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There's a lot of talk these days about presentation software. Every conference I speak at, I meet people that are ready to move up to a new level. From my experience, conversations, web surfing, Softouch Development's EasyWorship is a solid choice to take you to that next level and seems to be in almost everyone's Top Three.

EasyWorship is highly recommended because it is so user-friendly and honestly (due to their intuitive interface) has the smallest learning curve of any of the fine products available.

Unfortunately, the name leads many to assume that EasyWorship is lacking in features compared to other presentation software products. I'd like to address that assumption throughout this review.

One of the main reasons I see people changing their presentation software is for the ability to overlay text over video or have loopable backgrounds. I mention this as I list their minimum requirements because you want to be sure that you base your system requirements on how you plan to use the software. With that said, make sure you have at least a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 128 MB RAM, 100 MB of available hard disk space, a 7,200 RPM hard drive, and Windows 98 SE (or a later version). Keep in mind that you need a dual output AGP or PCI video graphics card with 128 MB of dedicated non-shared video RAM. NOTE: EasyWorship can run on less, but may not be able to use all the features (i.e., text over video).

Remember what I said about the assumption that EasyWorship is lacking? Let's take a closer look: The speed at which EasyWorship loads and refreshes windows and features is hard to beat. EasyWorship takes about 10 seconds to load. Other software has video transitions and displays that, at times, are jerky and not clean. EasyWorship offers clean cross fades and smooth video with up to 105 transitions. Do other companies offer the same features? Yes, but EasyWorship's quality of output and performance stands out.

The intuitive interface, as I mentioned earlier, is praised by most to be the easiest for a layperson to learn and use. I have trained volunteers to use EasyWorship in half an hour. That is amazing, considering other products come with a two-hour training video. One of my worship-leading mentors, Dennis Jernigan, has his children (as young as age 12) running EasyWorship for his concerts.

EasyWorship includes anti-aliased text in alpha channeling with five weights of outline and shadowing in any font, and which layer over video, camera feeds, DVD, and backgrounds. Often, you might see other software's text being pixilated and affected by video, or placed in a text box. EasyWorship's output is clean and crisp over any background. EasyWorship also allows a user to choose a color background and send the output to a switcher for chroma key or alpha channel use in TV broadcasting or production. EasyWorship will also display in 16:9, which is a growing technology.

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