VT | CG Pages In a Live Switch

Concept: rapidly selecting numerous CG pages
Modules: Switcher, CG and DDR
Assets: your own lyrics pages
Time: 10 minutes

Providing song lyrics on screen can be the heart and soul of video support for worship services, as is the case at Trinity United Methodist Church’s “Cappuccino and Christ”, in Huntsville, Alabama. This church decided on VT for it’s wide array of integrated features as the central suite of tools in it’s new 1250 seating capacity, 30,000 square-foot auditorium.

VT[3] comes equipped with a Character Generator for creation of overlays and lower-thirds, and even a CG Player, which is a smaller CG module designed for playback. But Nes Gurley and his team found a better way to display titles with greater ease and organization: use of VT DDR. “This had immediate benefits for composing in VT CG as it was only necessary to make each Project contain the words from one song. That would leave us composing maybe 24 pages in CG per project instead of 124. It allowed us the added benefit of being able to recycle song words as the songs were repeated in subsequent services.” To begin, open Windows’ Explorer and re-number page one through nine to 01 through 09.

If you don’t take that step, in order for them to load into the DDR in the correct order, it will be necessary to “Ctrl” click each CG page in the File Bin in the order that you want them to load.

Renaming is, in the long run, more efficient if they will be loaded at a later date.

In Windows Explorer, rename page 1, adding the song name before “Page 01”. If the song name starts with a letter that is later in the alphabet than “p” (for Page), I just precede the name with an “a” so that Key 01 will show up first in File Bin, instead of last.

This will allow you to quickly find the first page of any song in the DDR, and know which song it is. It may not matter on Sunday Morning, but during rehearsals, the song leader often changes the order for rehearsing the songs. This allows you to stay up with a rapid-fire announce and rehearse.

Now, open DDR for the CG Keys. Place it at the very bottom of the screen and grabbing it at the top, stretch it to full screen height.

TUMC uses the VT’s 16-input switcher, so this is placed in the closest position on the second screen.

All that is left is to take the set list, select add in the DDR and load each song in turn by Shift clicking on the first and last page, followed by clicking “Open”. Here is the result.

Now you can see why it’s a good idea to stretch DDR to full screen height. Note the scroll bar. This is from a Sunday with very minimal usage. It will be necessary to scroll several times between songs to keep seeing the current Song Words in the DDR. Even that doesn’t always work for a given song.

However, the down arrow will continue to step through the text pages even though they are below the area shown in the DDR. Although you will not be able to see the highlight and pointer on the selected page when it is not visible in DDR, you still get a momentary highlight surrounding DDR to indicate that the down arrow is still changing pages on that module.

Glancing at the list at DDR, you may worry that they can’t be read but that isn’t going to be how they will be read. Let’s finish the set-up to use the keys and then examine how to best read them.

Go to the Downstream Key, center section of the switcher, just to the right of the T-bar. If the dot is showing beside “DSK” click “OFF” just below, to move the dot next to it. Then click on the triangle to the right, and select the DDR with the CG words from the pull down.

Selecting DDR will cause the DDR to load into the Downstream Keyer, and the DDR will be displayed inside the keyer interface.

If the dot were left beside “DSK” the highlighted CG Key in the DDR would have immediately appeared over Main Out, to the big screens in this example. Another important tip here is that if the VT is shut down for any reason, the DDR will have to be reassigned to the DSK. NewTek set it up that way so that the VT wouldn’t open with a Key already being transmitted.

Now we are ready to be able to read our CG Pages. We will do that from an additional VT-Vision. Open a VT-Vision from the pull-down and set the monitor to “DSK” the right-most button on the bottom, next to “POWER”. The CG Key Page selected in the DDR will be on the screen.

The advantage here is that VT- Vision’s adjustable skin allows larger, easier-to-read text than relying on VT-CG Player, which has a fixed display size.

We are now ready to switch the program. There are several tips and tricks for best possible use, but for now, I’ll just suggest that if you use the mouse for any switcher function, be sure to mouse click back on the DDR page in order for the down arrow button to step through the CG Pages. You can always mouse click through them.

With its combination of live switching, character generation and multiple DDR’s, VT is a wonderful production asset for worship services.

Thanks to Nes Gurley for assistance with this tutorial. If you have a tutorial you’d like Newtek to publish, e-mail us at vt2tutorials@newtek.com and let us know.