EasyWorship Review 2007 - Christian Computing Magazine

by Mike Hewitt

There’s a lot of talk these days about presentation software. Every conference I speak at I meet people that are ready to move up to a new level. From my experience, conversations, web surfing, not to mention our own sales at WorshipHouse, Softouch Development’s EasyWorship is a solid choice to take you to that next level and seems to be in almost everyone’s Top Three.

EasyWorship is highly recommended because it is so user-friendly and quite honestly (due to their intuitive interface) has the smallest learning curve of any of the fine products available. Unfortunately, the name leads many to assume that EasyWorship is lacking in features compared to other presentation software products. I’d like to address that assumption throughout this review.

Click here to read the entire article…

Worship Software Comments by Third Party

I copied and pasted this from a forum on Church Media for your information.

“Our quest to pick a worship application continues; last night we played with several demos for over 3 hours and narrowed it down to four: EW, MS, Song Screen Liquid, and SSP (other demos were reviewed BTW).

Following are my thoughts/concerns and just let me say I have no bias of these four (yet). I’m still testing them all and their features. Feedback to clear-up any misconceptions or inaccuracies is appreciated. Also, I hope others in my situation benefit from this thread. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND, these are opinions and I hope no one is compelled to “defend” their own brand of choice. This won’t help me…to each their own, as this is definitely a personal choice decision (and not an easy one).

Easy Worship - Basically we’re confident with this product. Wonderful interface, very intuitive, easy to navigate, logical screen layout (for us), and to tell you the truth their web site is helping to sell us; they offer a download of the user manual (very nice). In short, we liked what we saw and now are looking for the others to “beat” what EW has to offer. One concern…can this product do text over video?

YES IT CAN DO TEXT OVER VIDEO. SOME OF THE FREE BACKGROUNDS ARE VIDEO CLIPS WHICH CAN BE USED RIGHT ALONG WITH THE STATIC BACKGROUNDS

Media Shout - Another great interface, a little more cumbersome and harder to figure out, but we really like how each slide is displayed graphically. In all fairness, this was the last program we installed and all agreed to spend more time with testing it. The brief video tutorials were helpful, but I wish I had a copy of the users manual. One thing that made us scratch our heads is why on earth did they decide to name controls buttons as “Boxer”, “Philo”, “Coach”, etc.. We found this just plain dumb. Other than this minor detail, this application is another strong consideration.

Song Screen Liquid - Unfortunately, this program seemed buggy. It lagged and clocked at times and we also had to restart it a couple of times. Very disappointed! From what I saw it looked promising. It also seemed this program was designed for multiple monitors. Not a negative though, because I’m a fan of having production and development views in front of me at all times. Other bummer for me, is I can’t seem to find allot of information from current users of this program. I plan to submit a thread on this product later. Again, not enough time was spent to test this one, but we are in no hurry to purchase anything. We will use PowerPoint until we find the right product for us.

Song Show Plus - Absolutely ridiculous demo! The install was frustrating and we had to download certain segments from the Internet. All other companies had a quick, no nonsense installs. Be that as it may, this programs seems to offer more. I for one liked the multiple display panels (since I work with Photoshop and Flash), Especially the display properties panel! But all of us agreed the toolbar icons could be more obvious. By that I mean it doesn’t seem clear what a button is for unless you do a mouse hover-over. I imagine this wouldn’t be a big deal once you become familiar with the program. Also, I like the “Slide Show Builder”. Another main concern for me is I want to wait and see what the new release will have to offer. Im my experience, just because a new version is available doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. I hope a new demo is available soon. This one seems simple to use yet offers more customization should one want to spend additional time to fancy things up.

Well, so far that’s all I have. More testing time is needed in my mind before making a decision. Some seemed ready to purchase EW because of how fast we figured it out. But I’m wondering what limitations this program has compared to the others.

EASYWORSHIP HAS AN UNCONDITIONAL SATISFACTION GUARANTEE FOR 90 DAYS.
“All orders come with an unconditional 90 day money back guarantee. If you are unhappy for any reason, return the product for a full refund.”

Below are some features we agreed we what. If any one of “our four picks” lack these features please let me know.

*Text over video
*Editable SCRIPTURE text

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO EDIT A BIBLE?

