I’ve been asked to prepare hymnal scores to be projected at a large conference in Nashville next week. I will be retrofitting my existing hymnal scores to display one stanza at a time, probably one system per slide, but I need recommendations from others who have done this successfully:
What staff size and lyric font size work best?
Should I use PNG? I want a high-quality image, but obviously ultra-high-res is pointless for normal projection. I’d like the images to be as small as possible without losing quality.
What image resolution should I use? It will be 16:9.
I made slides for my church’s Wednesday services for a few years. With some experimentation, we were all surprised at how large we had to make things to be clearly readable in a 1,000-seat house. I took screenshots in Sibelius and saved 800 × 600 PNGs. The larger size was a 32-point staff (8-point space) with lyrics in 22.5-point Georgia and the smaller ⅞ that size (for a few that just wouldn’t fit on the larger template).
Fortunately I was able to just paste the previously copied music into this template and tweak the lyric alignment as usual. But at this size many of the verses and refrains had to be split onto 2 slides. Hopefully your projection screen will be larger than ours was!
I happen to do a lot of video work on the side. PNG is sufficient, since video and projection operates in 72 dpi – so you don’t need it to be higher res than that.
I have actually previously used points as a decent conversion to pixels, so you can set up your page size to be roughly equivalent to a 16:9 layout by setting your page layout to 1920x1080 points (landscape), and it will effectively give you a 16:9 layout. Export the PNG as landscape, 72dpi - perhaps uncheck transparency since you probably won’t need that.
Even though in points, I have found when opening these files in Photoshop or any image program that the pixel readout is 1920x1080px which is 16:9.
It does require some finagling inside of Dorico to get the right size of music and staves, but I’m sure you know all about that!
Looks beautiful, as usual! Is the quarter note under “the” correct? I don’t think the cue notes are actually helpful. Also my eye really wants those five whole note chords at least somewhat centered, especially when the lyrics stay centered like this without extender lines.
Also I want to mention that my pale yellow background compensated for the bluish tint of the projector nicely, which is why I took screenshots.
Hello Dan, you were mentioned in another thread about hymn slides when I asked a question earlier. I have been doing this for several years for my church in Finale. I am liking the way that DOrico works to make this happen much better. Can I ask what your margins are? I am going with slightly smaller margins (our screens are mounted on light colored walls, so the “boarder” doesn’t make a lot of difference to the look, so I was curious. Your layout looks really good.
Thanks Michael. Yeah, these were projected last week at the Getty Sing Conference in Nashville for some 7,000 people. No pressure… haha. They turned out really nicely too. Lots of positive feedback.
My suggestion is to not squeeze the margins. White space greatly adds in the perception of readability.
Here’s the info for my layout:
Size: 400pt x 225 pt
Staff size: 4pts
Margins: 20pts all around
Music frame margins set to 0
Lyrics: 12pt Crimson Pro (absolute, not staff-relative)
