A Brief overview of LyricWorks 2 HD.

History: LyricWorks was original developed for Mac OS X Panther/Tiger and worked with Microsoft Pointpoint X. Changes in the Mac OS and some things MIcrosoft did in Office 2004 made it something that we ended up abandoning because the structure would need to be totally re-written.

LyricWorks 2 HD has been in development for about a year, and has been in use since July 2007 at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA.

Below are some screenshots and a brief overview.

This is the main Operator's screen for LyricWorks 2. It is designed for use with a touch screen for easy use, but of course can also be operated via mouse, keyboard, etc. You can create up to 12 "Sets", each of which can contain up to 5 songs. Songs can be displayed as a Lower Third for keying over camera shots, or as a Full Screen.

This is how the full screen view would look.

Set lists are built in the Set List Editor. You name/select the set lists at the left, the contents of the selected set list is shown in the middle, along with whether the default will be full screen or lower third, and also the "Roadmap" for the song. The entire Library of songs is shown on the right, where you choose the songs to be used in the set. You can use the Search Filter to quickly narrow down the list. As you type in the Search Filter, the list reduces instantly, so when you type "Y" it will only show songs that begin with "Y", then "Yo" are only songs beginning with "Yo", etc.

The operator can just touch the Prev Set / Next Set buttons, or choose from all of the available sets quickly..

LyricWorks 2 supports up to 3 video outputs: Operator's Screen (typically a touch screen) and 2 outputs for going to your video switcher. Of course, you need to have the necessary video cards in your Mac for this. The "A" output can display either Lower Third or Full Screen versions of your lyrics, and does dissolves between slides. The "B" output always displays the full screen lyrics and does a cut between slides. The dedicated full screen output is for sending to your Praise Team and/or Choir monitors, so they aren't seeing themselves and they can see more words at a time. Shown below are the 3 output screens during a typical set.

LyricWorks 2 will also work with PowerPoint 2004 and above. Although you use the Microsoft Presenter View interface for running your PowerPoint (Microsoft didn't really give an option there), LyricWorks 2 does add a floating palette on the right side of the screen which gives touch screen access to View the show from the beginning, view the show from the selected slide and powerful "Copy to B" functions that allow you to copy a slide to the "B" output of LyricWorks, allows for switcher transitions between two slides. This is especially useful when going between a lower third keyed over a camera directly to a full screen as shown below.

This is a larger view of the PowerPoint Presenter View operator screen with the LyricWorks 2 HD palettes on the right.

Lyric slides are created in the LyricWorks 2 Song Editor. You can copy/paste raw text from a web site, Word document, text file, etc. right into the Editor. LyricWorks 2 uses a unique method for organizing the song into slides. You highlight lines of the text and just tell LyricWorks what that line is. For example, the top line was the song title, and by highlighting it and just click on the Song Title button, LyricWorks now knows that is the song title - not to be displayed. You can also have a Roadmap (not shown below), and Source (like "Hymn 195" or a book code like "MSPW 95"). The "Section" shows what part of the song it is - Verse 1, Chorus, Bridge, etc. Then within the section of the song, you flag how those lines should be displayed. As you see, you group the lyrics into Phrases (makes it more readable and singable) and you can lay out the full screen and lower third versions quickly. As shown below in the middle of the Chorus, the lines "You were on Your throne. You are God alone" have been tagged as being part of Full Screen 1, Phrase 2 and also Lower Screen 2. You can see how they will be displayed to the right. You can pick your font style, size, spacing, etc. and then the LW2 Editor creates the slides in just a few seconds for use in LyricWorks 2. If you ever need to make changes, just go to the Song Editor, open the song, and quickly edit the text and tags.

That's the quick overview of LyricWorks 2 HD. It is a Universal Binary app (runs native on Intel or PowerPC Macs).
More features will be added in the near future and it works great with our companion products such as ClipWorks, TimeWorks, etc.