Dual Screen

Chapter points in this section:

The dual-screen advantage
How it works
Setting up dual-screen on your computer
Using WorshipSession in Dual-screen mode
Showing PowerPoint presentations
Writing dual-screen HTML presentations

The Dual-screen advantage

WorshipSession is essentially a “Single screen” system - it doesn’t have an operators’ view that’s different from the audience view. This is important because it's designed to be operated “on stage” by musicians. When used in dual-screen mode, WorshipSession offers two views that are almost identical, but the “on stage” screen can include extra information such as musical chords.

“Single-screen style”

WorshipSession is designed expressly for “on stage” use - unlike other song projection systems, it is intended to be operated directly by worship leaders, rather than by a separate projector operator. WorshipSession users find that they can worship lead more effectively because they are in direct control of the projector.

An important consideration for “on stage” users is that often they can’t see the projection screen because it is above or behind them. WorshipSession’s single-screen style means that the worship leaders see essentially the same image on their own monitors, so they have no worries about what words the worshippers are seeing.

WorshipSession’s display is designed for worship leaders and musicians -

• It is free of distracting details, allowing worship leaders to concentrate on worshipping.
• The song words can be read from some distance away, enabling on-stage singers to sing the “correct” words that everyone else is singing.

When used in dual-screen mode, WorshipSession preserves its “Single-screen style”, showing two views that are very similar.

Replacing the guitarist’s songbook

Dual-screen WorshipSession replaces the guitarist’s songbook by displaying guitar chords along with the song lyrics. When WorshipSession is switched to dual-screen mode, the “big screen” view is the same as before, and the “on stage” view includes guitar chords.

The dual-screen mode brings important advantages for worship leaders -

• They can reduce the clutter on stage, removing songbooks, stands and scruffy photocopied sheets.
• They're “singing from the same hymnbook” as the worshippers in church, reducing the risk of singing different words.
• Leading is more intuitive - if they want to sing the “bridge” section of a song, they scroll the screen to see the chords for the “bridge”, and the worshippers can see what’s intended.
• It increases the scope for spontaneity. They can include an unplanned song without having to find the music in the book.

Dual-screen WorshipSession - how it works

To understand dual-screen operation, you should bear in mind that WorshipSession has been designed to replace an Overhead Projector, and its display imitates a rather long acetate that can be scrolled up and down on the screen to show the song. Dual-screen WorshipSession is like having two acetates taped together side-by-side. The left acetate “shines” onto the on-stage monitor, and the right acetate onto the big screen. When the song is scrolled, both acetates scroll together, by the same amount.

Master screen (musicians’ view)	Slave screen (audience view)

WorshipSession is based on HTML, and the colours and fonts can be changed to your preference (see “Establishing a House Style” for details). The illustrations above reflect the ‘out of the box’ default style, and demonstrate two important aspects of dual-screen operation:

• The two views are very similar
• They’re not completely identical

The musicians’ view uses a smaller font to allow space for the chords. The line-spacing is maintained, so that both views take up the same space vertically. Although the two views are different, they’re so similar that the worship leader can still have confidence without needing to see the big screen display.

Setting up dual-screen on your computer

First you must establish whether your computer can drive two screens. Dual-screen capability is common on modern notebooks, but quite rare on desktop computers.

Look in the “Settings” tab of the “Display Properties” dialog box. (To display this dialog box, right-click on the desktop, and select ‘Properties’.) The “Settings” page looks like the illustration. If you can see two monitor images as shown, your computer is dual-screen capable. The right-hand screen (labelled "2") may be “greyed out”. Click on this image to select it, then tick the box labelled “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”.

Note that the “Settings” property page shown above displays the relative sizes of your two monitors, and WorshipSession is designed to work with two monitors of equal size and shape, as shown. (This sizing relates to the number of pixels that will be displayed on each screen, not to the physical size of the two monitors.) If your two monitor images show unequal sizes, use the “Screen area” slider to adjust them to be the same size. This will usually be either 1024 by 768 pixels (XGA), or 800 by 600 pixels (SVGA). In general we recommend that you set your screens to use the native resolution of your projector.

The “Colors” setting is not important for projecting songs and Bible readings, but to view images at their best it should be set to its highest setting - usually 24 bit or 32 bit. However some computers can’t display 32 bit colour at full XGA resolution. If you find that setting the colour depth to 32 bit causes the “Screen 2” image to become smaller, you will need to accept a lower colour depth, or use SVGA resolution on both screens.

Some computers have more advanced multi-monitor support, and you can access additional settings by pressing the “Advanced” button. The Nvidia GeForce MX series of graphic processors offer a choice of “Spanning” and “Dual View” - these settings affect the way Windows uses the two screens. WorshipSession works equally well in either configuration.

Why doesn’t my computer remember the Dual-screen setting?

Some computers detect the presence of a monitor (or projector) plugged into the secondary graphics port, and if no monitor is detected, they disable dual-screen support automatically. Unfortunately this may mean that the next time you switch your computer on it will start in single-screen mode. You may see different results if you have the projector plugged in before you turn on the computer.

How can I tell if my computer is in Dual-screen mode?

If you have your projector plugged in and running, you will be able to see that the image on the projector is different to that on your monitor. If it’s the same (and your mouse pointer appears on both screens simultaneously) your computer is not configured in dual-screen mode.

