Automation & Macros in ProPresenter

Let’s use ProPresenter’s macro feature to send slides when they have motion!

Transcript below

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Hey guys, I want to talk to you today about how to automate slide capturing through Proresenter uh for cases where

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you might have an animation going on or want to only selectively capture uh certain slides to the slide capture

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system and of course to the congregation's phones. First off, let me show you here. Uh, for instance, if we have a background image playing and we

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switch slides, you can see in slide capture that it does not capture that here uh on the right hand side even

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though auto capture is turned on. It's because it can't detect, it doesn't know when a new slide happens with that continuous motion going on. Um, we could

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obviously turn that off and just click the capture still button, but I know y'all don't want to have to do that during service. uh pressing the button

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every single time. So, we've made it really easy here. Um, still involves turning off auto capture, but uh it uses

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the devices in Proresenter to uh send a signal over there. So, let's get started and look at how to do that. First off,

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we need to go to Proresenter and go to our settings and we're going to go to our devices

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section here. Now, under add device, we're going to select Ross Talk. Ross Talk is a really powerful uh protocol. A lot of different companies support it.

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Uh even though it is of course tied to Ross. [music] Um but this protocol will let us talk. So, we're going to change

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our behavior here to a controller. And that means that Proresenter is going to connect to the slide capture

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application. Uh so before we get the uh rest of our settings, let's look at slide capture and go to the settings

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over here. And under the automation section, [music] we're going to make sure that Ross Talk is enabled. I'm

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going to turn that on. The default port for Ross Talk is 7788, but you may have something else running on that port. So if you need to change it, no problem. Just type that in here.

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Uh and it'll update.

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Now that we have this set, we can go back over here. We have 7788.

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And in the address, we're going to use localhost 127.0.0.1.

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That is basically saying use the computer that I'm on. So, if you're on a different computer, you need to type in the IP address from that machine. Uh, but for most of you, this should work.

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Uh, we're going to do that. And one other thing here that trips me up occasionally is autoreonnect. If you don't turn this back on, uh the

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connection, if it ever stops for some reason, Proresenter will not reconnect back to Sermon Slides and it'll just your automation won't work. Uh so we

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want to check that off. Um and unfortunately, Proresenter only works like 95% of the time. So, you may want

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to uh do a quick check before your service starts to make sure uh that it's actually started its connection. We're

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going to click back. Go over here and click connect. Now that we're connected, it shows a green light. Um but it will

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show that green light even if you're not connected. Um so you want to make sure that you do an actual check with your

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system uh before you uh before you trust that that green is actually means it's connected. It basically just means that Ross talk is enabled.

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So, now that we're over here, instead of adding the uh the custom control into every single slide, we're going to add a

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macro. So, click on our macros, and I'm going to add a new one here.

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[music] I'm going to call it capture sermon slide. Uh we'll use this green color for now. Uh but you can, of course, customize your icon and text uh

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to make it look good for you. Um, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add a single action. We go to actions,

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communication, Ross Talk, and you're going to choose custom control. Now, what are you going to add in here?

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We actually need to look at our s our sanctuary one here, our destination, and click automation, and it'll show you. We have several different options that we

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can run. Um, the one in particular we care about is called trigger a capture. And you'll see this capture 001.

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The 001 comes from our destination. So if we have two or three different destinations, those will all be numbered here. Uh and you can get that number

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here. It'll change live. Um and just click copy and it'll copy that whole string. So on our macro, we actually

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just want to edit now because it did add. Um we're going to change our custom control text to be capture 001.

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We've added that and now you can actually go over here and trigger it from the macro

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and captured. Um, if you want to add this now to a slide, you just drag it

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onto the slides and you'll see when you click that slide, it'll trigger a capture. I click

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this slide which doesn't have it and it won't trigger that capture. So, none of these other slides will trigger

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until we add that macro onto all those slides.

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So now, as we go through, it'll take those captures for everyone that we've actually added. Um, so now that you've

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added these macros, you can run your event and know that only the slides that you plan on sending to the congregation

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to their sermon slides app will actually show up for them. Uh, if you have any questions, of course, let me know. I'd love to know how you're using this

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feature uh and any cool automations that you're

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