Hosting: Separate machines

For high reliability and production, you might want to separate the main presentation machine from the computer capturing slides for Sermon Slides.

There are several options

NDI: The network option

As long as you disable wifi, on the receiving machine (with the Slide Capture App), NDI should provide a very reliable way of sending the slides over a Gigabit network.

I recommend setting the video to 1080p or 720p, but the frame rate at 30 or lower. The more frames you send per second, the more the encoder/decoder works, raising your CPU usage.

Also, you may want to check the Alpha Key tab and set it to Premultiplied. This will help if you choose “Auto Crop” in Slide Capture. With those enabled, you can send lowerthirds, side graphics, or other shapes cropped to only the useful part, making them much prettier for sharing and note taking.

For Proclaim, New Blue, Chyron Live, or others, these options should be set the same in the relevant output configurations.

Receiving in Slide Capture

1. In Slide Capture, click the + icon, and select Add Video Input.
2. From the next screen, select the NDI tab, and choose the screen you setup on the other machine
3. Now, you can link (or setup) this input to the Sermon Slide destination.

Syphon: Fast, but same machine

This article is focused on sending to another computer. But for completeness, you can use Syphon out or your presentation software, as long as you don’t mind running the efficient Slide Capture app on the same system. (It should use less than ½ of a CPU when running on a full HD video signal with auto slide detection running.

Capture Card: Advanced, Reliable, SDI or SMPTE-2110

We support receiving a video signal over SDI or the new SMPTE-2110 standard with a growing list of capture cards.

Currently, the Slide Capture app does not have this enabled, but contact us for a beta version, and we will work with you to validate your equipment works reliably before you go live.

More on the way

There are always new standards, systems, and configurations out there. The options above should work for most environments; but, if you need to use another one, please let us know so we can prioritize and work with it!