We had a great time at WFX (Worship Facilities Expo) in Orlando! This year’s booth design was different than anything else we have done in the past. We had the opportunity to connect with other exhibitors and make some great things happen for the church. There was definitely a lot of cool new technology to be interested in and that’s what I’m going to focus on here. Mainly, working with NDI and Alpha Channel videos.
But first….
EasyWorship 7 is the WFX 2018 New Product Award Winner in the Presentation Software category!
Now, back to the event…
THE SET-UP:
The EasyWorship booth set up this year was very simple. Vanguard LED Displays installed an LED wall as the background of our booth and we had three tables set up with a computer running EasyWorship on each.
NewTek, the developer of NDI technology (Network Device Interface which I’ll talk about more below), also had a booth set up at WFX. They had EasyWorship running on their computer to show the NDI output from EasyWorship to their TriCaster system.
Anyone who stopped by the Vanguard booth was able to see some of our media content running on their LED displays.
WHAT WE SHOWED OFF:
NDI Input and Output
The computer running the LED display in our EasyWorship booth was running EasyWorship 7 and was connected with HDMI. With the new NDI technology, we were able to send the output signal from one or all of the other computers to the LED display through the network. Our computers were connected via Ethernet, but NDI can also be transmitted wirelessly as long as the Wi-Fi connection is good enough.
Paul from PTZ Optics brought us an NDI camera to showcase adding an NDI feed in EasyWorship and then we had that feed running out through NDI to the LED display. You can see that video HERE. Plus, we’ll be doing a webinar with PTZ Optics on December 19th!
Alpha Channel
Alpha channel video support is also new with EasyWorship 7. An alpha channel video is a video that has transparency. Like a transparent .png image file, a .webm or pro-res .mov can have transparency as a video format. What this gives you the ability to do is overlay the alpha channel video on top of other content and only show the non-transparency portion of the video allowing the background content to display through the transparent portion. This is now a standard feature in EasyWorship 7. We were able to showcase this feature on our computers and LED display at WFX. Here is an image of one of the videos playing. The EasyWorship 7 logo and the Vanguard logo are both alpha channel videos and are placed on top of the blue sparkle background video.
If you haven’t watched it yet, we have a video with PTZ Optics showing the alpha channel video feature.
Remote App
Another feature we’ve been extremely excited about is the addition of the EasyWorship Remote App available for iOS and Android. You can run your schedules from your phone or tablet from anywhere within your church’s Wi-Fi range. The operator can sit with everyone else in the congregation and advance the slides. And, the pastor can also advance his own sermon slides. There is even a view only option so if someone is not able to see the screens, they can install the remote on their phone or tablet and just view the live output.
If you were at WFX this year and had a chance to come by our booth, thanks for coming to see us! If you weren’t there or didn’t get a chance to stop by, we would be glad to see you there next year.
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