Church Video Ideas: PC or Mac?

Orginally published on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 7:43 PM
by Greg Atkinson

Ah - that is the question these days. On the production and editing side, church techies have been pretty Mac-heavy for years, but most used a PC to project their lyrics and videos in an actual service. A big reason for this was that worship presentation software until recently was all PC-based. With the surprisingly quick rise of ProPresenter, I'm seeing more and more churches make a total switch over to the Mac platform...

Obviously, a big part of the rise of Macs is due to Apple’s amazing marketing campaigns. Apple has done a great job of presenting their products in fresh, exciting, compelling and attractive ways. The “PC vs Mac” commercials were and still are a huge success. Whether totally accurate or not, Apple and Mac computers are seen as sleek, stable and cool. It feels as if every one has an iPod and uses iTunes. Is that true? I doubt it, but it feels like that. My hats off to Apple again for one heck of an advertising job. Earlier this week, on my blog, I asked how many had upgraded to Apple’s Leopard and several responded that they had already upgraded.

I recently did a software poll where I asked churches what worship presentation software they used. If I had done this poll just 1 to 2 years ago, it would have been a toss up between EasyWorship and MediaShout and everyone else would have been way behind. This year’s software poll shocked me as ProPresenter (a Mac-based worship presentation software) took the top place and has never looked back. I, personally, stand behind and endorse 3 worship presentation products: EasyWorship, MediaShout and ProPresenter. I knew ProPresenter would be in the top 3, but had no idea they’d take the top spot.

Also helping Macs in the world of worship are the endorsements from conferences like Orange, Catalyst and all the Passion events. ProPresenter is also used on the Chris Tomlin tour and got its start at North Point where Andy Stanley is Senior Pastor. These high profile conferences, events and churches started raising the bar for media and when attendees asked, “What are you using to do that?” - the answer came down to two worship products made for Mac - ProPresenter (the worship presentation software) and ProVideoPlayer (designed to enhance live staging events).

Now having said all this, I’m back to the original question. You see, my church is PC-based. I love many of the features of ProPresenter, but we haven’t switched over to the Mac platform (for presentation) for a number of reasons. We do use Macs (with FinalCut) for video production. So, I bring this up for my own education. I’d like to know what you use at your church. Are you PC or Mac? Are you a hybrid like my church (PC for presentation and Mac for production)? I’ll also ask two more questions: If you’re Mac-based, have you upgraded to Leopard? If you’re PC-based, have you upgraded to Vista?

©2007 – Greg Atkinson (www.churchvideoideas.com)
Used by permission from author. All rights reserved by author.

Greg Atkinson lives in Dallas with his wife and their three small children. Greg served previously as the Director of WorshipHouse Media, after having served as a worship pastor for 11 years. Greg is now the Technical Arts Director at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship and continues to consult, teach and write about worship, media and creative communication. You can connect with him through his daily blog, Church Video Ideas, his podcast, Creative Synergy , or his email: .

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