*Ability to import scripture from various file formats (.doc, .txt, and so forth)
EW - YOU BUY ADDITIONAL BIBLES BEYOND THE FREE ONES AT $29 EACH. OF COURSE YOU COULD IMPORT SCRIPTURE TEXT INTO THE SONG EDITOR IF YOU HAVE THE TEXT.

*Additional video and audio feeds (such as a video camera feed for live panning)
*Text animations (like color changes as words are sung, and also have a lyric line disappear after those words are sung)
(CAN BE DISTRACTING IF TOO MUCH MOTION)
*Manual on-the-fly fade to black with speed adjustment
EW DOES THIS BY CLICKING THE ‘BLACK’ BUTTON. or YOU CAN SIMPLY CLEAR THE TEXT BY PRESSING THE ‘CLEAR’ BUTTON.

*Drag and drop functionality (to add video, pictures, etc.)

EASYWORSHIP COMMENT

Kelowna Christian Reformed Church likes Easy Worship the best. See here what they say…

“It all comes down to 2 products on the market. EasyWorship and MediaShout - the software prices and requirements are identical. They both look great.

Only EasyWorship provides automatic CCLI reporting. Both import CCLI libraries.
EasyWorship is by far the easiest one to use and actually does a number of important things better than MediaShout.
Take a look at the online tour of EasyWorship - http://www.easyworship.com/store/index.html - click on the “OnLine Tour” link.

Take a look at the MediaShout Screen Demos - http://mediashout.com/support/tutorials.cfm
MediaShout is the most popular product out there because it has been around the longest and people generally don’t switch once they learn a specific piece of software. It is definitely used by the largest ministries. EasyWorship is aimed at a regular computer user and is very intuitive.

Mediashout is aimed at a media/video/presentation guru. The net result is no better from Mediashout and you need to learn a whole lot more to use it all. EasyWorship should be easily managed after looking at it for an hour. MediaShout will need a lot more training to be able to use it competently.

I am definitely sold on EasyWorship -
1) easy of use,
2) automatic CCLI reporting,
3) site license to any and all users or computers related to the church.
A properly configured PC with dual ouput video card and all necessary hard drive space, extra RAM and DVD player may reach up to $2000
Sending “live” video feeds through the equipment will always have a perceptible 1/3 second delay no matter how much money you spend so don’t try to do that with these solutions. Use them for music, video presentations, power point presentations - anything but Live.”

Worship Software Help

You can change fonts to anything available on Windows in EasyWorship and most other software. It uses a standard font, I believe arial which shows up the best on the screen but any font can be made your default or used at one time or another when you have a reason to.

Copyright display — you simply put your CCLI license number in and every song will display it I believe. This one needs checking by me when I get home tho.

Also it is set to make the best use of the display space on the screen with a nice margin around the edge but all that can be changed, I believe under DISPLAY and OPTIONS but not being at my home computer, I could be a little off here.

If we were just looking for a profit we would steer you to Mediashout because it costs more. So I am not trying to steer you one way or the other but help you get what you really want.

Another really good source of information about EasyWorship and other presentation software is the EasyWorship forum. I don’t believe you have to be a present customer to register. Registration is free. It is found under the SUPPORT menu at EasyWorship.com.

Another very useful source is www.churchmedia.net. Tim Eason who owns the site is a “Media Missionary” who travels around the United STates giving seminars on presentation technology.

Also, you can go to www.ccmag.com and sign up for a free online Christian Computing mag.

Free Christian Audio-Video magazine.
And if you look around on the site, you will also find a signup for the new Christian Audio-Visual magazine. Every FREE issue of either of these is full of great info. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you and I would seem smarter when I pass on the information I learn there! :-) [grin].

Any more questions, I will be happy to answer.

At Churchpower.com we love to help people, especially church people and especially Christians, not being discriminatory to anyone else.

I was a teacher for 35 years and loved helping my students and also a seminar speaker at computer conferences and it is always a joy to pass on info that can help any of our customers make better-informed decisions! [Although sometimes from a business standpoint, we would make more money if we just ’shut up’ and let the customer buy what they are asking about. However we would feel like we failed in helping YOU decide rather than telling you what WE think is best for you.

Are you looking for ease of use with volunteer projectionists or for techie powerful stuff? That probably is what it boils down to. We will help you purchase what YOU FEEL is right for you.