Stake Conference Video w/ Hymn Text Overlay

I meantioned this in another post, but I thought I'd start a new thread with it. Our Stake Presidency wanted to be able to put the words to the Hymns over the video broadcast for the overflow areas similar to how it's done in General Conference. They wanted this for several reasons.

1. Time of making, distributing, and cleaning up the Hymn copies
2. The cost of making the copies

After a bit of research we purchased a simple piece of equipment that allowed us easily to put the words to the Hymns (via PowerPoint) over the video for the overflow areas. It looked very close to the way General Conference does this.

More people sang the Hymns, it was quite loud; a benefit we weren't anticipating.

This was suprisingly easy to do, much easier than originally anticipated when we first set out to figure out a solution to do this.

In addition to a video camera with the typical overflow setup, additional equipment needed

1. Grand MagicView EX
List Price: $249.99
http://www.grandtec.com/magicview.htm

Found it here for $159 +shipping
http://www.sundialmicro.com/PC-to-TV-Co ... 6_439.html

2. A computer (Window, Mac, or Linux) with a USB port to power the Grand MagicView
3. Presentation software such as PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress installed

Note: PowerPoint has a great option of displaying the slideshow full screen in 2nd monitor, which is the Grand MagicView. This allows me to work in the 1st monitor (a laptop) without anyone seeing it overlayed over the video.

In high school we used an ATI All-in-Wonder card to do text & graphics overlay. It has both a TV tuner / video capture input, as well as a TV output. The program that lets you watch TV on your computer, which comes with the card, has a feature that when minimized the television broadcast becomes the windows desktop wallpaper. What this actually does is set your wallpaper to be a specific shade of pink, and then the card overlays the video in place of everything on the screen of that color. We discovered this one day when watching TV while opening up some color pallet tool in some graphics program, and noticed that the pink in question was seen as a "hole" showing the video through behind it. A power point presentation with the background color of every slide set as that shade of pink did the trick nicely for everything we wanted to do. And, it was cheap. Back in the day the card was $149, and I imagine they likely less these days.

Actually all new ATI cards come with S-Video and Component In (I have been needing a new card lately as my ATI All-In-Wonder X600 is starting to die on me) though if you need to convert from RF to a picture then you need the TV-Tuner part of it.

The Windows Media Encoder is part of the package that ATI gives out which does allow captions to be inserted into the stream so you could insert the song as captions. There might be some other features which could be useful, I just haven't tried them yet.

I know of an external product that does this very well.

Its called the POP 1280S here is a link. I know whe shouldn't highlight certain products, but I wanted to include this link to show you the possibility.

https://www.shop.starvalleysolutions.co ... tegoryId=6

Tomj wrote:Its called the POP 1280S

Does it include a composite video output? The write-up doesn't seem to say that.

There is no composite out, It's designed for VGA out. But you shouldn't have any trouble hooking it to a Projector. It seems like all modern projectors should have a VGA Input. I have one that we use for large conferences where we are daisy chaining 3 or 4 projectors together.

This Box has VGA-In, Cable-in, S-Video-In and component-in. Typically our presenters use Powerpoint to Present, but then need to show a video clip. All they have to do is his the source button on the box and the input changes to Composite or S-video but the beautiful thing is that it is still outputting through the VGA, so I don't have to go and switch each projector to video mode, then back to VGA when the clip is finnished. It makes it very seamless.

The other great and useful feature is that it can do Picture on Picture, so you can have your video going in the POP and the Powerpoint going as the Main Screen. You can swap them (position, size, and source), and it works Great!

FYI - If your dealing with video, composite is about the Absolute worst signal. then s-video, then component-video, then RGB, Then HDMI/DVI There is a debate about Coax, but I'd probably classify it as the second worst for signal. If you ever have the choice go with something other than composite.

Tomj wrote:FYI - If your dealing with video, composite is about the Absolute worst signal.

No argument there, but it's adequate for dealing with simply extending the conference for large audiences. It's also much easier to distribute composite and connect multiple projectors. If you've got a presentation that won't work on composite, then it's probably got details too small for the audience.

