You can convert these following formats into PDF:

MS Word (DOC | RTF) 
-MS PowerPoint (PPT)
-MS Publisher (PUB)
-MS Excel (XLS) 
-HTML (MHT)
-Text (TXT)
-JPG , GIF,
-TIFF, BMP
-PNG, EMF,
-WMF

It is free, it is fast, and I do not need to use a PC.   This has solved alot of inter-compatibility between our computers…   Of course, I could train everyone not to use publisher, but that is a whole-nother issue 

Hey Everyone! Just got back from Vacation in Florida and had a wonderful time. I never knew the beach is so white in Sarasota… Today I wanted to give a few ideas on video sharing and distribution. If your church is looking for a way to upload videos and distribute them to your congregation for free? Forget about YouTube, try Vimeo (an anagram of the word movie). Vimeo is really the “Facebook” of Myspace. Clean, less advertising, easier to use and more powerful. Vimeo allows 1280×720HD movies as well as the possibility to download the original movie if the author wishes to allow this. Vimeo also give you 500 meg of upload space a week. Did I mention the quality is WAY BETTER than youtube?  It is just as easy to embed your videos 

Check it out for yourself at www.vimeo.com

Here is one of the Standard Definition videos we uploaded…

 
Day 2 from Tim Peterson on Vimeo.

Although there are way too many features to list here — just go to their website and watch some videos – I am going to mention a few that we have really liked. 

SERVICE PLANNING

Each week we plan our services on a “blank slate”.  We do not use set working formulas such as “Three songs, Announcements, Song, Message, Closing” and just fill in the blanks.  What we do is take the theme or concept of the weekend and brainstorm many ideas and plan a service that best tells the story in the most creative way.  This can include many songs, few songs, videos, dance, spoken word, specials, bumpers, etc… some which take weeks of planning to pull off.  We use Planning Center to place these brainstormed ideas in the specific service plan weeks in advance.   We also like how Planning Center handles and organizes the music.   Before, we had secure folders on our website that any band or choir member could get the chord charts and mp3s.   If they wanted to, they could download all the mp3s and charts and keep them on their computer — there was no control and we had to think about the legality issues with that as well.   With Planning Center, the band, choir, even tech team members only see the charts and mp3s for the weekend they are scheduled.  The worship leaders still have the large database of mp3s and charts to pull simply place into any weekend plan, but the only thing our volunteers see is the weekend they are on.  Plus you can set whether or not they can only stream the music (no music downloads) or download them as well.  

SCHEDULING

Like I mentioned earlier, we have hundreds of volunteers on a weekend and communication can be difficult.  Each volunteer is given a username and password on the Planning Center website and can do a variety of things such as look at the plan for the weekends they are scheduled and block out dates they cannot serve.  Most everything is done through email though so most volunteers rarely even know they are using the website.   As you plan your services, you can set what positions you need and schedule rehearsal times if needed each week.   Then you just fill in the blanks!  You see the last time a person served, if they had the weekend blocked off, or if they are serving in another ministry that weekend. You can set it up for a couple of ways–  The volunteer is scheduled and confirmed or the volunteer needs to Accept or Decline that weekend.    We just schedule them confirmed as hopefully they already blocked out the dates they cannot be on and then we don’t have to wait for them to click on “Accept”.     Planning Center has a powerful matrix tool that we use to show a whole months volunteers list and make it a pdf to send out to our volunteers.  One feature we do wish is that when we email a whole team through planning center, there is no option to add an attachment…. yet.  Speaking of email, one other thing is kinda annoying is that it automatically adds a “Hi (username)” at the beginning of any email you send.  This is only a problem when you send out an email to the whole team.  I have had volunteers think I am sending them a personal email about something when I was addressing the whole team.  I think once I was mentioning I need some extra help for our 5th Easter Service and a volunteer that was going to have surgery that week thought I was asking him to cover that service.  It would be nice to allow variables in the email such as Hi %firstname% or something like that.

I did not even touch some of the other features this program has… Take a look at their website and check it out…  If you would like an easy way to plan your services and schedule volunteers, I would highly recommend this program for your church.  It has made our lives easier and our volunteers feel more connected to what is going on each week.  I think they still have a 30 day trail that is free so pop your browsers to planningcenteronline.com

A few months ago, I started looking at a digital signage solution for the HDTV’s in the Atrium at my church and found that most commercial products were outrageously expensive and did not meet every need that a church would have.  Most solutions started at 20k… Ouch!  So I started exploring other options…  There were a few basic needs we need to address:

1: Announcements throughout the week
2: A distributed music system to play music during the week
3: Live feeds on during the services (Video and Audio)
4: HD Compatiable

One option was to use Mediashout on a loop, run Itunes, and use a scan converter and RF modulator to send Audio and Video to the TV’s.  Of course, this was not really an option so we decided to go with AppleTV for the Video/Audio and Content System and DBXZonePro for the distributed audio system.   

The nice thing about the AppleTV is that it is cheap (under $300) and runs 24/7.   It is HD 1080p… It syncs Announcement slides and music from Itunes and/or a network folder.  And it has a nice transitional element between images.  

We take the component video output and split the signal to have multiple feeds for our HDTV’s.  We select which playlist of music we want to play and 2 minutes later, the screensaver with our selected images plays on the screen. That’s it!  I will write how we use the DBX ZonePro as our audio distribution system in a future post.  If you are using AppleTV in your church let me know how it is working or if you have any tips for us.

My name is Tim Peterson and I am the Creative Arts Director at Crossroads Church in Loveland, CO.  My weekly responsibilities at Crossroads include Video Production, scheduling and leading the Technical Arts Team, maintaining the Website and Podcasts, and just like you, probably a few hundred other things as well   Before Crossroads, I attended school at North Park University in Chicago and worked at Willow Creek Church in Chicago with video and production of weekend services.  Short enough?