Presentation

Spectra gives you full control over how your worship presentations look. This guide covers branding, the Theme Studio drag-and-drop designer, animated backgrounds, slide and line-level animations, song lyric reveal, title slides, document (PDF / Word) slides, and display settings.

Branding & Customization

All presentation settings are managed in Settings → Presentation. Changes apply globally to all slides and update the live presentation window in real time.

Background Precedence

Spectra uses a layered system for backgrounds. The highest-priority source wins:

1. Title segment's titleBackground (set in the Lyric Segmenter's title-segment Backdrop accordion — only the title slide)
2. Song-level defaultBackground (set in the segmenter's Song backdrop picker — applies to every verse / chorus in the song)
3. Slide's own backgroundImage (per-slide override)
4. Slide's own backgroundColor
5. Global branding backgroundImage (from Settings)
6. Global branding backgroundColor

The same precedence applies whether the chosen background is a still image or a short video loop — a slide-level video upload wins over the global branding video.

The animated background layer (when enabled) sits between the static background and the slide content, blended at the opacity you choose in Settings. An overlay tint (when set per-title or per-song) sits above the static background and below the text.

Theme Studio (drag-and-drop designer)

The form-based Branding section above is the fastest way to set a logo corner, a font, and a colour. Theme Studio is the opposite end of the spectrum — a WYSIWYG canvas where you can drag every visible element of the slide to exactly where you want it, then resize the verse text block to set its width. The Theme Studio canvas lives in Settings → Theme Studio next to the classic branding form and writes to the same store, so both UIs stay in sync and the live projection updates in real time.

Canvas + control panel

The left side is a large 16:9 canvas that mirrors the projection surface; the right side is a contextual control panel that surfaces controls for whichever element you have selected. Click an element to select it (handles appear); click an empty area of the canvas to deselect.

• Logo — drag anywhere on the canvas; the right panel exposes size and opacity sliders. The classic 4-corner presets still work, but a free-form layout takes precedence the moment you drag.
• Verse text block — drag to reposition; grab the left or right edge to resize its width. The wrapped lyric / verse uses the same auto-fit font sizing as the projector, so what you preview is what your congregation sees.
• Reference line — drag the “John 3:16”-style reference label anywhere relative to the verse block (above, below, off to the side, even tucked in a corner with your logo).

Stays in sync with the form-based settings

Theme Studio writes to the same PresentationBranding store as the classic Settings → Presentation form. Toggle dark mode in one and the canvas in the other reflects it; pick a font family in the form and the live canvas re-renders with it. The free-form positions you set in the canvas add to (rather than replace) the form-based settings — you can mix corner-preset logos with a dragged reference line, for example.

Animated Backgrounds

Adds gentle continuous motion behind every slide so the screen never feels boring — especially during long worship sets where a static background can read as flat. Set globally in Settings → Presentation → Animated Background, or per-song from the Song backdrop picker in the Lyric Segmenter. Twelve styles ship out of the box, each tuned to be calm enough not to pull eyes off the lyrics.

A blend opacity slider(20–100%, default 60%) lets you tone the motion down so lyrics stay legible. All animations run on long cycles (18–40s) and respect prefers-reduced-motion. A song-level pick from the segmenter overrides the global setting while that song's slides are live, then restores the global setting on the next non-song slide — so you can layer Snow over a Christmas hymn without switching presets manually.

Video Backgrounds

Any backdrop slot in Spectra — global branding, song-level, per-title, or Text Builder — accepts a short video loop in addition to a still image. Upload an .mp4, .webm, or .movand Spectra projects it as autoplay / loop / muted under the slide content. Audio is suppressed deliberately so the room mix isn't fighting the video's audio track.

• 50 MB cap per upload — keeps the file size sane and disk footprint predictable. Oversize files show a toast with an ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 26 -preset slow out.mp4 hint to re-encode at a lower bitrate.
• Local HTTP server — videos are saved to disk and served via a loopback HTTP server (http://127.0.0.1) inside the Electron app, so Chromium's native network stack handles range requests and seeks reliably (data URLs can't).
• Where you can use it — Settings → Presentation Background, the per-song Song backdrop picker, the per-title Backdrop accordion, and the Text Builder backdrop.
• Plays with overlays + motion — overlay tints and animated motion layers still render on top of the video, so a busy clip can be calmed down with a Midnight or Vignette overlay without touching the source file.

