If you would like to use slides to give the congregation the words they need to sing or respond, there are a few choices you can make that will help your service look just how you want it to. Watch the video below for examples of different slide and camera combination layouts and a tutorial on making it work for you, or read on for a written overview.
When making slides there are two main ways you can go about; slides designed for picture-in-picture and slides designed for a screen split. The most important step when adding slides to your service is the design of the slides themselves, but both of these styles require different things.
For picture-in-picture make sure the words on the slides take up as much of the slides as possible. Don’t use space on designs or images; if you want to add extra flare this should be done on the main input. Choose a background that is nice but not distracting. You can fade the background a little using the transparency setting to help keep the words in the focus if you need to. Make sure the font is easy to read and not too stylized, Ariel or some other clean font is best. Make the font very big and spread out the words between multiple slides rather than trying to cram it all onto one. Be aware that a lot of the time when importing the slides either the top or bottom might get cut off a bit. It is different for each machine so unfortunately all you can do is a test and see how it looks on your vmix. Once you get used to where the cut-off is for you, you can push the words to the edge of that point and make sure you are taking up as much of the usable space as possible.
To add this to your camera in vmix, bring in your camera and NDI of slides in as usual. While it is possible to add the slides directly to the camera input, there will be times when you need a clean camera source so make it on a new blank source instead. Go to add input and use the arrow beside to bring up the sub-menu and chose blank. Now choose the gear and go into the multiview menu and chose one of the premade picture-in-picture layouts on the side with two sources. Add your camera source as input one, and your NDI slides as input two. If you would like to adjust the slide size a little chose edit on input two and adjust the size and position as you wish. Don’t make it too large or it will make framing the camera difficult. Do this again for any extra cameras you have so you can switch camera angles and still have slides if you wish.
For screen split, you need to make the slide into a full-screen set that will take up the whole screen, and split it into two distinct parts. Choose a shape you want the camera and slides to be separated in; two simple rectangles, some wavy line, something more jagged perhaps, as long as it splits the slide in approximately half either vertically or horizontally. Make the shape a solid, distinct colour, that won’t be used in the life scenery or the slide words. Typically a bright neon green is chosen for this but you can use anything as long as it meets those requirements. This will be removed in vmix and where the camera will be shown. On the other half, make the slide just as you might for picture-in-picture. Use big, legible font, take up as much of its half of the screen as possible.
Bring these slides into vmix using vmix as usual. Now use the gear, go to color key and remove the section you set aside in your slide for the camera. Now add a blank input as before. Go to the multiview settings and add the NDI as input 2, because we want the frame we treated to sit on top of the camera. Add the camera as input 1. You can edit the camera to move it over a little if you want, but most of the framing will be done by positioning your camera so that the main subject is to the side as needed to not be covered up.
The advantage of picture-in-picture is that you can add slides in without disrupting the camera framing very much, and they are not as complicated to make. The advantage of screen split is that the words can be bigger and the layout can be more appealing. Neither is the better choice, they simply accomplish the task differently. So choose the method best for you and keep playing with them until you are happy with how things look.
Companion articles:
Using a green screen – if you need a more detailed walkthrough for screen split.
Detailed Multiview – for an in-depth look at using the multiview settings.
Happy streaming and God bless.
