open SundayPlus your menu bar and desktop disappear and the SundayPlus screen is centered on your main screen (or fills it depending on your resolution) and sometimes it appears against a black background. I DO wish they'd give you the option to NOT hide the menubar.
The SP windows consists of three parts:
The Cue List area (Top left), Preview area (Top Right), and the “bin” or import area (Bottom).
BEFORE we cover how to set up a show, we need to import our media, so we'll be dealing with the Bin
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Grass Roots Software