Per-Song Theming

Most worship apps make you pick one background and live with it for the whole service. Spectra lets each song carry its own backdrop, overlay, motion layer, logo placement, and decorative font — configured once in the Lyric Segmenter and applied automatically to every verse, chorus, and bridge slide in that song.

The full picker lives in the segmenter's Song backdrop accordion. At runtime:

• Backdrop wins over the slide's own image and the global branding image (see the precedence table); the title segment can still override with its own titleBackground.
• Overlay tint applies above the backdrop and below the text — same 9 presets as the title overlay.
• Motion layer overrides the global animated background while the song is live, then restores the global setting on the next non-song slide. Snow for Christmas, Embers for refining-fire passion lyrics, etc.
• Logo position override — pick Inherit, one of the 4 corners, or Hidden. Hidden suppresses the logo entirely for that song, which is useful when the backdrop already includes a wordmark or has busy artwork in every corner. The Theme Studio drag-to-place coordinates still win if set — an explicit pixel placement is a stronger signal than either preset corner.
• Default font — one of the 10 decorative display fonts (Lilita, Lobster, Cinzel…) applies to every lyric slide in the song so the typography matches the title.

Slide-Level Animations

Slide-level animations control how the whole slideenters when you advance to it. Set your preferred animation in Settings — it applies to all slide changes globally. (For finer-grained per-line lyric animations, see Animated Lyric Reveal below.)

Dual Bible View

Pro users can display two Bible translations side-by-side on the presentation screen. This is great for multilingual congregations or for comparing translations during study.

1. Go to Settings and enable Dual Bible View
2. Choose your primary and secondary translations
3. Both translations update simultaneously when a new verse is detected or selected

Always-Full-Screen Auto-Fit

Spectra measures every slide's text against the projection viewport and picks the largest font size that fills ~92% of the screen without overflowing. The result: short verses get huge, long verses comfortably wrap, and your text always uses the available real estateon any resolution — from a 1080p preview window to a 4K projector.

The font-size percentage multiplier in the editor is a target fill ratio, not a literal pixel size:

• 100 — Auto fill (~92% of viewport)
• 120 — Tighter to the edges (~98% — clamped just shy of clipping)
• 80 — Looser, more breathing room (~74%)

Auto-fit re-measures on viewport resize, fullscreen toggle, projector swap, font family change, and slide content change. There's a hard floor at 24px so very long passages never shrink past legibility.

Presentation Window

Click “Present” on any verse or slide to open a fullscreen presentation window. This window is designed to be displayed on your secondary monitor / projector.

Idle Screen

When no slide is active, the presentation window shows an ambient idle screenwith a dark background and subtle floating particle animation. The text “Ready to present” is displayed. This gives your congregation a clean view between presentation moments.

Song Presentation

Songs in your library are broken into individual verses. There are two ways to present song content:

• Single click on a verse card — adds it to the schedule queue
• Double click on a verse card — presents immediately (bypasses the schedule)

The “direct present” mode is perfect for spontaneous worship moments when you need a verse on screen instantly without managing the schedule. While a song is live, use the arrow keys to step through its verses.

Rehearse Mode (test go-live)

The Rehearse button in the Live Preview toolbar opens a fullscreen test screen and reroutes all your live actions to it — so you can practise the whole service flow in-house without anything appearing on the projector or NDI feed.

• Right-click any schedule item → Rehearse this slide to jump straight into the test screen with that slide showing — the fastest way in.
• One toggle — the Rehearse button in the Live Preview toolbar turns the mode on/off; while on, the normal controls (send to Main, double-click a verse, AI auto-present, etc.) all drive the test screen instead of the real outputs.
• Faithful — the test screen is the real presentation renderer, so what you see is exactly what the congregation would see at any resolution.
• Unmistakable — an amber “Rehearsing — not live on screen” badge shows so it's never confused with the real output. Press Esc or Exit rehearsal to leave.

Countdown Widget

The Countdownbutton in the header puts a full-screen countdown on the live output — a “Service begins in” holding screen for the minutes before a service or after a break. It shows on both the projector and any NDI feed.

