Reading this post made me think of the condition we are in during this present age.  One day we know we will live in perfection with God as King of the New Heavens and New Earth.  Longing for this day, there is a tension living in a world of sin. 

In a similar way (admittedly limited in scope I am currently working on a MacBook and living in a PC based world at church with our presentation software (EasyWorship).  I long for the day of perfection when all we see is the beautiful apple.

We use Mac’s and ProPresenter. My Macbook Pro was running Leopard by 4:30pm last Friday. It is worth the upgrade for the new Quick Look alone. Although Spaces and Time Machine are amazing too!

I have used many flavors of PC’s running many flavors of windows, including Tablet PC’s and Vista - the Mac and OS X win hands down in my book! What can I say - I’m a fan boy!

MH

We’ve been using easyworship for a few years here and it works ok, but there are some definite drawbacks for a large, multi-venue facility like ours.

As far as using Leopard, it’s way to early to expect people to switch over. You never want to change your operating system if you have a stable editing system. Until the release has been out and the bigger bugs are worked out, you never want to upgrade to something that’s going to possibly disrupt your workflow. One problem I’ve already heard about is that many Adobe apps won’t work to their fullest on Leopard yet. They are working, but some don’t work completely yet. Adobe will issue a patch soon, but that’s still something that could cause a major problem if you’re trying to do a project that relied heavily on these programs.

While the whole PC vs Mac debate can go on and on, it does show a bit of pride to think that a PC cannot handle anything important. Our audio post guy had been working on a PC for many years and only recently switched over to a Mac. It wasn’t because ProTools HD wouldn’t work with his PC, he had more than enough capacity for what he had been doing, but he wanted to upgrade his computer and decided that since our video editing systems are on Mac it would help if he went Mac too. My personal editing system is a PC but my work systems are Mac. I know that both offer a lot of functionality to the point where I don’t think anyone can really claim that what is possible on a Mac is not possible on a PC. One thing that I will say, though, is that I do not want to run Vista and so I will be switching over to a Mac when I can afford it.

We started with MediaShout several years ago, but moved over to ProPresenter a few months ago.  The only thing we use the PC for is general office tasks.  Everything looks so much smoother coming off the Mac.

We use PC’s. The main reason is noone on staff here has any experiance with Mac’s + it would be expensive to purchase 7Macs (4 in office & 3 for service + a server) at once.

We use Easy worship & our trial is almost up & will probably purchase it. It is more cost effective because of Media Shout’s site license thing.

I personally have a lappy with Vista & have only have problems adding software.

Our production facility is all Mac.  Our main auditorium just switched to Mac about 3 months ago, and we run ProPresenter.  I had already bought LiveWorship, but a guy I met @ Willow Creek’s Arts conference convinced me to go to ProPresenter. We were using an older version of EasyWorship, but every time I tried to upgrade, my computer would crash (sound familiar to anyone?).  I liked EasyWorship, but it was clearly time to upgrade my media computers, so the hand-me-down Macs went to the auditorium.  The youth room is to follow, then our children’s dept., possibly within the next couple of years.  We LOVE ProPresenter.  The computer is runs on is a Dual 2Ghz G5 with 4GB of RAM.  I have played 7min videos with no hiccups.

We have a very happy with Oratorio from graymattercomputing.com.  It’s crossplatform and can put together a song presentation in just a few minutes on the fly.  Change backgrounds and lyrics quickly and seamlessly.  A free trial and only costs $99.  Developer has been great with feedback and adding new features.  Check it out.  Has saved us money and lots of time.

Well, I’m a mac guy, always have been.  While our IT guys at the church worry about the Macs given to the Arts team and for our production machines aren’t as secure on our network, we’ve slowly won them over.

As for software, both MediaShout and EasyWorship were used at one point, moreso the former.  But it took a good 40-50 minutes to train someone adequately on MS.  And even then they wouldn’t fully have it.  And we were just not satisfied with the number of hiccups it was prone to have, so we ditched it and went to ProPresenter on Macs.  We’ve never looked back.

Not only does it surpass (imo) the other two PC programs by far, it is TREMENDOUSLY easier for volunteers to learn.  I can have someone running it competently in about 5 minutes...20 if I need to show them how to make presentations (lyrics, passages, etc).

I can’t imagine life without ProPresenter now.  My volunteer team leaders thank me almost daily...so do others on staff.

We hold international conferences annually (about 800+ attendees in the evening meetings) and smaller conferences during the year of around 120 people each.

We have been running our songs through a PC running Microsoft Powerpoint for about 5 years.

This year, however, I switched to a Macbook running Keynote. I have also being doing our weekly meetings of mainly core volunteers running the songsheets from a flat screen TV and doing a Keynote presentation. I run the screen and lead worship from the same laptop without really using separate songsheets.

I did not even know software like ProPresenter existed, and I am definitely going to give it a try.

I am also going to upgrade to Leopard as soon as it becomes available in South Africa - which should only be around next week.

We’re in a similar place with a lot of churches here.  Our Communications Department (Post Production and Graphics) is using all Macs.  However, our Senior Pastor has a MacBook Pro, as well as almost every pastor on the executive team.  Assistants are all on PC’s and most Pastors are on PC’s also.  We’re using Easy Worship in our Sunday morning services.  I think Easy Worship does a fairly good job.  I would imagine in the next few months we’ll be switching to Mac in there so we can run iWorship or ProPresenter. 

Oh yeah, and I’m running 10.5 on my MacBook Pro, and my MacPro.  IT ROCKS!!!!!

My church is definitely has been a hybrid church like yours. However, we are now in the process of moving into a new building and changing the way we do things a little. We have been all Mac for production for quite some time now, but we have had a PC for peesentation. We have recently made the decision to switch to Mac for presentation, and we were going to go with ProPresenter...but because of the issue of PowerPoint (not being able to use transitions in ProPresenter and having to import all the PPT slides as jpegs)...we decided to stick with EasyWorship. Since we’ve decided to go with EasyWorship, we of course have to partition our presentation computer, which is now going to be a Mac. This means we have to install Windows on it. Weird...but from what I understand, Vista received its highest performance rating when operated from a Mac. I found that very interesting.

One staff member has Leopard installed on their computer and the rest of us will be getting Leopard installed this week.

We’ve got 4 Macs here for video production and graphics work and use easy worship and powerpoint for presentations. Video playback is via DVD off a normal consumer DVD player.
The youth service is switching to Keynote from Powerpoint, but run Easyworship off their Macbook with Bootcamp.