Dec 14, 2019
Paul H Woodard
wrote
We do three services on Sunday mornings, two traditional, one contemporary. In MS 5 we had one long script for the entire morning. Is anyone facing this and just doing separate scripts for each service and message? My thought is Traditional scripts, contemporary scripts, message, announcement loops as separate scripts. Thoughts?
Reply
6 Answers
Dec 15, 2019
Andrew Daigle
wrote
We did the same thing. In MS5, we used one script for both of our services because it would reference the media files on the filesystem. It appears that MS7 now encodes the media files into the script, so they get extraordinarily bloated very quickly. Ours are frequently pushing 1GB with just a 5:00 minute countdown video and a sermon intro, so we now do separate scripts for our Traditional and Contemporary services to try and keep the file sizes down. If you reuse the same media for both services, you might be better off with a single script.
The upside to having the media in the script is that you can copy your scripts between machines and not worry about missing media or pointing to the wrong folders; but the downside is that now you have multiple copies of the same media - the original plus a duplicate copy in every script that uses it, which is rather inefficient and unnecessarily eats up disk space. It also causes the scripts to take forever to load (in MS7) because they are so large. Especially if you encounter a crash during the service; it can feel like an eternity waiting for the script to re-load and switch back to Presenter view. I would actually prefer the older method of referencing the media on disk to keep the script file sizes down and to have quicker load times.
The upside to having the media in the script is that you can copy your scripts between machines and not worry about missing media or pointing to the wrong folders; but the downside is that now you have multiple copies of the same media - the original plus a duplicate copy in every script that uses it, which is rather inefficient and unnecessarily eats up disk space. It also causes the scripts to take forever to load (in MS7) because they are so large. Especially if you encounter a crash during the service; it can feel like an eternity waiting for the script to re-load and switch back to Presenter view. I would actually prefer the older method of referencing the media on disk to keep the script file sizes down and to have quicker load times.
Dec 16, 2019
MediaShout Support
agent
wrote
Hey Andrew! Good thoughts there. It was decided to embed the media instead of just reference it due to a ton of confusion that was always around how that process worked for many users, and to simplify the process of transporting script files. However, we are definitely realizing the issues that are coming along with the larger script files in some cases. So I wanted to let you know we are working through some ways to optimize that and possibly give users a choice on how media files are handled- regarding the Cues Library and probably individual scripts along with it. Thanks for your patience in the meantime!
Dec 16, 2019
MediaShout Support
agent
wrote
In response to the original question- I would probably encourage different scripts for each service, and you can keep them open as tabs across the top of MediaShout 7 kind of like a web browser.
Dec 16, 2019
Andrew Daigle
wrote
Hi David, that's great news. I think it would be ideal if there were an option for scripts to reference the media files directly on the filesystem instead of embedding them. I think it would do wonders for speeding up the loading and saving of scripts and would also save a ton of disk space.
Dec 17, 2019
Paul H Woodard
wrote
Thanks for the feedback, going to try the different scripts this weekend.
Dec 18, 2019
MediaShout Support
agent
wrote
Andrew- yes sir, we agree and will be working on it! Paul- absolutely, keep us posted if we can provide any more insight.