Screens

The Screens page is where the screens live. Open it from Screens at the bottom of the sidebar.

Screens

A screen is somewhere a picture goes: the projector, a confidence monitor, a foyer television, a window on this computer. A theme is the picture itself, see Themes.

A screen shows exactly one theme, and any theme goes on any screen. Two screens may show the same theme, in which case they stay identical. A theme a screen shows, on any of the church’s computers, cannot be deleted until that screen is given another.

The page draws every screen the computer can see, each in proportion, at its own size and with its own fit. Click one to edit it: the theme it shows, where it goes, the language it speaks and how the picture fits. Point a screen at a display and the app remembers it.

A computer drives any number of screens, each with its own theme, such as a stage display beside the projector, and each can speak its own language. All of it is free.

Fit

A theme is designed at a fixed size, and a screen rarely has exactly that shape. Fit says what to do about it: Contain shows the whole theme and leaves bars, Cover fills the screen and crops the edges, Stretch fills it and distorts. The settings tell you what each one costs in pixels for the screen you picked.

Behind the theme

Every screen has a color or a picture behind its theme. It shows wherever the theme draws nothing: in the bars Contain leaves, while nothing is live on a theme with no background, and across the whole screen when no theme is assigned. Black is the default. A church logo on the foyer television between services is one picture away.

A web screen opened as a transparent OBS source ignores it, so a lower third still keys cleanly. An NDI or Blackmagic screen can pick Transparent instead, and sends only what the theme draws.

Mixers and switchers

Besides displays and windows, a screen can go to a video mixer: over the network as an NDI source for vMix or OBS, or out of a Blackmagic card over SDI or HDMI into an ATEM. Both are free and count as screens like any other.

Web screens

A Web screen is a page any browser can watch: a television with a browser, a laptop in the overflow room, OBS. Its Access decides where from. Local network opens it on any browser on the church’s Wi-Fi, with no delay and no internet, for free. Internet lets it be watched from anywhere through biblelook.com, with a short delay, and comes with BibleLook Plus.

The language a screen speaks

A screen either follows the operator, which is what a new one does and what the projector usually keeps, or speaks one language whatever the operator is doing. Pick one and the screen also asks which Bible translation that language means.

A following screen shows whatever is being navigated, in whichever language, including the second one when Translate Mode is on. A fixed screen shows its own language only, and never the two together.

Because this belongs to the screen and not to the theme, the same design can be on the projector in one language and on a stage monitor or an overflow room in another. Nothing is duplicated, and nothing about the design changes.

Alerts go to the screens you name

An alert reaches every screen unless you narrow it. The chip beside the send bar lists the screens whose theme has somewhere to draw an alert, and ticking only one keeps that message off the others: the note for the platform never reaches the congregation.

Identify

Identify flashes a number on a tile and on the real screen at once. In a hall with three cables of unknown provenance, that is how you learn which is which without walking back and forth.

Checking before the service

The tiles start on whatever is currently on air, each in the language its own screen speaks, so a tile of a screen fixed to Ukrainian previews Ukrainian. The same is true of a next tile in the sidebar: what you have selected is drawn as that screen would say it, before anyone sees it.

You can also drive them through a simulated state, switching every tile at once to see how a verse, a song or an alert sits on every screen, without any of it reaching the projector. That is the point: it is a rehearsal, not a broadcast. Alerts overlay and Speaker overlay are presses rather than switches: each one puts its layer over every tile for five seconds and takes it away again, which is the whole life of an overlay rather than the one state it is never in.

Click a screen tile to edit it. A tile whose theme shows a timer this computer has not picked says Variables not configured; press it to pick one.

Changing a theme mid-service

Click the screen, pick the look under Shows theme, or press Browse to see every theme as a picture, and Save. That screen repaints and nothing else on air changes: the musicians’ monitor does not follow the projector into Christmas.

While you try a fit or the colour behind the theme, the real screen shows it, and Cancel puts it back.

Browse also makes a new theme and opens the theme library on biblelook.com. Renaming, duplicating, moving and deleting one happen in the Library, under Themes, where every computer the church pairs sees the same ones.