VideoPsalm

This topic describes how to split Bible verses after a given number of characters.
It enables to limit the amount of text displayed on a slide, and makes sure that the text is well readable, even from far away.

The screenshot below shows different Bible verses, one per slide, and illustrate how this can be useful:

You will notice that the long Bible verse (at the right) is displayed with a smaller font size.
This is because VideoPsalm automatically reduces the font size to fit the content into the slide.
However, you may prefer VideoPsalm to split long verses in two slides instead of reducing the font size.

To automatically split long Bible verses in two slides, proceed as follows:

1. Select the “Bibles” style level:

2. Make sure that the “Body style” is selected (it is the normal situation):

3. Select how many characters should be rendered on one slide, for example 150:

Romans 8:26 is now rendered on two slides:

What to do when the second slide contains only a few words?
When a verse gets split, it can happen that the following slide contains only a few words (See slide 2 just higher up).
You can tell VideoPsalm to "fill-up" the remaining slide with the consecutive text:

4. Again, make sure that you have selected the "Bibles" style level and the "Body style".

5. Press the "Extend to next verses" button:

Now, VideoPsalm fills-in the second slide with the text from following verse:

6. Save your changes:

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: