I thought I would address the issue of Text cues in MediaShout because of the number of calls taken recently about ShoutWriter. There are still a few users who do all of their Text cues using ShoutWriter instead of Ted. I personally have used it only a handful of times and only then because I needed bullet points.

ShoutWriter has not changed since the completion of Version 2.5 and is a carry-over into V3. Ted, which was not available in V2.5 allows you to type directly into the text box and see exactly how your cue is going to look in relation to the background image and position on the screen. This becomes especially important when your background media contains focus features that you would not want covered with text. You can still highlight portions of text and change the font, color, size and alignment.

My biggest issue with using Ted is the lack of support for bullet points. Text copied from ShoutWriter or Word does not retain formatting. The bullet points are removed or replaced by hollow squares in the place of the intended bullet design. One alternative is to manually type a symbol into the the field that would act as a bullet point, such as a -, *, >,~

Many churches are still inserting PowerPoint presentations for the pastor’s sermon outlines and announcements. This is perfectly understandable, especially when you have a pastor that has been doin his sermons in PowerPoint for years.

Another option to both Ted and ShoutWriter is to create a Word Doc, .rtf, or .txt file and setup your page to be 6″ high by 8″ wide. This will give you the same aspect ration as your 4:3 display screen.

Perhaps the most common reason users are still utilizing Shoutwriter instead of Ted is so that they can save those text files and use them again later. Well, you can still do that in Ted.

• The first way to preserve a Text cue with embedded text rather than text from a file is to drag the Text Cue into Boxer and save that Boxer script.
• The Second way to preserve your text is to select the text cue then click on the Edit menu. Choose Convert > Export to RTF file. This will allow you to save the entire Text cue and its sub-cues to an RTF file that you can access and use again at a later time.

If you have any other ideas I would love to hear them.