Just a few quick thoughts on ProPresenter 5 on Mac… (from a complete PC guy)

Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter 5 has been an enjoyable experience as a very capable presentation software package.

After spending just yesterday afternoon sitting down in front of the Mac, I was able a get a handle on the ProPresenter software pretty quickly – points of user-friendliness! The ‘My First Presentation‘ video tutorial on the Renewed Vision website covered just about all of the basics, and the gist of the workflow. After this I was pretty much able to do most things I needed to do without having to fish around on Google for how to do it in ProPresenter.

The only issue I had was how to remove the background of a slide so that it would be blank. Yet this turned out to be simply my Mac n00b-ness… because Mac’s don’t right-click – you hold down the Control key and then click…

Onto the fun live stuff!

Following that afternoon night I had a bit of on-the-job training for a night event.

**Adding and editing media

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The half hour before the event started, a few changes to the slides were requested. The ProPresenter interface made it appreciatively simple to add new media.

However a downside was that editing a PowerPoint (imported as images) wasn’t really feasible – we had to grab the flash drive with the PowerPoint in order to edit it. I’m not really sure if other similar software projects like OpenLP – with LibreOffice integration – are able to accomplish this either.

Reorganising chorus/verse 1/verse 2 according to the arrangement**

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This was ridiculously a snap with ProPresenter. I didn’t take screenshots (I was busy on the night!) , but reordering and repeating parts of the lyrics was just a matter draging and dropping breadcrumb-like labels to match the arrangement for the band of the night.

Onto the fun live stuff part two!

Today it was my turn to do the visuals (lyrics/video switching/lights etc.). Not audio – that’s a bit harder ;P

Editing slides while not disturbing the current live content

I found that the source images for a presentation are loaded as they are shown, which meant that I was able to update graphics whilst the presentation had already started. This was good as I had to make some changes with the event already kicking-off.

The playlist of items was also flexible during ‘live mode’, e.g. adding new media.

YouTube

ProPresenter didn’t directly support embedding YouTube videos, but as pointed out and explained in the FAQ, one can download and import the video just as easily using a site such as the recommended ‘PwnYouTube’.

Wrap up

All up, ProPresenter is a highly mature, stable and feature-packed software presentation package. A huge benefit goes to its ease of use.

Would use again ¹⁰⁄₁₀

(After two days of lots of bass I've come to realise how little bass my own subwoofer at home has...)