My system takes a bit of work to set up, but provides me good results for the cost:

The basic setup I've used for the last few years is:

- NTSC Video camera (stake had and old VHS camcorder)
- Osprey / Cheap BT848-based Video capture card ($5-100)
- ATI Graphics card for dual display and overlay capabilities ($15+)
- WinXP for independent desktops (Too much)
- Athalon 3400+ computer (faster is always better)
- ChrisTV Lite + Addon Pkg #2 for convenient video display ($10)
- OpenOffice.org Impress for text display ($0)
- Paint Shop Pro 4 or other graphics program for checking overlay codes ($0+)
- UPS - Not needed, but recommended!

Out of the Windows-based video display programs I tried, I liked ChrisTV because it had flexible overlay settings (which let me use it with a variety of systems), clean video window border, allowed me to easily switch sizes/Full Screen with single keystrokes without having my mouse in the video window. By setting the master slide background color in OOo to the overlay color (some variation of black, e.g. RGB 16,0,0 or 0,16,0) then it allows me to place my video window behind the full-screen OOo slide show and have it show through (i.e. the slide background is transparent). I can switch ChrisTV in/out for controlling it (to switch video from full screen, etc.) with a minimum of display artifacts. The only reason I wish I'd gotten the Pro version is that the light version will only allow me to display on the primary desktop, which means that for my setup I have to move my taskbar to the other monitor, etc. from what I normally have it. (since I normally use a DVI monitor as my primary surface, vs. analog out for projection)

To prepare my slide show I type in the lyrics as I want them to be formatted (or hsave someone else send them to me in a text file), and double each line. My slide templates have two lines of text, one large and white and the other below it smaller and grey; this lets me display the current line while providing a preview of the next line, so that people can read ahead and not have to rely on 100% exact timing (I'm easily distracted, and am occasionally late advancing slides!)

I've investigated lots of software for making lyric display easier, but there are none yet that are cheap enough and flexible enough to suit me, so I continue to do it the painful way by assembling my own slides. I've had to deal with song-changes, etc. in the middle of talks and the two displays really help keep things smooth. Additionally, sometimes I've added a pair of video switches to bypass the computer completely (normally all video is captured/redisplayed by the computer) in case of major problems; it allows you to reconfigure/reboot during a talk if necessary without disturbing the congregation.

There is necessarily a little bit of lag (the video is delayed slightly behind the audio) because I'm capturing/buffering the video, whereas the audio is bypassing the computer. Additionally, there are slight pauses when the slides change (OOo is not very lightweight...), making the chorister's arm jump slightly. The faster the computer the better; it will minimize both delay and stutter. On a good AMD4000 machine it was very rarely noticeable to me.

Recently I've added:
- 2nd camera (little GE security camera)
- home-made remote pad for the camera to control zoom/focus
- Telescope tripod with azimuth mount & clock drive w/ remote for panning
- two more capture cards
- VGA-NTSC converter w/ VGA splitter

My main camera is now the security camera, since it can pan/zoon; the other camera is set up at a fixed point high and off to the side. I can now keep preview windows open of both video feeds, and switch between them at will. I try not to overdo it -- if it's distracting, it's wrong -- the point is to make it natural so that it lessens viewer fatigue (a single fixed video camera can get annoying to watch for 2 hrs), yet most people couldn't tell you whether you ever switched video or not!

I messed around for a long time with the built-in NTSC-out on video cards, and finally decided that it worked a lot better if I used an external converter. It allows me to feed a nice clean VGA signal directly into the cultural hall's projector, and produces a better quality (with more control) composite signal to feed into the RF modulators for the TVs in the overflow rooms.

Anyway, it's a bit more than the minimum, but still cheap for what it can do (and pretty much everything except for the $10 software is owned by me, rather than the stake, since I have other uses for it and nobody else would know what to do with it), and our stake and the adjacent stake that uses our facilities on occasion have found it quite pleasant to watch, in fact many people who have experienced it now prefer to sit in the cultural hall instead of the back half of the chapel, because they have more options and have a better view.

