One of the most important parts of our worship service is the motion graphics we display on the center screen. We have an amazing group of graphics operators that truly have a heart for worship, and lead the congregation in worship graphically just as the worship team leads worship musically.
Like many churches, we utilize worship motion graphics distributors such as Worship House Media and Sermon Spice, as well as stock video sites such as Pond5.com and iStockphoto for content to display. These are great sources, but as we’ve progressed in our production, we’ve found a need for creating unique content for our worship sets, as well as our message series.
So what is the best way to resolve our wish?
Enter H.264 and SongShow Plus
H.264 is quickly becoming the standard codec for playback. This is in part because video files transcoded to H.264 are relatively small and the quality is very good - some would say even better than DV, or DVCPRO.
For us this is important because we create our content in Final Cut Pro, which supports H.264. SongShow Plus recently added H.264 .mov playback support, which now enables us to take the content that we create and play it directly without having to convert it to an .avi or .mpg format.
Now our typical workflow is as simple as creating our content, exporting it as an H.264 quicktime .mov file, importing it into our SSP database, and adding it to the program.
Here are a few sequences we recently used to support the worship song, “God of This City”. We took footage around Boise, cut it together, and with the workflow outlined above, we were able to add a local flavor to a powerful worship song.
Tablerock from Marcus Hackler on Vimeo.
Cityscape of Boise from Marcus Hackler on Vimeo.
Streets of Boise from Marcus Hackler on Vimeo.
Here is all the footage cut to the song:
God Of This City from Marcus Hackler on Vimeo.
If you are a Vimeo account holder, feel free to download the above content and use for your service!
SongShow Plus is available through GoFish Media, which not only sells the product, but offers full training and support.
Final Cut Studio is available through Apple
Tags: SongShow Plus, Video
nice work, bro. this is why your job is awesome.
Great post! Very thought out….I appreciate your in-depth analysis. H.264 is awesome the only downside is the render time
Just curious how you got h.264 to work in SongShow. I see they've added .mov support, but I don't know how to import the clips. SongShow will not see them. I am running the November 2008 Edition, 11/17/2008 Build. I'm downloading the k-lite codec pack which someone recommended on the SongShow forums, but don't want to have to install that if there's another or easier way.
Thanks
Just as with any video, we place the video files into the videos folder in the songshowplus directory. You'll need to make sure the .mov file is in the H.264 codec when you export it. If you are using Final Cut, you need to specify H.264 as the codec when you are exporting.
chackler,
I have all that set right. The clip is one I got from Worship House Media and it's an H.264 SD clip. I have it in the Videos folder, but it isn't showing up. Do I need to have any certain codecs installed for SongShow to recognize it? It plays in Quicktime.
Thanks.
The version of SSP should contain the codec - I'd call up tech support and see what they say.
Thank you.
You need to "enable" .mov as a file type SSP will recognize. Under Tools -> Utilities -> Recognized Video Files.
Thanks for the tip!
Thanks Stephen. Sorry I didn't update everyone, but I was able to get it working.