VideoPsalm

This topic describes 4 methods to transfer and synchronize VideoPsalm songs from one PC to another.

In a common situation, you have VideoPsalm installed on your home PC, and on the church PC.

The initial setup follows more or less these steps:

On your home PC
1. Install VideoPsalm.
2. Add predefined songbooks.
3. Add Bibles.
4. Assign style attributes, like font, size, alignment, colors, animations, etc.
5. Type-in some songs.
6. etc.
7. Using VideoPsalm's integrated Backup/Restore functions, backup the VideoPsalm documents to a USB stick.

On your church PC
You want to get exactly the same setup as the one you have at home.
1. Install VideoPsalm.
2. Using VideoPsalm's integrated Backup/Restore functions, restore the USB stick backup to the church PC.

VideoPsalm stores each songbook in a file on your hard drive.
A handy way to transfer songbooks from one PC to another, is to copy their files from one PC to the other, for example via a USB stick.

To easily locate the songbooks on your hard drive, open the VideoPsalm options, and press the “Explore” button:

Your songbooks are located in the “Songbooks” sub-folder.
Copy the songbooks onto a USB stick.
On the church PC, paste your USB stick songbooks to the corresponding VideoPsalm folder.

This solution comes in handy when you have only a few songs to transfer.
It is something that will happen on a weekly basis.
1. On your home PC, type-in new songs and make song corrections.
2. Put all new or edited songs into an agenda.
3. Save the agenda onto a USB stick.

An agenda contains all that is needed to reproduce your presentation identically on another PC: 

• Songs with their lyrics
• Styles (the backgrounds, styles at different levels)
• Songbooks definitions
• Styles (Songbooks, Bibles, Base)
• Slideshow images
• Standalone videos
• PowerPoints 
• etc. 

4. On the church PC, open the agenda from the USB stick.
VideoPsalm will automatically:

• Add to your church PC all the agenda songs, in particular those that are not yet there.
• Create the potential new songbooks.
• Add the song backgrounds to the image and video galleries.
• If the songs are already on the church PC, their lyrics and other attributes are replaced by those from the agenda, depending on how you set up the “Agenda open” options on the church PC:

Consider following example
Someone prepares an agenda on his home PC. Among the songs, one is called “King of kings”. In our example, this song contains an accidentally mistyped title “King of all kings”. There are possibly other misspellings in the lyrics.
To prevent these errors to propagate to the church PC, enable the “Preserve the text of my songbooks and Bibles” option on the church PC.

In case your shields are both set, only new songs will be added to your church PC. Songs that already exist on your church PC won't get modified.

4. Finally, save the changes produced by opening the agenda:

Solution overview
1. Move your home PC VideoPsalm document folder into a Dropbox folder and make VideoPsalm point to this folder via its options.
2. Setup your church PC VideoPsalm document folder to the same Dropbox folder.
3. At church, wait until Dropbox finishes to sync its files before you open VideoPsalm.

Detailed instructions
To sync songs between multiple computers, you can use a service like Dropbox or any other similar cloud solution.

VideoPsalm usually stores its songbook files in the following folder:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm

To setup your VideoPsalm to sync with Dropbox:

1. With a File Explorer, copy the "C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm" folder and its whole content into a Dropbox folder.

2. Start VideoPsalm.
It will load its documents (songbooks, Bibles, images, videos, etc.) from the usual location, namely from:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm

3. In its settings, tell VideoPsalm to load its files from the Dropbox location:

Usually, the header of song verses is not used, and is empty. The footer is used instead.

​Lower third: This is how it can look like with a green background and a relocated body area:

1. Select the “Songbooks” style level (respectively for Bibles the “Bibles” style level):

2. Press the highlighted button ("Display the resize rectangle" button):

Grab the corners to resize the relocation rectangle.
You can also resize it by grabbing the middle of a segment.

You may want to adjust the text alignment:

Now this is how your slide looks like:

While the footer rectangle is selected (respectively the header rectangle), the style properties like font, font size, font colors, transition, etc., apply to the footer (respectively to the header).

Here below, see a footer with a bigger font size and a different color:

When you are finished with adjusting footer font attributes, don't forget to select the “Body” button again, so that changes that you do to style attributes apply to the body, which is what we do most of the time:

While changing a style attribute, you may mistakenly have changed it at the wrong style level.
There are several ways to correct a wrong style attribute.
Let's start with an example:
We will assume that I assigned a background image to a song verse instead of to the (whole) song.

Press the green bullet, to activate the display of style level badges:

This displays “Badges” above the style attributes:

- A “Style level” badge (green) indicates the level where the style attribute is positioned.
Click on a badge to easily select its style level.

In the screenshot below, the font is set to “Century Gothic”, at the “Songbooks” style level.
Click on the green "Songbooks" badge to easily select the “Songbooks” style level:

It has the same effect as manually selecting the corresponding style level in the style level drop-down:

- A “Brush” badge (orange) indicates that the attribute is positioned at the current style level (in this case “Verse”).
Click the “Brush” badge to remove the “Background image” attribute at that “Verse” level:

The song verse will then be displayed with the image defined at a lower style level (at the “Song” level, or lower).

The style level brush clears the style attributes set at the current level:

This action will have the same result as pressing all the orange brushes displayed on top of the style attributes in the ribbon.

In the case we are considering, where we need to remove an image assigned by mistake to a song verse, we could do the following:
1. Select the “Song” style level.
2. Press the “Delete all the above style attributes”.
This will delete all the song verses style attributes (of all song verses):

The style explorer is a panel enabling you to see what attribute is set at what level.
To open the style explorer, press the highlighted button:

This opens the style explorer, where you can selectively clear each attribute at the right level:

When you press the “Save” button, VideoPsalm lists all changes that will be saved, and gives you the opportunity to select what items to save:

In the worst case, close VideoPsalm without saving your changes, then restart it.
This method is not very practical and should be used as a last resort.