PS: I just looked at that description of that Magic View, and I like it. Most gen-lock appliances are rather expensive, but if you can pick it up for $150, that's pretty reasonable. It lacks the ability to do anything but full-screen, but would allow you to maintain perfectly smooth video with a lot less computer, software, and geekiness.


Here's a couple of pictures of my camera remote. As you can see, I use only the best quality parts!

Wow! Thanks for all of the information. You were very thorough and it sounds like you have put a lot of time and effort into this.

P.S.
I love the Sesame Street sticker!

WOW!

Some of you have put a LOT of time an effort into this.

Decade engineering makes a simple text overlay device that sits between a composite source and destination and inserts text based on RS-232 data.

http://www.decadenet.com/bob4/bob4.html

The new BOB-4 device is pretty cool, but the older BOB-II works just as well without the pretty colors and transparancy.

BOB-3 and 4 are available in boxes with DB9 connectors for $240 currently. NTSC and PAL are both supported.

Thanks
The Earl

Okay, so in reviewing this thread it looks like there are two basic ways to get the hymnal words onto the projected image.

One, keep everything in the TV signal world and place a computer generated text image on the signal. This requires a PC to TV converter for the text....the MagicView EX solution

Two, keep everything in the PC signal world and convert the TV signal to computer to be overlayed. This requires a TV to PC converter for the camera signal.....the POP 1280S solution

Anoter issue is that in our Stake Center, we have a computer input up front (rgb computer monitor connection), but not a TV input connection. So it seems to me that generating a PC output would work best for us.

Right now if we want to show video in the chapel we use a video player and projector sitting on the pulpit....even though we have a built-in overhead projector, because we can not input a signal to the overhead projector from the chapel....but we can from the library!!! So if we go with the 1280S solution, that would solve this problem too....when we are going to show a video we just use the converter and plug it into the PC connection on the wall...........right??

Am I getting this right?? Any thoughts about advantages / disadvantages??

Thx for all the help,

I use 3 camcorders that I control RF remotely (PTZF) and a video mixer I picked up off ebay. I made the camera controller and modified the camcorders. I use a laptop to generate text and graphics. Then I can overlay titles and hymns on video.
I prefer to use scanned hymns and show a bar at a time so that people can read their music parts. My gripe with hymn text only is there is no music to read.
The video mixer is a bit noisy so I'm thinking of designing my own 4 input digital video mixer controlled via usb with graphic capabilities. Any suggestions on features? It would be nice to do native RGB but I'm stuck with composite.

I've had a few private messages asking me for more details on the power point part of this process so I thought I'd share more info here.

At our first stake conference I had the words to the Hymns at the bottom of the screen just like General Conference. The problem was, some people couldn't read them because when they stood up to sing their view of the bottom of the TV or Screen was blocked. So, from then on we put them at the top and the director underneath in the view.

When setting up a computer or laptop with the MagicView EX and PowerPoint, be sure to use the following settings:

1) Set the desktop background to black
2) Disable any screen savers, hibernate, or monitor shut down settings
3) Use Dual Monitor settings and display the slide show on the MagicView EX as a 2nd monitor using PowerPoint's Presenter View (see: http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsm ... s_pre.html)

If you get the device you can send me a private message with your email address and I can send you a power point slide that we used. It had a solid black background, white text, and dark gray shadow on the text. The unit automatically makes the black background transparent. It was simple to setup and use.

-Thomas

So if you're using a SlingBox at the Stake Center and a laptop at the other building, does this GrandMagic View EX remain at the Stake Center and plug into the SlingBox somehow, or does it go with the laptop and go to the remote building? If it goes with the laptop (since that's where the Powerpoint application is going to be, can the hymn overlay then be seen at the Stake Center and the other overflow TV's located in the Stake Center as well as in the remote building?

Tomj wrote:...

FYI - If your dealing with video, composite is about the Absolute worst signal. then s-video, then component-video, then RGB, Then HDMI/DVI There is a debate about Coax, but I'd probably classify it as the second worst for signal. If you ever have the choice go with something other than composite.

