There are few things that make me happier in children’s ministry than a streamlined system. It was taking me forever to convert files to Mp4 for Media Shout until our good friend Handbrake came along.

If you do anything in children’s ministry with video you should download Handbrake. It works best in Mac OS and is easiest to use, but can used in PC. Elevate doesn’t offer Mp4 so we convert each lesson in Mp4 and load the files in Media Shout. The whole service runs extremely smooth. Instead of relying on a DVD player we can use the cues of Media Shout and can easily go back to a previous cue.

Thanks to Carolyn Mejia for making this process work. I had been working on it, but couldn’t get it quite down. It takes between 10-15 min to convert 1 lesson to Mp4.

Finding music for kids is quite a task. I don’t want anything cheesy, and I need it to be easy to learn. I have some new songs for Club ROCK and I love the easy way I was able to download them.

Most kids praise and worship videos are found in a DVD format. This is great if you are doing the songs in order, but if you want to change the order this can be a challenge. I started converting the files to mp4 and dropping them in Media Shout. This helped, but it takes a while to convert a whole DVD into mp4 files. Sometimes the files are not saved as chapters or individual songs so cutting the video is necessary.

Hillsongs Kids has saved me from converting files and cutting the video. They now have available mp4 video files to download. The graphics and sound quality are top notch. It took me just a few minutes to download them and pop them into Media Shout.

I wish other kids sites would follow. It is worth a little extra money to save time!