Projecting an address and the prompter
Paste a spoken address, project it paragraph by paragraph and scroll it in front of the speaker, at their own pace.
A guest takes the floor. A leader reads a prepared message. Someone gives a written testimony. This is neither a sermon with its outline nor a three-line announcement: it is a continuous address, and it has two audiences at once.
The congregation reads it in chunks, on the hall screen. The speaker reads it continuously, on the stage return screen. You paste the text once, then choose what to do with it.
Pasting the address
Open the Live panel in the control room, Address tab.
- The title and the speaker name — both optional, but they will appear on every slide.
- Paste the text into the large area.
Three indicators appear straight away: the number of slides, the number of words and the estimated duration. The third matters most. A twenty-minute address slipped between two songs changes the whole shape of the service, and it is better to know before it starts.
One paragraph, one slide
That is the rule, and it is entirely in your hands: a blank line separates two paragraphs, and each paragraph becomes one slide.
You therefore control the split as you write, with no setting to understand. A lone "Thank you." on a screen is not waste: it is a breathing space, and it stays alone if you wrote it alone.
A paragraph too long to fit on one slide is split automatically, always at the end of a sentence, never in the middle of a clause.
Tip: single line breaks stay inside the paragraph. Text pasted from a word processor, with its hard returns, will not be chopped into one slide per line.
Click Project the address: the slides are inserted after the one on screen, and you navigate as usual.
The speaker's prompter
This is the other half, and it is independent of the first: you can scroll the text in front of the speaker without projecting anything to the congregation.
- Open the stage screen (Broadcast menu).
- In the Address tab, click Send to stage screen.
The text appears on the stage screen and starts scrolling. The public screen does not change.
Note: the prompter is never shown on the congregation's screen. They would read the address before it is spoken.
Speed is set in words per minute
Not in pixels, not as a percentage: in words per minute, because that is the only unit a speaker can estimate. The default is 130, the average pace of public speaking. Count on 110 for a solemn reading, 150 for a lively tone.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start / Pause | The text stops dead and resumes exactly where it stopped. |
| − / + | Changes the speed without making the text jump. |
| ↺ | Back to the start, keeping the speed. |
| − 15 words / + 15 words | Nudges a few lines, when the speaker has lost their place. |
From the phone
As soon as a prompter is running, a block appears on its own on the remote: start, pause, speed, nudge.
It is in fact the most useful station. Whoever accompanies the speaker is next to them, not behind the control desk — they can see on their face when to slow down, and they correct it without crossing the room.
Note: the text of the address never reaches the phone. The remote receives the scrolling state, never the content.
What the speaker sees
- The reading line sits in the upper third of the screen, not the middle. When you look up at the congregation between two sentences, your eyes come back from above: they find the place faster.
- Top and bottom fade out, so there is only one place to return to.
- A progress bar at the bottom shows what remains.
- When paused, the screen says so. Motionless text could mean "paused" or "the control room dropped out"; the speaker should not have to guess which.
Beam-splitter glass
If your church reads through a glass placed in front of the camera, as in a studio, add &mirror=1 to the stage screen address. The image is flipped horizontally, and the text reads correctly in the reflection.
The address on the live stream
Like everything else, a projected address is also sent to the live stream as a lower third: whoever watches from home follows the speaker exactly as those in the hall do. The title and the name appear, never the chunk number — "3 / 12" means nothing to a viewer.
The scroll does not drift
A technical detail with very concrete consequences: the position of the text is recomputed from the start time, on every frame.
The common method adds a small increment on each frame. It is wrong in a way that only shows after several minutes: a dropped frame is lost for good, and over ten minutes the gap adds up to whole paragraphs — the speaker re-reads a sentence they have just delivered.
Here, a dropped frame costs nothing: the next one lands exactly where it should. The stated speed is therefore held, even if the computer stuttered or the window went into the background.