Assuming, of course, that you're comparing matching sync rates and resolutions, isn't component video the same thing as RGB? If by those terms, you mean separate analog red, blue, and green signals (with sync either separate or piggybacking on green), wouldn't they be two names for the same thing?

By "Coax", do you mean modulated RF? If so, the best it could be is a little worse than composite. It can't be any better than composite, because the input to the modulator and the output from the demodulator are effectively a composite signal.

As a type of physical cable, coax can carry any of a large number of signal types.

By the way, for anyone preparing to do text overlay, if you can find an old Amiga computer still running and not in a museum display case, model 2000 or higher, I understand they were very good at things like text overlay on video.

You are basically putting the mixed image up onto the building system. In our set up, as I'm assuming most others as well, we plug mixed output signal into the camera input in the back of the Chapel. Thus, whatever would normally see the camera input signal would now see the mixed (overlay) signal.....so yeah, you should see it at a remote site and in over-flow rooms, assuming you pull those signals in such a way as to show a camera view if a camera were connected to the input plug in the back of the Chapel.

We use a really ugly green desktop color.....on the second monitor, then set that same color on the MagicView as the overlay color. That way, when your power-point is not running, the camera image is passed straight through. I do this because you can then start and stop the slide show in Powerpoint and the people don't know it.....so you can make changes, edits, etc. in PP and restart without anyone seeing the switch.

We are also putting a background behind the words of the Hymn because, unlike Gen Conf, sometimes the bottom of our image is not dark.......so to control that area, we put a dark color in.

WesGrimes wrote:.....on the second monitor

Nice! Some laptops can be set to use the VGA connector on the back as a second monitor, so I can see that working quite well. No need for a bulky dual monitor desktop. You just need a extra LCD screen for the laptop. A 15" would be perfect - and cheap.

RussellHltn wrote:Nice! Some laptops can be set to use the VGA connector on the back as a second monitor, so I can see that working quite well. No need for a bulky dual monitor desktop. You just need a extra LCD screen for the laptop. A 15" would be perfect - and cheap.

Right, the overlay box has a nice connector that goes into the VGA plug on the laptop, and lets it pass through for the second monitor. I got a cheap (about $50) second monitor to run.....that way I know that whatever is on the second monitor is what is being broadcast.....works great.

Wes

We just purchased a webcast communicator and would like to display the hymn text on screen for our overflow and remote locations. Do the options listed in this thread work with the webcast communicator? Are they other options we should consider?

Thanks

You could probably start with that.....I think each system is slightly different. Have you tried it yet??

Let me know what songs you need...we have several already in PP format.

W

I know that a lot of work goes into putting the hymns into PowerPoint and this would be totally up to those who did the work, but it might be a really nice resource if everyone were to share the hymns that they have already put into PowerPoint slides. Over time we could have a pretty large library of hymns!
Just a thought...
Troy

I agree, I'm happy to share what I have. One thing I would strongly recommend is using a seperate monitor on the laptop...then use PP option to display the "slide show" on the 2nd monitor.

Wes

tsheffield wrote:I know that a lot of work goes into putting the hymns into PowerPoint and this would be totally up to those who did the work, but it might be a really nice resource if everyone were to share the hymns that they have already put into PowerPoint slides. Over time we could have a pretty large library of hymns!
Just a thought...
Troy

This is an interesting idea, which perhaps could be hosted at the Wiki.

tsheffield wrote:...it might be a really nice resource if everyone were to share the hymns that they have already put into PowerPoint slides. Over time we could have a pretty large library of hymns!
Just a thought...
Troy

When I prepare our hymns, I simply go to lds.org and copy and paste the lyrics into PowerPoint. Fast - Easy - Accurate

http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dll/ ... titles.htm

Sorry everyone, I'm a newb. Just got called as the Stake Technology Specialist and I am trying to find a specific piece of hardware to overlay text into the live video during stake conference.

I have read a lot of good things in these posts but nothing about a specific piece of hardware (that is up-to-date). Anyone have a good suggestion?

The video is coming from a single camera (s-video out) and I just need to get something that I could use to throw the power point slides "into the video stream".

PLEASE let me know what you are using, good up-to-date suggestions?

Thanks!