Friday, March 02, 2007

EasyWorship Presentation from Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro

What the heck does that title mean? Okay, before I get into the specifics, here's the broad overview: EasyWorship is a piece of presentation software similar in some respects to PowerPoint (except it's not from the horrible evil empire known as Microsoft), that was designed specifically for use in a worship setting, such as a church, or contemporary Christian rock concert–Steven Curtis Chapman, when I saw him in concert a few years ago, definitely used EasyWorship or something similar.

A MacBook Pro is the type of laptop I have, made by Apple, running Mac OS X. Because Apple has migrated all their product lines to using Intel chipsets instead of PowerPC, my laptop is also capable of natively booting into Windows, and that's what "Boot Camp" is for. It's [currently Beta] software provided by Apple that allows one to dynamically repartition the laptop hard drive into two areas: one for Mac OS X and one for Windows.

Being the pioneer that I am, or rather, since EasyWorship only runs under Windows, I created a 15GB Boot Camp partition and installed Windows XP Pro, as well as Apple's Boot Camp drivers that help Windows function properly (I know there's a certain irony in that statement, in that nothing could possibly make Windows function properly, but specifically I meant in terms of screen resolution and other hardware integration). After running a slew of Windows Updates (manually–automatic, non-user-initiated updates are a bad idea on any platform) and installing the St Olaf provided Symantec Antivirus software, I installed the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools and ran remapkey to remap the left Command key (what Windows thought was a "Windows" key) to be another "Control", and the right Command key to be "Delete". I also installed Apple Mouse Utility from http://www.geocities.com/pronto4u/applemouse.html to teach Windows to treat a Control-Click as a right click. For kicks I also installed Quicktime and iTunes, then used Disk Utility back in OS X to create a disk image of the Boot Camp partition (so that I have a "pristine" state to fall back on in case anything gets screwed up later).

Lastly, I installed EasyWorship and imported the several hundred motion video backgrounds (these I had created by simply exporting video tracks of the backgrounds from Apple's LiveType software; I then re-exported each video as an AVI because EasyWorship does not yet support Quicktime movies).

The hardest part of the entire process honestly came in simply trying to get Windows to recognize a second display–fortunately a lot of others had already encountered this problem under Boot Camp and so Google found me some directions on how to fix it.

Why was this worth writing about? Because I think there's a good chance I'm the only one, or at least one of only very few, in the country who has this particular unique setup, and I just felt like sharing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have just put bootcamp on my macbook , one of the main reasons I did this was to run easyworship, I haven't tried vids yet on it but everything else does seem to work as per normal.