If you don’t have a projector running, it’s much more difficult to check whether the computer is in dual-screen mode. If WorshipSession is running, you can see that the Status line displays the previous Item in the Session, in addition to the current and next Items. In single-screen mode, the WorshipSession Status line displays the licensee’s name and CCL number.

A quick way to check is to move the mouse pointer off the right side of the screen. In the usual single-screen setup, the pointer is constrained at the right of the screen, so when you move the mouse to the left, the pointer re-appears immediately. But in dual-screen mode, the pointer disappears fully, and you may need to move the mouse some distance to the left before the pointer re-appears.

Using WorshipSession in dual-screen mode

When running on a dual-screen computer, WorshipSession draws the same thing on both screens, and for most purposes the two displays are identical -

• Songs look similar, but the musician’s display includes chords.
• Bible passages display the same on both screens.
• Pop-up Messages display the same on both screens.
• Full-screen images display the same on both screens.
• Full-screen video is displayed only on the projector.
• PowerPoint presentations are displayed only on the projector
  (See PowerPoint section, below).
• HTML files are re-processed to appear on both screens,
  but may require some re-working (See HTML section, below).

Working in dual-screen mode places higher demands on your computer’s processor, and slower computers may look sluggish during “smooth scrolling”. This effect can be minimised by speeding up the scrolling action, using the “D4” Utility.

Showing PowerPoint presentations

WorshipSession can show PowerPoint presentations directly - internally it uses Microsoft’s PowerPoint viewer. The PowerPoint viewer is not dual-screen compatible, and will only show the PowerPoint presentation on one screen or the other, depending on the computer configuration. On some computers the presentation appears on the master screen, while on others it appears on the slave screen.

To overcome this inconsistency, WorshipSession includes an HTML file that “hosts” the PowerPoint presentation, and shows it only on the slave screen. This is effective, but the user must click the mouse on the presentation to transfer keyboard focus, otherwise it is impossible to control the presentation. When the presentation ends, you must click the mouse on the master screen (i.e. the musician’s screen) to restore keyboard focus back to WorshipSession.

Your computer may display PowerPoint presentations correctly without requiring the HTML page, and if it does, it is better to use it in this way because you don’t have to worry about keyboard focus. To test your setup, rename the file ws_show_ppt.html in the utils folder. If you rename the file (for example to ws_show_ppt_renamed.html) WorshipSession uses the PowerPoint viewer directly, as it does in single-screen mode. (If this causes the PowerPoint presentations to appear on the “on stage” screen and not on the projector, you will need to rename the file back again.)

Note that the PowerPoint viewer only shows presentations on one screen, and the “on stage” screen will be blank. If you have a full version of PowerPoint you may prefer to use that - the 2003 version can be configured to show a “presenter’s view” on the “on stage” screen, which can include presenter’s notes and is quite useful. Switch between PowerPoint and WorshipSession using Alt-Tab.

Writing dual-screen HTML presentations

WorshipSession uses a table to convert HTML to two columns, so that if you write HTML like this example, it will be transformed as shown in the example below. For simple HTML this works with no problems, but if you are using CSS (style sheets), the result might look different because of different attributes applied to the <BODY> and <TD> elements.

For example, if you specify in CSS that your <BODY> should have padding-left of 2cm, the padding will appear correctly on the master screen, but not on the slave screen. To see the padding in both screens, it should be applied to the <TD> element. Alternatively, apply a margin to the <P> element - this would work equally well in single-screen and dual-screen setups.

Some points to bear in mind when writing HTML:

• You should take care to write correct HTML. The dual-screen transformation causes the browser to be sensitive to faults that would otherwise be ignored, for example where an element has not been closed properly, this can cause an incorrect display, or even no display at all.
• You can use the "dualmaster" and "dualslave" ids in CSS, to apply different style rules to the two columns.
• If your page has a background image and you want the image on both screens, the image should be the same size as your screens (800 or 1024 pixels wide), and you should specify repeat-x in your CSS.
• If the page includes a <BGSND> element, you should move it outside of the <BODY> element, otherwise the sound will be loaded twice, which sounds really bad!
• The width of the "dualmaster" column is calculated at 4 pixels less than the width of the master screen. This allows for the minimum margin widths of the various elements. Nevertheless the "dualslave" column may be a pixel or two smaller.
• If you apply different style rules, the two screens may wrap differently, which can cause problems if the page is scrolled.
• The dual-screen transformation is suppressed if you specify a dualscreen attribute on the <BODY> element - for example <BODY dualscreen="1">. This enables you to write “dual screen aware” HTML files, which explicitly draw their content onto the two screens.
• The dual-screen transformation is performed after any persistent fields have been loaded. These fields will therefore appear in both columns. When the page is unloaded, only the fields in the master column are saved.

Dual-screen processing of songs

The way WorshipSession prepares songs for dual-screen presentation is significantly more complex, because of the need to maintain scroll points in synch, and also the way features are hidden from normal display. The main difference is that each paragraph element in the song is translated individually into a separate table, and any attributes that were applied to the paragraph will be applied instead to the table.

On occasion you may want to edit the HTML of features within songs, for example to use a different font, or include a photographic background. You will need to bear in mind that WorshipSession performs a transformation like this (Simplified!) example:

After the transformation, your feature may not look as you intended! See the examples of photographic features supplied with WorshipSession, (for example Jesus, be the centre in songs/j.html). Copy and modify the HTML there to suit your requirement.