• Message — the line above the timer (defaults to “Service begins in”); your last message and duration are remembered.
• Minutes — pick a quick preset (1 / 2 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 30) or type any value, then Start countdown.
• It stays up until you send any slide live (which replaces it) or press Stop & clear screen. The header button glows while a countdown is live.
• The timer counts down cleanly — MM:SS for short holds, H:MM:SS or D:HH:MM:SS for longer ones — and shows “Event Time!” when it reaches zero.

Like double-clicking a verse, the countdown uses the direct-present path, so it never creates a slide or a schedule entry — it just takes over the screen until you move on.

Split-Layout Slides & Progressive Reveal

Split-layout slides (created in the Text Builder with the Single / Split toggle) present two text columns side-by-side on the projector. The killer detail: they don't have to land simultaneously. When a split slide goes live, the projector only shows the primary (left) column at full width. The operator decides when — and whether — to bring the companion in.

Control lives in the LivePreview panel next to the live slide thumbnail:

• ▶ Reveal companion — one-shot button that slides the right column in beside the left. Once revealed, the button locks to “Companion shown” until the next slide.
• Spotlight controls (◀ ┃ ▶) — appear after the companion is revealed. Tap a side to grow that column to ~70% of the row (the other shrinks to ~30%). Tap the center ┃ to return to equal columns. Useful for emphasizing one half during a call-and-response.

Each column uses its own per-column auto-fit so the text fills its available space optimally regardless of which spotlight is active. Both the reveal state and the spotlight state are keyed to the slide id, so advancing to the next slide automatically resets back to “hidden companion, equal columns” — no manual cleanup needed between slides.

Document Slides (PDF, Word, Markdown, Text)

Spectra can project imported documents the same way it projects verses and lyrics — drop a sermon outline, a liturgy sheet, a printed program, or a scanned bulletin into the slide deck and the congregation sees the actual document on screen, page by page or as a continuous scroll.

Supported formats

• .pdf — parsed via pdf.js; pages render at projection resolution.
• .docx — parsed via mammoth.js to clean HTML, then projected with consistent typography.
• .md — markdown rendered to formatted HTML.
• .txt — preserved verbatim in a monospace block so spacing and line breaks stay intact.

Importing a document

1. Drag a supported file into the Media Center, or use the document import button on the editor.
2. Spectra creates a single document slide that references the imported file. The original is stored in the media library so you can reuse it across services.
3. The document parses once on first view; flipping pages, switching zoom, or even opening it on the projection window never re-parses the source — useful when a sermon PDF is 30+ pages.

Paged vs continuous-scroll

Each document slide has a mode toggle on its control bar:

• Paged — show one page at a time, with prev / next buttons (or arrow keys) to advance. Ideal for sermon outlines and slide-style documents.
• Scroll — continuous vertical scroll. The operator scrubs the scroll position from the control panel; the projection screen mirrors that position smoothly. Ideal for long-form liturgies or printed bulletins.

Operator controls

While a document is live, the editor panel shows a dedicated Document Control Bar:

• Page nav (paged mode) — prev / next buttons + an input to jump to a specific page.
• Scroll position (scroll mode) — a slider that controls the projection's vertical scroll offset as a percentage.
• Zoom — scales the document on the projection (e.g. 100% / 125% / 150%). The controller-side preview always fits-to-thumbnail so it never gets cropped.
• Text color override — pick a colour for plain-text and markdown documents so they read against the global branding background.

Animated Lyric Reveal

Most worship apps treat a verse as a flat block of text — the operator clicks “next slide” and the entire stanza appears at once. Spectra's animated lyric reveal renders lyrics temporally, the way the song is actually performed: line-by-line for ballads where each line has space, word-by-word for rhythmic sections, with the new content arriving via your chosen animation instead of a hard cut.

Reveal style is configured per-sectionin the Lyric Segmenter (Verse 1 line-mode, Chorus word-mode, Bridge static — operator's call). The Reveal: … pill on each segment card opens the configurator.

Reveal modes

Linger modes

Controls what happens to lines / words once they've been revealed:

• Fade — previously-revealed text dims to 35% (karaoke feel; the audience can still follow context)
• Keep — previously-revealed text stays at full opacity until the verse ends
• Solo — only the current line / word is on screen, centered. Previous content disappears entirely. Each new line gets its own entrance animation, and the leaving line plays a brief outro fade. Font is sized as if the visible line were alone on the slide, so single lines fill the screen.

