Show Slide on Stage Display Only
There are many reasons why you may want to show text (slides) on the Stage Display (the screen that the people on stage can see) but not on the audience screen. The most common reasons would be churches that want to allow the choir to see the words but not show the words on the main screen, or for those leading VBS to see the words on the back screen while the front screen is showing something else.
This feature (called "Show Slide on Stage Display Only") was added in ProPresenter 5 and was expanded in ProPresenter 6. The core concept is that when you enable this feature, any slide you click on will show on the Stage Display, but will not show on the audience screen. In this article we will dive into how to enable/disable the feature, some concepts that are helpful for understanding the feature, and some limitations that you might come across while using the feature.
Manually Enabling/Disabling
You can always manually turn on and off this feature in one of several ways:
- In the menubar, click Actions > Show Slide on Stage Display Only
- Press Command-0 (zero) on a Mac or Control-0 (zero) on a PC
- If the feature is already enabled, then click the yellow triangle under the Preview window in the top left of ProPresenter to disable the feature
Using Cues to Automatically Enable/Disable (ProPresenter 6 only)
If you have ProPresenter 6 then you can also add a Cue to a slide that will enable or disable this feature. Here are the steps to do this:
- In the menubar, select View > Cue Palette
- Click and drag the Stage Display icon to the slide where you would like to add the Cue
- Select either "Suppress Slide on Output" to enable this feature or "Enable Slide on Output" to disable this feature
After that, any time you click on a slide with one of those Cues, it will immediately (before the slide is fired) perform that action. As an example, you might add a "Suppress Slide on Output" on the first slide in a song to hide all of the slides in that song, then create a blank slide at the end of the song and add a "Enable Slide on Output" Cue to turn the feature off at the end of the song.
Concepts
One important concept to understand for this feature is that ProPresenter will keep doing what its doing, until you tell it to do something else. This is an important concept for this feature for two reasons:
- Once you enable this feature, it will stay enabled until you disable it. That is, you don't have to turn it on for each slide; simply enable the feature and leave it enabled until you are ready to show the slides on the audience screen again, at which point you can disable the feature.
- This feature is simply suppressing slide clicks from going to the audience screen. That means that if a video or other media or slide was already showing on the audience screen, then that media will continue to show on the audience screen (looping as normal if needed). This means that you can set up the background the way you want it to look before you enable the feature, and that background will continue to show while the text is showing on the Stage Display.
Limitations
There are a few limitations to consider before utilizing this feature:
- This feature only suppresses clicking on a Slide inside of ProPresenter. If you show a Prop or Message, or you click on media in the Video/Image Bin (as examples), those items will still show on the audience screen.
- Is not compatible with using the Live Slide feature of ProPresenter 6. (The Live Slide feature always shows an exact copy of the audience screen, so even if you have this feature enabled, because it is showing the audience screen the Live Slide will not show Slide clicks on the Stage Display.)
- If you are adding a Cue onto a slide in ProPresenter 6, you can only have one Stage Display Cue per Slide, so if you also wanted to have the Stage Display change Layouts, you would need a second slide (with a separate Cue) to do so.