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View from FOH 01-16-11

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 18:46:33 -0800

A little taste of what I see each weekend for 5 services…

Automating ProPresenter

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 09:43:00 -0700

At TCC we have 2 Sunday services that are large enough to need both overflow video and IMAG, this requires us to reconfigure ProPresenter's multiscreen output to feed our 3 screens and feed a lyrics only key to video. Up till now we have had to remember to make the change each weekend before the 1st and 3rd services. I've wanted to try creating an Automator script to automatically make the changes right before the services, I finally tried it and it worked.

You can use this for any keystroke shortcut you need to run at a certain time, not just multiscreen changes.

Here is my method (this is written for Leopard, Snow Leopard instructions at bottom of page):

Open ProPresenter and Automator, choose a custom workflow in Automator.
Hit record, click on ProPresenter, then press the keystroke shortcuts for the change you want it to make, and then click stop.
Automator should show the actions you just did with a ProPresenter logo next to them.
Edit the workflow and delete the 1st entry, which is the mouse click.
Save your workflow as a plugin, select iCal alarm as the type.
Automator will open iCal and create a new event, edit the event.
Select the time you want it to run the event as the start time, then I made the stop time 1 minute later.
The alarm should be set to "Open file" and your plugin name below that, set the repeat to weekly, then click done.
I duplicated my event to run before the 3rd service, since I just need the same keystrokes to put everything back.

Now at the preset time iCal will run your script, there is no notification that it runs, and this will even work if PP is not in the foreground. Obviously this only works for a timed event, hopefully one day they'll add scripting to ProPresenter so I can change per song...

* Updated: 10-3-10 7:40p est. I've been asked about if the window is moved, I tested and you don't need the click, but I couldn't find a way to record a PP key stroke without clicking on it. I added a step to delete the mouse click, that seems to work fine for me in Snow Leopard, but I just discovered SL's Automator is different from the Leopard version, as well as iCal's alarm is slightly different too. We downgraded our SL machines to Leopard because we found it preformed better with ProPresenter.

* Update: 10-3-10 8:30p est.

Snow Leopard instructions:

Open ProPresenter and Automator, choose iCal Alarm as the template type in Automator
Hit record, click on ProPresenter, then press the keystroke shortcuts for the change you want it to make, and then click stop.
Automator should show the actions you just did with a ProPresenter logo next to them.
Edit the workflow, select and delete the 1st entry, which will show it's user action as 'Mouse Clicked'.
Save the workflow
iCal will open and create a new event, edit it, change the event time and most importantly the Alarm time to 0 Minutes before (or whatever time before you'd like).
Set to repeat to 'Every week' and click done.
Duplicate the event as needed.