Advancing the reveal

Each segment can pick how its reveal cursor is driven:

• Manual — the operator advances each line / word with the keyboard during the live performance.
• Recorded — cadence is captured ahead of time in the timeline editor; the live verse plays back hands-free.
• AI Listen (coming soon) — the existing Moonshine ASR matches the live transcript against the next expected line and advances on its own.

Regardless of the picked source, the operator can always intervene with the keyboard:

• Space — reveal the next line / word
• Shift + Space or Backspace — step back one
• R — reset reveal cursor to the top of the verse
• ← / → — jump to the previous / next verse (cursor auto-resets)

Manual presses on a Recorded verse are non-destructive — the playback timer only ever advances the cursor forward, never back. If you push ahead of the recorded schedule, the timer for the skipped line just becomes a no-op when it fires.

Per-line entrance animations

Every line can use a different entrance animation, picked from 33 options grouped into three flavors:

• Subtle (8) — Rise, Fade, Drop, Slide ←/→, Zoom, Blur, Typewriter
• Concert / dramatic (6) — Bounce, Pop, Flip, Roll, Sweep, Glow
• Attention seekers (animate.css inspired, 9) — Pulse, Rubber band, Shake, Head shake, Swing, Tada, Wobble, Jello, Heartbeat
• Zoom entrances (4) — Zoom in ↓ / ↑ / ← / →
• Flippers + Rotates (6) — Flip Y, Rotate in (4 corner variants)

Each segment has a master “Default line animation” picker plus per-line overrides via the segment card's “Per-line animation” strip. The picker shows live previews of every option in a 3-column grid — mouse over any tile to replay it, or click Replay all to re-fire the whole grid.

Looping emphasis

Each line can optionally have a continuous emphasis animation that loops while that line is the active cursor target. Toggle it on per-line in the segment card; the dropdown beside the toggle picks the animation:

Pulse, Zoom in/out, Heartbeat, Glow, Swing, Shake, Head shake, Wobble, Jello, Rubber band, Tada.

Each loop has a built-in rest period, so the line punctuates rather than constantly agitating. Past lines never get the emphasis loop — only the line currently being sung.

Justify alignment for lyrics

Alongside Left / Center / Right, lyrics support a fourth Justify alignment that word-packs each paragraph so the lines fill the slide width naturally. Unlike CSS text-align: justify(which scatters spaces across short lines), Spectra binary-searches the largest font size at which the words re-pack into visual lines that fit both the container width and height, then renders those packed lines centered at that font size. The result: 1-word lines no longer explode to fill the entire slide, and long verses still fill the screen the way you'd hand-typeset them.

• Uses Canvas measureText() per word — fast, no DOM thrash during fit.
• Respects blank lines as hard paragraph breaks so verses stay grouped the way the operator typed them.
• Honors the same font weight, family, and italic so the measured size matches the live render.
• Reveal compatibility — Justify mode short-circuits per-line / per-word reveal (mid-reveal re-packing would shift the layout mid-flight). Pick Justify on segments you want to display as a complete block.

Pre-recorded Timing

Capture the cadence of a verse once during preparation, and the live presentation advances the reveal cursor on its own — no keyboard, no operator timing the song in the moment. Set a segment's reveal source to Recorded in the Lyric Segmenter and a Record timings button shows up on the segment card. Click it to open the timeline editor.

Timeline editor

Inspired by video-editing software. Drop a reference audio file (MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC — whatever your browser's decoder accepts) and the editor generates a waveform across the timeline. Press Play, scrub to find each line's vocal entrance, and drop markers at the right moments. Drag any marker to nudge.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Space — play / pause audio
• M — drop a marker at the playhead for the next un-timed line (or for the selected line if one's selected)
• Delete / Backspace — remove the selected marker
• ← / → — seek by 1 second
• Shift + ← / → — nudge the selected marker by 100 ms

LRC import & export

The editor reads and writes the standard [mm:ss.xx] Lyric line LRC format, plus the extended per-word variant. Useful for:

• Reusing timings across services — export a verse's LRC, import it next time you sing the song.
• Sharing with another worship operator who uses Spectra (or any other LRC-aware tool).
• Backing up hand-tuned timings outside the app.

