After the success of some earlier video loops playing subtly in the background of some of our services, I was challenged to find one for our upcoming ‘Passion for Life’ service. This ‘Sunday Supper’ at St. Matt’s (warning: light snacks only!) will be themed with spring-time yellows and greens.

We use the simple-to-use but cringingly badly named ‘EasyWorship’ software to display most of our visuals, and I knew their website now has lots of videos, stills and loops for sale. It turns out they’re drawn from quite a few different video companies that specialise in this purpose.

I landed up buying ‘Particle Vine 01‘ from Centreline New Media. (And whilst I was at it, I bought ‘Starline Flurry‘ to replace the current Christmas-y one. $6 each.)

Despite buying from them, I’m not that impressed with CNM. I scanned all their 200 or so loops, and almost all are too busy to go under powerpoint presentations or songs, as they claim. I will have to slow down the Flurry one before I think it would be usable, for example.

Other companies include Pixel Girl Media, Shift Media, PowerPoint Sermons.

Most of their loops suffer with the same problems, but Pixel Girl Media do show more subtlety at times, including various blue abstract ones, and Shift Media with Gold Concrete if it were slowed down.

Though in some settings this would be fine: for example ‘White Confetti‘ would be great at the end of a marriage service.

After several years of being fed up with Speed Hosting, I’ve finally upped and left. It wasn’t just their amateur approach to customer service, but the interruption to service that came too often, particularly to all the email to Martha and myself, which routes through their servers. So apologies if you’ve had odd or delayed responses to email recently … we had a 5-outage last week.

So we’re now with 5quidhost, who hopefully will turn out to be more inspiring than their name. They have very high ratings on some review sites (and not just ones from sites that turn out to be co-owned by the hosting service, like http://www.justhost.com/ do). I like their realistic attitude to support:

We prefer to handle all of our contact with our customers by e-mail, and we use it in the way it was intended: Prompt, timely, informal and information-rich. With no pointless delays, and no impersonal machine-generated responses to your questions. In emergencies, we do have a number you can call …

They also seem to understand Joomla and Drupal hosting, which could be important for the project I’m starting for CYFC. More on that another time.

I was slightly dreading having to transfer account, email and the complete blog history between hosts. But a big thumbs-up to cPanel (the software that most web hosts use): they have the ability to create complete backups, ftp it to a different server, and then recreate it all at the other end. That possibly saved me hours of work.