UPDATE: The emphasis animation feature mostly solves the issues I've described, but introduces new issues; see the first reply.

At my church, we normally use full-screen lyric slides with 4-6 lines per slide, but since the pandemic started, we've been recording video of our first service and uploading it to YouTube and Facebook as a premiere during our second service for those who can't meet with us in person. For display of lyrics, we've been creating duplicate copies of our songs with the slides modified/split to work better in a 2-3 line lower third format, which is overlaid over the video. We then just display the lower-third version on the sanctuary screens during the first service for recording and swap back to full-size lyric slides for second service.

While I can OCD the songs enough when I'm around, this is obviously way too high-maintenance to work as a long-term solution, so we've been looking for a better way of doing this. We'd rather not use 2-3 line slides all the time, so I've been experiment with SSP's Multiple Displays feature.

The most obvious thing to do is keep the main display window with standard settings, but add a second display output set with a purpose of "lower third." This second display would have the song build options set to a maximum of two lines per slide. In testing, I've gotten this set up, but I've run into a problem: the lower third display is splitting slides, but the program panel of the presenter window doesn't list these split slides because it's based on Display 1. The only way to actually advance the lower third display to the later lines of each slide is to manually move the mouse over to that display and click the display window. This sometimes also works to advance the main display when transitioning from one verse to another, but even that doesn't always work. Ideally we would be able to focus on advancing the slides according to the lower third display, and have Display 1 update its full verse slides automatically as the lower third transitions to the next verse.

The alternative that I also tried was reversing the roles of each screen, using Display 2 as the full-screen lyric slides and Display 1 for the lower third, so that the presenter window lists the split slides. This worked, but now has the limitation that slide properties for individual program items only apply to Display 1, and the only way to control these properties for Display 2 is to set them globally in the Default Slide Properties. Additionally, Display 2 ignores the Preferences setting under "Song Transitions" to use no transition between verses within a single song; whatever transition is set in the Default Slide Properties for Display 2 is applied to all transitions, even between song verses. Setting Display 2 with a purpose of "Presentation" or "Other" isn't an option either, as this results in a completely different program set which is controlled separately.

Is there a way to accomplish what I want using SSP? The multiple displays feature is so close to a perfect solution for our needs, but these limitations are holding us back. If we could force the program panel to base its item listing on Display 2 or could set individual program items' display properties for the second display, that would be perfect, but these options just aren't there.

If not, I'd like to hear what others in these forums would recommend for a situation like ours.

Well, I figured out that setting the build options on the main display to two lines at a time and then enabling the emphasis animations makes the program panel see the different slide parts since they actually exist in Display 1 now, but this still has issues. The emphasis animation not only forces the non-emphasized text to a grayer shade of whatever color you're using, but it adds an obnoxiously large gap between the pairs of lines. There doesn't seem to be a setting to disable these visual effects, which is unfortunate, since while the animation itself is completely unnecessary for our needs, its effect on the program panel would perfectly solve the issues I mentioned in the OP.

EDIT: From further experimenting, it seems this gap is caused by the fact that the emphasis animation feature carves the display area into horizontal "slices," as many slices as there are slide parts. Each line/pair of lines/however many lines you have set per slide is then aligned within that "slice" based on how you set song text alignment. This inevitably results in an annoying gap between the slide parts since you can't align one part to the top and one to the bottom within a single verse.