Once you've created a show, you'll want to add things like transitions or loops to it.
There's a slider and a button underneath the preview window that you may have noticed:
Clicking on the large green button toggles three modes: Global, Preset and None. Global gives every slide the same transition, and you can change this by Right/Control clicking on the button. Preset lets you choose a different transition for every slide. You can set this by Right/Control clicking on the slide in the cue list. None, obviously gives you no transitions between slides.
Lots of people want to be able to run an announcement loop before the service. This is actually pretty easy. Right/Control click on a slide and choose Loop. Set your timing in the window that pops up and click the Set Range button. Your cursor changes to a "start" icon. Click the slide you want the loop to start with. Then your cursor will change to an "end" icon. Click on the slide you want the loop to end with. The loop will start right away. You can then click the End Loop button to stop the loop. NOTE: One thing you won't find in the manual: If you are using video clips in a loop, the WILL play in their entirety, overridding your timings, which is usually what you want to happen.
There are two more buttons we haven't used yet. Bail to Logo and Bail to Black.
Bail to Black blacks the screen out until you click on a new slide.
Bail to Logo fills the screen with a logo of your choice (you can replace the SundayPlus logo in the prefs)
SundayPlus allows you to display a number that you can use so that parents know that they need to go to the nursery. It's buried in the Cue menu and in order to change it, you must go to the menu and bring up the window. But, you can turn the number off and on by hitting the N key, and the first time you ever click the N key, the window opens to let you decide where to put the number and what the number will be. One nice thing I found that WASN'T in the manual: Command-N (control-N on the PC) always brings up the window, allowing you to change the settings without going to the menu. Very nice.
NOTE: I originally put this in the my complaints area on page 6, until I learned those few key commands that make it very easy to use. Lesson learned: READ THE MANUAL COMPLETELY BEFORE USING THIS PROGRAM! And always try a key command if you think it makes sense to be there-it probably is. There is a chart at the back that contains key combinations that aren't necessarily mentioned elsewhere in the manual, and if you're a Mac user, most of the time you must substitute the Command key for the Control key.
One cool new feature I mentioned earlier allows you to drag a song on top of a video clip. Now, don’t get your hopes too high-SundayPlus does NOT "Key" or superimpose the song over the motion video behind it, instead it puts a colored or image background strip behind the text. A neat trick to get by the hardware limitations of compositing in realtime-something most computers can't do very well. The benefit of all this is that if you format your songs to only take a strip along the bottom (or top) of the screen, one or two lines high, you can put the song words across the bottom of the screen while a video image you want is playing on the rest of the screen. Don’t try this on anything less than a G4, and you can forget Classic unless you don’t mind the video pausing every time you change the words on screen. This effect only works on pre-made video clips, it DOES NOT work with live video, SundayPlus just isn't wired that way.
One thing we haven't covered is the Preview screen. To the right of the Cue list is the preview window. I'm not quite sure what this shows by default since I have changed my settings so many times, but it has 4 "modes" as I call them. Mode 1 is Picture in Picture with the "next up" slide small (like a picture in picture window) and the "showing" slide large. If you click on the large slide, it will switch to mode 2 which is the reverse of mode 1. Control-Click on the large slide and you'll get modes 3 and 4. These two modes only show one slide, but you can switch between the "next up" or the "showing" slide by clicking on the slide. Control-Click and you're back to Picture in Picture. You can also preview any slide in the Cue list by Control-clicking on it and choosing Preview from the menu. There is a bug with this feature though. If you have a song showing when you preview an image, it will show the image you want to preview with the text of the current showing (or next up) slide over it. I don't recommend previewing and out of sequence slide while a song is showing, it just gets confusing.
What to run SundayPlus on an iBook, or PC with no extra video card? Tucked away in the Prefs (under the Tools menu) are the Display settings. In the resolution area you'll see several resolutions including 256x192. When you only have one screen SundayPlus uses this resolution to emulate the display screen. BUT you can choose the resolution matching the one your single screen is running and SundayPlus will set the floating window to that size and center it on your screen-covering up the control window. When you're done with the show you can simply click on the screen and drag the window far enough out of the way to get to the Tools menu and change the resolution back to 256X192. This was confusing when I first discovered it, but it works very well.
NOTE: there are some new helpful key commands that did NOT make it into the manual, but work in the Mac version (The Command Key is the same as the Apple Key)
Clicking Command-1 switches to Single Screen presentation mode
Clicking Command-2 switches to searches for monitor 2 and switches to dual screen
Clicking Command-0 switches single screen back to regular working mode, so you don't have to figure out how to clear the screen.
|
