Photo courtesy of the Church at Rock Creek.
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So, the worship side of your weekend production is growing. You’ve gone from maybe a vocalist or two with an acoustic guitar to a full band, and maybe your worship pastor wants to clean up the stage during sets by removing music stands. Maybe you’ve added a second service, so now it’s imperative that everyone see a big clock or countdown for a hard out to avoid a mess in the parking lot between services. Maybe it just looks funny when your worship team can’t remember the lyrics and they’re always looking at their music stands. Whatever has brought you here, you’re looking to set up a confidence monitor and you need some ideas for doing that well.
I have a quick outline for you to make this process easy if you’ve never done it before, and here’s what you’ll need to consider:
- Hardware & Software
- Placement
- Formatting
Hardware & Software
One of the first things you’ll need to take a hard look at is the hardware you have available. Does your front of house computer have enough processing capacity to run your presentation software and at least three displays–one for your operator, one for your main display at front of house and then one for your confidence monitor? Furthermore, if you’re going to use ProPresenter for your display software, you’ll most likely want a Mac. In my personal experience, while ProPresenter is compatible with Windows, it runs better on Mac. I’m sure some other AVL directors would argue with me about that, and that’s fine. All I’m saying is that we’ve used both platforms here at Lifemission, and ProPresenter on Mac OS just works, whereas we experienced all sorts of bugs and glitchy business on the Windows version.
Regardless of which OS you decide on, make sure your computer is powerful enough to handle the graphic requirements of your services, especially if you’re going to work with 4k video. You’ll want a machine with at least 16GB of ram and an i7 or i9 processor in addition to a dedicated GPU. My personal recommendation is a Mac Mini M2 Pro or a Mac Studio M1 Max or Ultra. Apple’s new M1 and M2 chips are unbelievably powerful. We use the Studio M1 Max, pushing four displays of 1080p video and our Ram + CPU loads never exceed 13%, no GPU needed. We haven’t even touched the sort of video work that machine can do. Of course, you can build a similarly powerful PC for less money, but I don’t need to rant anymore about how I don’t like ProPresenter on Windows, and I can’t tell you to build a PC and then follow this tutorial to run Mac OS on it so that you can use the Mac version of ProPresenter; that’s a little bit illegal. Either way, investing in a good computer like a Mac Mini, a Mac Studio, or a custom PC build is a seven- or eight-year investment. It’s worth the money and ease of use.
Speaking of ProPresenter, which software should you use?
ProPresenter is, by far, “industry” standard. No one else in the game is doing what they do, and its native integrations with SongSelect, Blackmagic Design, Elgato Stream Deck, and Planning Center Online make it hard to pass up. But it is by no means the only player on the field, with Faithlife Proclaim offering similar features and a team-collaborative approach on both Windows and Mac. Worship Tools Presenter offers a neat, low-cost, mac-only bang for buck, but the confidence monitor is locked to a few basic options. A few more companies have respectable offerings, and a simple google search can point you in the right direction. There’s also an innovative platform from Australia called Big Screen that looks compelling.
Placement
Once you’ve dialed in your hardware and software, you’ll need to consider your confidence monitor placement. In general, I’ve seen confidence monitors in one of three places:
- at the back of the room on a large TV or projected on the wall,
- on the floor in front of the stage on or near the front row of seats, or
- on the stage itself, usually at center, right in front of the vocalists.
Photo courtesy of Bethel Church.
Personally, I think putting your confidence monitor at the back of the room is the best option because it’s the most unobtrusive placement since no one in the seats will notice it unless they turn around during service. Depending on the size of your room, you will need anything from a large TV to a wall display via a projector. Our sanctuary sits 1300 people, and we have our monitor mounted above our entryway about ¾ of the way to the back of the room. We use a 70” LCD display, and with our lyrics cut up into two-line sections, they’re highly visible.
Placement at the back of the room is also more desirable because you probably won’t need to run a cable under or over your sanctuary floor to get signal to your display. Long runs usually require a conversion from HDMI to SDI or CAT6 and then back again, which adds many links in the system where something can break. Ideally, if your display is close enough to your media desk, you’ll be able to connect with one HDMI cable, or with the right card (like a Blackmagic Design DeckLink), just one SDI cable.
Placement at front of house will mean that your text will be highly legible and you won’t need to invest in a large TV or extra projector, which makes a great option for teams on a tighter budget, but whether you put it on the floor or even on the stage itself, you’ll need to be clever about hiding it so that it doesn’t create a distraction. Similarly, you’ll also need to take your vocalists’ eyeline into consideration—if they have to look down to the front row in order to see their lyrics, people will notice that awkward eyeline after a while, especially if your vocalists are like me and can’t remember their lyrics very well.
Formatting
Now you’ll need to figure out how to lay out information on your confidence monitor, and this is where ProPresenter really shines, but before we get into the specifics of, your confidence monitor needs to have some key building blocks:
- Lyrics (current slide + next slide)
- Time
- countdown timer for videos and service flows
- Stage Messages (messages you can send your stage team / speaker)
You can format these however you want, but ProPresenter in particular is highly customizable and lets you change stage display formats throughout the duration of a service or event, which means you don’t need to cram all four of those building blocks into one stage display; rather, you can design a confidence monitor that works for each part of your service flow, like one during pre-service with a big countdown timer, one for worship with lyrics and a clock, one for the message with a timer and box for emergency communication and so on. The stage display (what ProPresenter calls a confidence monitor) edit tab allows you to format as many different stage displays as you want, and then you can easily switch between those stage displays by either adding actions to specific presentation slides or by simply selecting a different stage display within the show controls.
Here at LifeMission Church, we use 4 different stage displays during our weekend services:
Pre-Service Timer
This is our countdown for our preservice time, which is basically just a timer that counts down to when our broadcast starts for our 9am and 11am service. It’s big and bold so that our worship leaders can easily see it, and it still has the current time displayed in case we miss our live time.
Worship Display
This is what our worship team sees during a set. It has current lyrics in white, coming lyrics in gold, a clock, and the tile of song their in so they know where they’re at.
Transition
Our transition time between the message and worship doesn’t need a lot, just a media countdown timer, a clock, and space for a stage message.
Message Timer
This is what our speaker sees after our announcement video transitions us into the message. It’s a big bold timer that’s easy to see, and I’ve programmed it to turn yellow once they’ve gone over time. I like yellow as opposed to red because our “zero” time isn’t a hard out, just more of a reminder to land the plane ASAP.
These are just examples to get you thinking about how to format a confidence monitor that might work for your context. Another great resource is the Bethel Production YouTube Channel, where you can see their confidence monitor as part of their multiview live stream. Renewed Vision also hosts documentation about formatting their stage displays, which you can read at your leisure.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully you now have a basic idea of how a confidence monitor can work within your particular context, with a few different options that might fit your function and budget. Talk to your leadership and your team about what they need a confidence monitor to do, and let those discussions guide your decision into the right hardware, software, placement, and formatting. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me personally at any of my socials below. I love to help anyone who wants to learn how to best serve their teams.
