EasyWorship 2009: Display Foldback Overview

If you’re an EasyWorship user, there’s a new version available for you. EasyWorship 2009 was released recently, and it has several new features. One of the features that is causing some interest and even confusion is Display Foldback.

I’ve been using EasyWorship 2009 at our church for a few months now in its beta form, and it has been rock-solid. Our worship team really likes the Display Foldback capabilities, and has made it clear that this feature alone is worth the upgrade fee.

So, what is Display Foldback? Basically, it’s support for a third output from the computer that is intended specifically for the people on stage. It supports different settings for backgrounds and font size and style. In addition, you can display a clock for the worship team and preacher to use. Perhaps my favorite part of the system is that you can display the first line of the next slide in case your slide operator falls asleep at the wheel.

Display Foldback requires an additional level of hardware that you may not already have. You’ll need a third display output, which for many churches, means purchasing an extra video card. Our setup is unconventional, but it works all the same. We use the integrated video on the motherboard for our control screen. Then, a single PCI-E video card sends VGA to the congregation and Foldback to the stage via composite video. You could do any combination of video cards and monitors from something like what we use all the way to three independent cards.

Once your hardware is in place, setup is simple. First, configure Windows so that all three outputs are active. Hit the “Identify” button to be sure you’re not duplicating a certain output across two screens. You’ll want to see a “1” on the control screen, a “2” on the congregation screen, and a “3” on the foldback monitor. Then, start up EasyWorship. In the Live > Options pane, set the main (congregation) output to “Secondary Monitor”. Click Ok. Now, in the Live > Display Foldback Options pane and under the “Display Foldback” heading, change the dropdown menu selection to “Monitor 3” or whatever yours may be called.

That’s it! Change the Display Foldback settings as you see fit. Most of the foldback pane is similar to what you’ll see in the main Display Options pane, so you should be familiar with what you’re looking at. A plain background with the clock and next line preview turned on seems to work well for us.

There are two more features related to Display Foldback I’d like to mention. First is the “Foldback Alert”, found at Live > Alerts > Foldback Alert, or the Alerts button just to the left of the Logo, Black and Clear buttons. There, you can send a message only to the stage. Operation is identical to the “Message Alert”.

The other feature is enhanced PowerPoint slide operation. In the Live > Display Foldback Options pane and in the PowerPoint Options tab, there are some options to add thumbnails of the next few upcoming slides. You can change the size of the previews as a percentage of screen height. However, if your foldback monitor is not very large or it is positioned far away, sharing that screen with thumbnails makes the primary slide small and hard to read very quickly.

All in all, EasyWorship 2009 is a good upgrade, and there are many more features besides Display Foldback. Another feature that I like is webpage integration, especially for YouTube.

Prices are $399 for a new license, $99 for an upgrade and free if you have purchased since the beginning of 2009. More information can be found at http://www.easyworship.com