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Media Shout

Ok, so normally I’d only give an aside to a link to a software program, but this one is really worth a bit of a plug. Last night was the Moore College review - a very funny night, and I’d been roped in to help with running the AV equipment for the night.

But not long after getting there for the setup at 2pm, I was starting to fret a little. There were about 15 videos of different formats that needed to be played, a DVD, 2 backing tracks on CD and a live feed video that needed to be streamed through to the projector at the start. And I was given one computer to run it all off. And it was a PC.

Having been in charge of AV stuff at a few big events I knew all too well how this was going to work out. I’d be sitting up the back madly scrambling to get different discs in and out of the drive, as the entire auditorium turned around to shoot dirty looks at the AV operator (Oh yes that is what happens!)

But my fears were quickly relieved when I was shown the software we were going to use - Media Shout. It was simply incredible. It can handle files of all the major media types. Even powerpoint presentations, flash videos, video’s, MP3’s and even can handle live video streaming while placing words like song lyrics over the top. And it was so easy to use. Just drag whatever you want into the queue of tasks waiting to happen, and it just works. No changing applications to do different things. No lag, no error messages.

It’s such a good bit of software because it’s been developed specifically for churches, rather than the business world. Rarely in the business world do you need to do a presentation at the level of complexity of a regular sunday night service - that’s why powerpoint and keynote (the appallingly bad Apple version that’s about as user-friendly as an aircraft cockpit) are inadequate for most multimedia churches. I was so impressed, I’m even thinking about making my next computer a PC - or at least making my mac dual-boot…

Grab a trial version here.

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