Imported LRC files are normalized just like the recorder's output: the first line's timestamp becomes startMs: 0, and all subsequent lines are offsets from there.

Playback debug overlay

While a verse with recorded timings is live on the presentation screen, a small playback indicator appears in the bottom-right corner of the presentation window:

• A pulsing green dot + “Prerecorded playback” label so you know the timer is armed.
• Next line + countdown (e.g., Next: L2 in 3.4s) so you can see exactly when the next reveal will fire.
• Total elapsed seconds since the slide went live.
• End of timeline message when every recorded line has fired.

Useful for confirming your timings are landing on the right beats. It only appears when the live slide is a song with source: ‘prerecorded’ AND lineTimings— normal slides are unaffected.

Title Slides

A dedicated title slide for each song — designed like the song-title overlays you see in concert footage and music videos. Toggle “Include title slide”in the Lyric Segmenter and a Title segment is automatically prepended to the verse list with the song's name.

Title styles

Each title segment also accepts an optional subtitle (e.g. “by Charity Gayle”) and an entrance animationoverride — pick any of the 33 line animations including Typewriter for a dramatic letter-by-letter title reveal. The song name field is a textarea, so manual Enter presses preserve as real line breaks on the slide (handy for two-line titles).

Decorative title fonts

The font picker (formerly Concert-only) applies to every title style. Pick one of 10 curated display faces or leave it on Default to use the global branding font:

• Lilita One — chunky rounded, pop concert (the Concert-style default)
• Bagel Fat One — heavy modern display
• Berkshire Swash — swashy decorative serif
• Lobster — classic curvy script
• Pacifico — 50s diner brush script
• Alfa Slab One — heavy slab serif, vintage poster
• Rye — western saloon
• Yeseva One — elegant editorial display
• Anton — tall condensed, concert poster
• Cinzel — Roman classical caps

Script faces (Lobster, Pacifico, Berkshire) auto-skip the uppercase treatment on Concert and Minimal styles so their connecting strokes survive. The same font registry powers the per-song default font picker, so the title typography can be matched across every lyric slide in the song.

Per-title backdrop

The title segment's Backdropaccordion sets a background and overlay just for the title slide, leaving the rest of the song's slides on the song-level backdrop. Useful when you want a hero image with a dark vignette behind the song name, then cleaner imagery (or none at all) behind the lyrics.

• Background — 5 preset photos, your own uploaded image, or a short video loop (50 MB cap) applies only to this title.
• Overlay tint — 9 mood presets: None, Purple Haze, Midnight, Sunset, Gold, Crimson, Emerald, Mono, Vignette. Sits between the backdrop and the title text so a busy photo doesn't fight the typography.

Lyric Segmenter

The reveal modes, linger modes, line animations, and emphasis loops above are all configured per-section in the Lyric Segmenter — the same modal that breaks raw lyrics into slides when you add a song to your library. Pattern-based detection (explicit markers, blank-line separators, numbered prefixes, auto-chorus, inline refrains), nine section types with color-coded badges, in-line editing, split / merge / reorder / re-label, size-constraint sliders, and persistent saved-song settings all live there.

See the Lyric Segmenter section in the Library guide for the full walkthrough — opening the segmenter, how segmentation works, the section-type colour legend, post-segmentation editing, and what gets saved when you commit a song.

QR Code Generator

Spectra has a built-in QR code generator so you can share links, giving pages, event sign-ups, event registrations, or prayer request forms with your congregation — and project them straight to the live screen without leaving the app.

Generating a code

1. Open the sidebar and pick QR Code Generator.
2. Paste any URL or free-form text in the input. The preview updates in real time.
3. Pick a color style or customize the foreground and background with the color pickers. Six presets ship out of the box: Classic, Soft, Blue, Purple, Green, and Inverted.
4. Optionally upload your church logo (up to 5 MB) to embed in the center of the QR code. Size and position are tuned so the code stays scannable.

Projecting to the live screen

The generator has a Project to Screen action that pushes the QR code straight to the presentation window at full size, perfect for inviting the congregation to scan in a moment of announcements. The code stays live until you change the slide.

Exporting and reusing

• Download the current code as a 512×512 PNG for use in bulletins, slides, or social posts.
• Add to Media Libraryto save the code as a reusable media asset — drag it into any future slide like any other image.