Hi all,

Our church is thinking of doing live streaming and to do this I would like to use the alpha channel feature to overlay just the song lyrics over the live stream.
I am testing out alpha channel and it doesn't seem to be working the way I expected it to.

when I create a theme with no background (black) by right clicking > New Song Theme... everything works as expected, the alpha channel output shows white where the text and its outline are.




However, when I add an image or motion background the alpha channel becomes just a white screen.



As you can imagine this is useless for keying. Is this the intended functionality or a bug?

Refering to this article [url:2c1oj7pb]https://support.easyworship.com/support/solutions/articles/8592-alpha-channel-setup-ew-6-, I sounds like this is not the way it is supposed to work. "when placing text (e.g., lyrics) or a transparent PNG (e.g., church logo) on top of a motion background or live feed, alpha channel is the best way to generate clean, professional edges around the text"

I have also tried scriptures and presentations with the same results.

I am adding the backgrounds via the Inspector>Background. (although I have also tried just adding the media to the slide and clicking send to back.)

Machines I have tried this on:
Personal PC :
Windows 7 64bit
GPU 2X GTX560
EW V6 Build 4.8 Evaluation copy

Church PC:
Windows 10
GPU - not sure - integrated intel CPU
EW V6 Registered copy. Not sure of build version but I checked for an updated version today (12 Aug 2016).

Thanks in advance, Timothy.

This feature is designed for use with a video mixer. This is really not like the alpha channel you are familiar with in graphic design. If you set a background to the song, you are telling EasyWorship that you don't want to replace the background with one of the cameras you have connected to the mixer, you want to use your own background. EasyWorship will then put an alpha channel mask over the whole screen so the mixer doesn't try to remove the background you setup.

Normally you will set the background in EasyWorship to black and connect two video outputs to a video mixer. One output is the alpha channel, and the other is the text and graphics. In the mixer you'll setup a luminescence key to key out content based on brightness. You'll set it to key out black. EasyWorship sends an alpha channel mask (white) to the mixer and the mixer interprets that as an area that you don't want replaced with the camera feed. The alpha channel mask allows for transparency, which gives you a much better looking text over camera look.

If you are not using a video mixer, this feature is not going to accomplish what you are wanting to do.

An example of how this would be setup on a video mixer can be found in the following article.
https://support.easyworship.com/support ... udio-setup

If you want to just have a background behind the text, you'll need to set a fill for the text box and not a background for the slide. I recommend doing this as a theme and not one song or slide at a time. You can set transparency on the textbox fill too.
Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about.

Thanks for the reply Rodger.

We are planning on using a video mixer but it sounds like our use case is slightly different from normal.

What I want to achieve is to use the main output from Easy worship directly on the main projector in the sanctuary and also feed the alpha channel output along with the main output into a video mixer to key the lyrics over live video for livestreaming.

The ideal way easy worship would work for us is something like this:

Lyrics/Scriptures - Main output has text with background, Alpha output has white where text is (like with black background currently)
Media/Presentations - Main output has media/presentation, Alpha output is solid white.

It is probably too much to ask to add this functionality (although I suspect there may be a few others who would use this feature) so I will reassess our options for the livestream.

Thanks, Timothy.