VideoPsalm

This article describes how to configure and use VideoPsalm for different teams on the same PC, each team having its own folder of documents.

For example:
- The Sunday morning worship team,
- The youth group team on Saturday night.

Each team will want to find their songbooks, settings, styles, backgrounds, etc. and modify them, without impacting the other team.
 
The idea is to prepare two icons on the desktop, one for the Sunday worship, one for the Saturday youth group :

This way, each group manages its documents independently of the other group.
The documents for Sunday worship are those stored in the standard documents folder :
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm
 
And those for the youth group will be stored for example in the following folder:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm Youth Group
 
When you start VideoPsalm, it loads following documents :
- songbooks,
- Bibles,
- settings,
- background images,
- background videos.
 
To change the document folder, open the VideoPsalm options and select it in the "General" tab:

Then click "OK".
VideoPsalm will load the documents from the new folder.
This may take a few seconds depending on the number of documents to load.
The next time you start VideoPsalm, it will remember to load the documents from the new folder.
 
If you select an empty folder, VideoPsalm will end up with no Bible, no image, etc. in it.
To add documents to it, import predefined songbooks and Bibles with the help of the VideoPsalm import assistant.

There are three ways to create a new VideoPsalm document folder:
 
Solution 1
Make a backup of your document folder to another folder, for example from the folder
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm
to the file:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm Youth Group

Solution 2
1. From within VideoPsalm, switch to another document folder, for example to:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm Youth Group
2. Import songbooks and Bibles using the VideoPsalm import assistant.

In the dialog box that opens, adjust the following fields:

1. In the "General" tab, rename the icon to "VideoPsalm Sunday worship".

2. In the "Shortcut" tab, in the "Target" field, at the end of the line, specify the folder to open for the service:
 /f="C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm"
Normally, the target now contains the following text:
"C:\Program Files\VideoPsalm\VideoPsalm.exe" /f="C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm"

3. Press "OK" to save your changes and close the dialog.

4. Copy and paste the VideoPsalm icon (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V), to get a second shortcut.

5. Rename the second icon to "VideoPsalm Youth group".

6. Right-click on the second icon, select the "Properties" menu and select the "Shortcut" tab.

7. In the "Target" field, replace
 /f="C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm"
with
 /f="C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm Youth Group"

8. Click "OK" to save your changes and close the dialog.

Your two icons are now configured and each group will be able to work independently with respect to the documents.
All they need to do is to start VideoPsalm with the right icon.

If you need to, you can go a step further in compartmentalizing, and create a Windows account for each group.

Or maybe "Why is my song text so small and on one line only?"

This article describes why and when to use the "Wrap" button:

The "Wrap" button has following effect:

When "Word wrap" is off
VideoPsalm will reduce the text font size until the longest line fits the screen width.
This is what you can see in image 1.
In this situation, increasing the font size will have no effect, because the text is already as wide as it can be.
Possible consequence: The text may be too small when a song line is very long.
Solution: Insert new lines at the right places.

​By default, VideoPsalm is configured to not wrap long song lines: the automatic word wrap is off for songbooks.

Solutions
To prevent VideoPsalm from wrapping sentences at the wrong places, you can either:

• In the lyrics editor, insert a new line at the right place.

or

• Replace specific blanks with "non-breaking spaces".

Non breaking spaces​ are displayed like regular spaces, but VideoPsalm will not split a sentence there.
To produce non-breaking spaces, press Ctrl+Shift+Blank (it works the same in MS-Word).
In its lyrics editor, VideoPsalm displays non-breaking spaces with an "Underline" red symbol "_".

Conclusion  For songs, you will want to disable word wrapping.
VideoPsalm is configured by default to not wrap long song lines.
If for some reason your songs do wrap, you may want to disable word wrapping globally for all your songs.

Alternatively, click the "Songbooks" button:

From now on, all changes that you do to the style attributes will be applied to the "Songbooks" style level, which means that they will apply to all songbooks, songs and song verses (unless the property is reassigned differently at a higher style level).

If for some reason your Bible verses get displayed on one line only, in a very small font, it means that the word wrap option is disabled:

To enable word wrap for all Bible verses:

​​1. Select the "Bibles" style level:

Alternatively, click the "Bibles" button:

From now on, all changes that you do to the style attributes will be applied to the "Bibles" style level, which means that they will apply to all Bibles, Bible books, chapter and verses (unless the property is reassigned at a higher style level).

​2. Select the automatic word wrap option:

This article describes how to set the text color. Fill, outline and shadow colors:

A slide has a background from a plain color, an image or a video.

​This is how you can set the background color:

Which gives this:

​
Solution 1 - Adjust the text fill color:

3 easy steps:

Step 1 - Select the style level at which you want to assign the text color.
In case the background is the same for verses of this song, you will want to assign the text fill color at the "Song" style level:

The result is much more readable, isn't it?

Depending on the background, it is not always possible to find the right color by the first trail.
One cool feature of the color dropdown is the possibility to grab a color from the background image:
​​1. Press the "Display more colors" button:

You get a color wheel from where you can select many more colors, as well as Red-Green-Blue and transparent sliders:

Notice the pipette. It enables you to grab any color from anywhere on your screen:

This comes in handy to find the exact color from the background image, and assort the text color to it.
Click and drag the "Pipette" icon to the color area in your screen.
Isn't that cool?

The text fill color is enough in many situations.
But how to handle text floating over a moving background, alternating between dark and light colors?
This is where the solution 2 comes to the rescue.
​
​
Solution 2 - Adjust the text outline color

Step 1 - Open the text outline color dropdown.
​Step 2 - Select the outline color.
Step 3 - Adjust the outline width.

That's what we can get with an outline dark color over a light background:

And with the same text colors, over a dark background:

As you can see, the combination of a light fill color with a dark outline color can fit every background.
The opposite is true too: a dark fill color with a light outline color:

This covers most of the needs.

​
Solution 3 - Add a text shadow effect

​The text shadow effect will give deepness to the text, a kind of a nice 3D effect:

You set the shadow through the third color dropdown:

Step 1 - Open the text shadow color dropdown.
Step 2 - Select the shadow color.
Step 3 - Adjust the Blur effect, its depth and direction.

Do you like it so far?
There is one more way to set your text colors:
​

Solution 4 - Use a preset color effect from the font color gallery
Select one of the preset color effect from the font color gallery:

So far, we have seen how to globally set the font color of a song verse, or a whole song, etc.
It is the recommended way of doing it: by using the tools in the top bar (the ribbon bar):

Solution 5 - Highlight specific song lyric words
Sometimes you need to highlight a specific word in a song verse, like the word "Awesome" below: