Worship Software » video formats

Choosing Backgrounds Size & Format

Tony — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:24:30 +0000

Learn how to choose the correct motion backgrounds for your worship software. This information table is extremely helpful in understanding your options.

Choosing Background Sizes

There are two sizes you can choose from when it comes to worship backgrounds. The sizes really are aspect ratios and not pixel dimensions. There are 4:3 and 16:9 ratios. This determines the width and hight of your projector screen and area of coverage. This also determines your worship backgrounds both motion and still. For motion backgrounds we refer to 4:3 as 480p and 16:9 as 720p.

4:3 aspect ratio

This is the original and still widely used screen dimension. With this screen you would want to choose 480p (640×480) for motion backgrounds . Choosing these sizes for 4:3 aspect screens ensures there is no stretching of the video on the screen and it will fill the screen as expected. This motion backgrounds screen size is available in MOV h.264 & WMV formats.

16:9 aspect ratio

This is a very popular screen size today. With a wider screen you have more screen real estate to work with and opens the door to HD movie play back. If you are using motion backgrounds you should use 1080p (1920×1080) or 720p (1280×720) motion clips. Using these sizes will eliminate any image stretching or distortion. This motion background screen size is available in MOV h.264 and WMV formats.

HD Motion Backgrounds are large video files and should only use MOV h.264 encoding or WMV advanced encoding to preserve video quality in playback.

Loading Backgrounds in EasyWorship

Tony — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:20:51 +0000

Learn how to load and manage media files in EasyWorship 2009. Work with EasyWorship’s media library and schedules using backgrounds with motion and mini movies.

Get the EasyWorship tutorial here:
Loading Media in EasyWorship

Worship Motion Loop Sizes & Formats

Tony — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:35:10 +0000

Common questions around the right motion format or size to use with your worship presentation software come my way weekly. My hope is this brief explanation will help you make the right choices when selecting your motion backgrounds to use.

Get more information on choosing backgrounds here.

Motion Background Sizes
There are two common sizes used for motion loops. These sizes have become the unwritten standard in the worship community.

Widescreen 720p
This is a newer size used in Church projection today. The format is for wider 16:9 projection screens and allows for more horizontal real-estate. This is also the HD format for mini movie clip playback as well. The resolution is 1280×720. A common encoding is MOV format to maintain resolution. However, the new features in WMV allow for 2-pass VBR to deliver high quality Windows native encoding.

Standard 480p
Still popular in Churches around the world and for more years to come. This size is more of a square design 4:3 aspect ratio. The motion video resolution is 640×480. Common encoding for this format is MOV and WMV.

Formats
MOV is native to Mac OS X and H.264 encoding. You can use K-Lite codec for MOV use on Windows operating systems. Used in ProPresenter natively. EasyWorship and MediaShout with K-Lite Codec.
Installation tutorial on installing K-lite codec here.

WMV is native to Windows and with 2-Pass VBR maintains high quality HD video. Used in EasyWorship and MediaShout.

MPEG-1 is an older interoperable encoding but lacks quality and is slowly phasing out.

Worship Software Video Codecs

Tony — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:57:26 +0000

There are several forums and posts with this one question regarding video formats or codecs. Depending on your worship software you can use a few different formats. Most worship media sites include (.mov .mpeg & .wmv). This is because they cover a wide variety of worship software and the compressions are high quality.

What is a Codec?

Codec (enCOder/DECoder or COmpressor/DECompressor) is used to reduce size of audio and video. Find out more about Codec here.

A safe way to determine the supported codec or video format for your worship software is directly related to your operating system. The most popular operating system in the worship community is Windows XP / Vista. Alternatively there are a hand full of Apple Mac users but this is mostly in the high end mega Churches. There is a great deal of power in an Apple Mac for worship service and worship software offerings which I’ll talk about in another blog.

Windows XP and Windows Vista uses a native video player Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player supports for video: AVI, MPEG1 & WMV and for audio: WMA, MP3 & WAV natively. So this means if you are using EasyWorship, MediaShout and SongShow Plus you can use MPEG1, WMV & AVI.

MPEG4 & MOV Support On Windows

Alternatively you can run MOV or MPEG4 video files in EasyWorship, MediaShout, SundayPlus and SongShow Plus but you need a special CODEC called K-Lite Codec Pack. Be sure to follow install instructions from the worship software’s website.

Apple Mac OS X Worship Software

If you are using an Apple Mac OS X operating system then you can natively support MOV, MPEG2 & MPEG4. If you wanted to support WMV or AVI you can install separate codecs from Apple’s website under Quicktime Player. The most popular worship software for the Apple Mac is Pro Presenter by Renewed Vision. This is a very professional software and used in the entertainment business as well.

Side Note: You can also use a DVD to play your video backgrounds on all the worship software mentioned in this blog.

Please leave a post with your experience to help others.