Layouts and how things look
Three separate decisions: how scripture is presented, how a picture fits the screen, and what the people at the front can see.
How scripture looks
Four looks ship with Aria. The choice is per church, set once in Settings.
| Look | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Classic centre | The default. The verse centred, readable from the back. |
| Hero cinematic | Large type over artwork, for a darkened room. |
| Lower third | The verse sits along the bottom, leaving the camera shot clear. For streams. |
| Minimal | Text and nothing else. |
How lyrics look
| Look | What it does |
|---|---|
| Classic centre | Lines centred on the screen. |
| Stacked modern | Lines stacked with tighter spacing. |
| Minimal | The words, nothing around them. |
The worship screen separately offers slides, teleprompter and single line, which is a different decision: that one is about how much of the song is on screen at once. See Songs and worship.
Fitting a picture to your screen
A picture is rarely the same shape as the screen it lands on, so Aria offers four ways to resolve that. This setting exists because on one church TV the first and last line of a bilingual song slide were being cut clean off.
| Fit | What happens |
|---|---|
| Smart | The default. Fills the screen where it safely can, and falls back when filling would crop something. |
| Contain | The whole picture, always, with bars at the edges if the shapes differ. Nothing is ever cut off. |
| Soft | The whole picture, with its own blurred edges filling the gap instead of bars. |
| Cover | Fills the screen completely, cropping whatever does not fit. |
The stage layout
The stage screen is the one the people at the front see, and it is built from zones you place yourself. Open the layout studio, drag a zone where you want it, resize it, and it moves on the real stage screen immediately.
Zones you can place:
- Current slide — what the congregation is seeing now.
- Next — what is coming, so nobody is surprised.
- Notes — the speaker's own notes.
- Clock — the time of day.
- Elapsed — how long the service has been running.
- Timer — a countdown you control.
- Slide info — where you are in the deck.
Five ready-made templates come with Aria, including a lyrics-focused one and a minimal one. You can save your own, and undo and redo while you experiment.
The stream layout
The transparent stream feed has its own editor, because it is a different problem: there is no background to design against. You choose where the verse sits, where the sung line sits, how big each is, and whether a backdrop appears behind the text so it stays readable over a bright camera shot. Each option previews on the checkerboard your streaming software uses, so you can see what is transparent before you go live.