Planting By The Brook

The trend toward video campuses is growing and seems to be part of church strategy for years to come. We took our first crack at a video campus when Southbrook opened it’s first “video venue” over two years ago. We had one thing going for us…the new video venue was going to be right here on our existing campus. Our main problem…we didn’t have any money. After much trial and error and too many hours spent in technical manuals and on support.lines, we figured out a couple things.

Contrary to what you might hear, I think anything less than running high
definition (HD) isn’t really worth it–especially as high definition video
becomes more and more affordable. What is gained by HD is worth the
price–clearer picture, wider field, and ultimately a more engaging venue
(IMHO).

So, the nuts and bolts. We started off VERY simply with one basic HD video mixer (Edirol V440), some brighter spot lights for the stage, and a Sony HVR-Z1U camera. Although this wasn’t ideal, it still gave us a decent picture to send over fiber (donated to us by a local company) to our video venue. No fancy multiple camera shoots…just one camera set to a wide shot of the pastor (head to toe). We set our projector to have the bottom edge of the picture flush with the stage so that our pastor looked as close to “real” as what people were seeing live.

Then along came our video campus several miles away. We had the live feed down–the question now was, “How can we send live to one venue, and capture HD video for the other venue?” Easy question when you have cash…in our case, we still were a bit strapped. For our pastor to translate a bit better on video we knew we needed a better camera, so we upgraded to a JVC GY-HD250U…still only one camera. Since our Edirol V440 allowed us to input 3-BNC component video (which was one of the outputs on our new camera) we simply connected the camera to a Laird 1 X 6 component DA (which basically means we can take one camera signal and turn it into 6 identical
camera signals). We then could send one of the identical signals to our video mixer (for a live feed to our video venue on campus), and another of the identical signals to a Mac computer (to record video for our “not live” video venue). That didn’t give us the option to do fancy graphic stuff on the video itself, but it did allow us to capture a very nice picture for playback. We purchased a Kona Lhe card from AJA (it’s a card that can be installed into a Mac computer for video recording) that allowed us to capture live video via Final Cut Pro to an external hard-drive (G|Drive).

On the playback end, we purchased an additional Mac Pro computer with an additional internal hard-drive. We simply take the Quicktime movie generated from the Final Cut video capture and copy it over to the additional internal hard-drive of the playback Mac. We cue it up in
Quicktime and hit play when we’re ready for the message. The nice thing is, when the Mac’s aren’t being used for capture and playback, they can be used for various projects during the week.

Recently we’ve added the Panasonic AV-HS400 (and some additional input/output cards) that are really going to give us the opportunity to send out multiple formats, increase graphic use in live video, and expand to additional cameras, etc. That will just have to be another post for another day.

-Mike Cruser (Creative Arts)

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