Foxvideo Productions

I’ve been using FreeShow at our Chapel in conjunction with iSing as we don’t have any musicians to play hymns. It’s a system that worked well, project in FreeShow (readings and slides), CMD Tab (or window click) to iSing for a hymn and then CMD Tab (window click) back to FreeShow.

A couple of months ago we were notified iSing would cease and was being replaced by Worship Player. I downloaded the trial version and found out CMD Tab didn’t work (iSing apparently displayed in a full size window). An email to the devs came back with some workarounds and I found out a ‘triple click’ in FreeShow also worked.

Come forward 2 weeks and the Worship Player dev had written some code into Worship Player and it now worked with CMD Tab and FreeShow!

Our service on Sunday now worked perfectly between FreeShow and Worship Player, so if you’ve found this from a Google search your problems should be solved.

5 days on from the Facebook disaster that looked as if I would have to cancel my trip to the Philippines. Thankfully I was able to create a new Facebook account which I'm now being extra cautious with! The next problem was getting on the same flight as the other team members, again thankfully that's now been done. So for the 2nd time (actually the third as I went in 1996) I'm off to The Philippines.

Thanks to Google, I've now got a website to document the trip - https://sites.google.com/view/sindangan2026/home

I set up to record a sermon at our Chapel using the same settings as last week, audio levels looked fine on the side screen. Ingesting the footage into Resolve 21 Beta 3, I noticed some audio had peaked. I thought I’d deal with it in the morning.

Next day I went to pull some one minute clips for TikTok and confirmed the worst with peaked, slightly distorted audio on the timeline. Time to try out the 32-bit float files stored on the transmitter. I downloaded Røde Connect, plugged the transmitter into my M4 Mac, found the saved file, and imported it into Resolve. Selected the original video and audio with the new audio, hit sync by waveform, done instantly. Deleted the old audio track.

Perfect audio. In sync. No distortion. Problem solved.

Resolve 21 Beta 3: A Smooth Start…?

I installed Resolve 21 Beta on my iMac for a quick look while keeping a couple of personal projects running in Resolve 20 on my M4 Mini. Thanks to the dongle license, swapping between machines is painless, so it was easy to compare both versions. I also kept an eye on the Resolve 21 Beta bug forum to see what others were running into.

When Beta 3 dropped, I rolled the iMac back to Resolve 20, moved my two small projects over as a backup, checked everything still worked, and then installed Resolve Beta 3 on the M4, my projects still opened and ran just fine.

A while back I bought RiotDQ, an EQ plugin. When the final version was released, I installed it in Resolve 20, then moved it over to 21 to test. The EQ worked, but the dial animation didn’t. The Inspector sliders still applied EQ, but the plugin’s UI wasn’t behaving. I sent the developer a video, and he replied saying it wasn’t something he’d seen before but would look into it.

About That New Photo Page…

I have to say, I don’t really see the point. Resolve is a video editing package. Every user, pro or amateur already has an established, preferred photo editor installed, whether that’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity, or any of the many options out there. So why introduce what feels like a version 1.0 photo tool with limited features and bugs?

Final Cut seems to be slowing down in development and playing catch‑up to Resolve and Blackmagic are clearly gaining users from it. With that momentum, Resolve adding photo editing feels like a step sideways, maybe even backwards when users are still reporting bugs left over from v20.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m impatient. I’m usually first in line for software updates. Most of the time it’s fine, and if it goes wrong, I just roll back to the previous version and move on.

Blackmagic recently released DaVinci Resolve 21 Beta at NAB with some big new features. I was tempted to jump in, but this time I held off. After reading the Beta 21 forum, it’s clear things are not quite there yet. Plenty of users have lost complete projects, and some can’t recover them. That’s despite the repeated advice: never install a beta on active projects. To their credit, Blackmagic has helped some users recover some of the damage. Still, you can imagine the frustration when people ignore the warning.

Beta releases matter, they help find bugs and improve the software. But the rule is simple: don’t install on systems with live projects!

(PS: I did download Beta 21 but only on my iMac, not my main M4 Mini.)

UPDATE - Beta 2 is now out and has addressed many of the earlier reported issues BUT advice still stands - DO NOT UPDATE ON LIVE PROJECTS!

Having used WorshipTools Presenter (free version) for several years, I recently found FreeShow. I tested it for a month before deciding to go live for the first time with a new Mac Air M4. It was all set up 20 minutes before the service, 15 minutes before the service, the screen went black, the audio cut out and then it all came back in less than 2 seconds! 10 mins before the service it happened again, so I switched to a backup 2018 Mac Mini and WorshipTools Presenter. Perplexity tells me it's probably a low spec HDMI cable or an HDMI switcher fault. A new Thunderbolt to HDMI has been ordered, so I"ll have time to test it before the next service.

UPDATE.

New HDMI cable seemed to work, I've now used FreeShow for 4 weeks without any issues (even stopped taking a backup Mac Mini along!). I'm probably only using 25% of the features but getting more used to it each week, it's a better program than WorshipTools Presenter (and being free, it's cheaper than ProPresenter!), I'm surprised more people are not using it.