Looped Video Behind Notation in ProPresenter Software

Two of the most popular choices for presentational software in churches are Proclaim and ProPresenter. Both packages offer expansive options in the way content in presented and I would highly suggest either one. For churches who wish to present notation on screen (sheet music), your options for aesthetically pleasing images pretty much go out the door. Unless, that is, you know how to format things correctly and make the software do things it wasn’t necessarily intended to do.

This article will focus on how to allow a looped video to play behind your notation on screen in ProPresenter.

Getting a moving background to play behind on-screen notation in ProPresenter is a simple action. The brunt of the work comes in prep for the slides itself.

Obviously, the first step is to create your notation with a transparent background.  I have covered this in a previous blog post found here:

http://garymoyers.com/make-your-worship-song-slides-more-appealing/

With the process above, you would simply stop before you added a static background and then export the slides as a PNG.

A simpler option is to use notation from PowerPoint slides that has been left in layers, such as those from Keith Lancaster’s Praise & Harmony. In this case, you would just erase every layer but the notation and, again, export as PNG. Either way you do it, you need to end up with notation slides on a transparent background in PNG.

Once you have your full song in slides on PNG files, you’re ready to go to ProPresenter. 

The first step is create a new document, either by hitting Command-N (Mac) or hitting the plus sign in the lower left corner and choosing New Document. It will give you an empty presentation with one blank slide. You can either use that or delete it. More on that in a moment.

At this point, open up your Finder/File window and go to the directory where your transparent files are. Highlight all of them and drag and drop into the new document window on ProPresenter (the big gray thing).

Doing this will create new slides with your PNG files already embedded. One problem, though. It will automatically assign your imported files as a background. Notice the little icon in the upper left corner (see red arrow on example below). This means it will not work as it is, because your slide thinks it already has a background.

Now you must covert it. Select ALL of the slides in your presentation. Then right click on one of them and choose “Convert Media Cue to Slide Element.”

This will turn all of your PNG files into foreground images. At this point, all you need to do is locate the video file you want to use as a background (which you should place in your ProPresenter Video/Image bin ahead of time) and option-drop or alt-drag it into the first slide. If you don’t option-drag, it will replace your PNG file.

If you still have the blank slide that was created initially and you dropped the video into it, then people will see the video before you launch the notation. If you deleted that, the notation will come up with video simultaneously.

After that, your Presentation should look something like this (see screenshot below):

Now, wash, rinse and repeat for as many songs as you wish. Hope that helps.

One note: when creating your PNG files, it’s best to create them in the native size that your ProPresenter presentation will be be using. The example above has everything in 720p.

Have fun!

~ Gary