What's the best software for putting together a pandemic church service?

April 5, 2020 11:52 AM

Hey guys I'm at my wits end. My tiny church is trying to adapt to weekly streaming services, and my normal role is to play piano and lead worship. I have tried to adapt PowerPoint to this task and produce a video that includes the worship music, communion video message by someone else and the sermon by our pastor, but it turns out PowerPoint is a really awkward tool for this and I can't get half the videos to play despite a full day of debugging and testing. Help!

I really only need two things: 1) A video editor that lets me overlay text for the worship songs on top of or adjacent to my worship video, and 2) A service that lets me patch 3 to 6 videos together for one 50 to 70 minute long presentation. I'd rather not spend hundreds of dollars on this but I might if I have to. Assume my tech level is relatively proficient but certainly not in the livelong member of the high school AV Club.

posted by Happydaz to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: I've been working to do a similar thing for a theater company I work with. The two tools I've found so far are Restream Studio and OBS (as mentioned above). I'm just starting to learn about both of them, so I don't have a ton of opinions on either. OBS is free; Restream Studio has a free plan but may need to be paid depending on what you need from it. I'm curious to hear what other suggestions folks have -- I think a lot of people are trying to solve this same problem right now.
posted by ourobouros at 1:40 PM on April 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

One more option I found: Lightstream, a browser-based streaming studio with a free starter plan.

In the meanwhile, I've been playing with OBS and it seems extremely intuitive and easy to use, with good help documentation available online.
posted by ourobouros at 8:39 AM on April 8, 2020