In the middle of your next service, ask yourself this question: What is on the projection screens (or LCD’s) and why is it there?

Often habit becomes tradition, tradition becomes concrete and sometimes concrete just gets in the way. If you have live video there, is it necessary? If you have slides or still imagery there could you have an animated background?

My point here is to look at what’s there and how could you enhance or build on the communication that is already happening on the stage. It’s quite possible that you could do something very easily, using the equipment, software and hardware you already have.

Secret Tip: OpenSong …. it hides a multitude of sin if you’re currently in the Powerpoint realm and can’t afford to purchase any presentation packages, we still use it because we love it, and it’s free!

2. Take The Service Live Streaming …. on Twitter

140 characters has proved to be enough space to preach the gospel, deliver the news or simply interact with other individuals in recent times. How could you use it in your service?

I’m encouraging my Senior Pastor to use it, much like Hillsong’s Senior Pastor is, to communicate to his congregation and to promote transparency. On a larger church wide aspect I’m using my church’s twitter to keep congregation members updated on Church news and events, and we’re looking at how we can microblog on the message being preached so church members can look back at some notes or so members away, or people viewing on the internet stream can catch the notes or scripture references.

Secret Tip: Tweetlater.com is a blessing. You setup the tweets across the week and let them go! Hootsuite looks good as well.

3. Take The Service Live Streaming …. on ustream.tv

Ustream.tv is a free service for streaming video and/or audio to the internet. I use it to stream our video feed to our website, and we’re currently investigating a more fruitful way of doing this, including talking about a web only service playing music that we have written. I’m also a volunteer at the Christian Community Radio Station here on the Gold Coast and just this weekend we’ve set up an audio only stream, that uses Adobe Flash Media Encoder 3, and ManyCam to stream the radio service across the internet. (We’re a few cables away from a permanent install on that one).

If you have a video mixing desk and you’re wondering how to get it to ustream.tv, you simply need a analogue video/audio to DV converter, I use one from Canopus.

Secret Tip: ManyCam edits, or creates, your video feed that you send to Ustream, or FME3 then onto Ustream. It’s a welcome friend in the Internet video world and lets you do all the ‘cool’ things you might not be able to with your current video setup.

4. Have A Look At Your EQ

I was shoved behind the sound desk 7 years ago and I’ve been freaking out ever since. Well, until Andrew Ironside did a master class in Sound Engineering for my team and some other local sound guys recently and opened my eyes to the beauty of a graphic equalizer. We’re extremely blessed at SURFCiTY to use a Yamaha M7CL powering Nexo Geo S8 speakers and woofers. The truth is that EQ skills can be applied to any sound desk, just to varying degrees.

If you don’t know EQ, find someone who does, if you do know EQ, listen to a CD and ask yourself how you can make that sound, do you want to create that sound? what did you like and dislike about that sound? Try taking your senior pastor, worship or music pastor through the same purpose. Make sure that the people behind the sound desk are working with and for the musicians, singers and leadership. The last thing a church needs is disunity between the communicators and the people that can make the communicators be heard.

Secret Tip: This Frequency Ranges PDF will make your life that little bit better, and put some understanding to all of those numbers on you sound desk.

5. Got Light?

Chances are your stage is already sufficiently lit, if not then get on to that sooner rather than later. After you have done the necessary lighting look around at what’s left and see how creative you can be.

Example 1: The old and no longer used overhead projector, yes that thing you tried so long to get rid of! How could you use it in your next service? I’ve printed out a word with black background on a transparency before and projected a word on to a wall. Or could it wash colour somewhere for you?

Example 2: Down-lights are rather cheap and easy to wire up, could you hang a few from a ceiling or rack and make some impromptu look-a-like Christmas lighting.

Example 3: Left over cans from an upgrade or what-not. Put a gel over them and splash them up a wall or a truss, put some colour where there was none before.

Secret Tip: Lighting has often been seen as the divide between the emergent church and the boring church. Don’t let christianese or common thought get in the way of you taking light into dark places and putting colour into life. Lighting could possibly be the easiest, coolest and most effective change you’ve made in quite a while.

What I would like to do is give you an idea of how my church implements video technology and why.

The vision for our church has absoloutley nothing techie in it. To give you an idea our vision is “We are a city church, setting in place God’s master-plan for every household; releasing them from sin, sickness and sorrow, recovering freedom, hope and purpose for all.”

See! Nothing techie at all! So when I came on board and joined the A/V team their main video purpose was the try and do a video news, put lyrics on the screen during the music and record services for DVD. From there on in we moved into our new building a few years back and brought our Newtek Tricaster with us and we put two projector screens either side of the stage.

The current video setup is all controlled by a Newtek Tricaster Standard. It has 3 video inputs, we usually input two cameras and a DVD player, sometimes three cameras for a special event. The Tricaster also receives a VGA screen from a networked computer using iVGA technology (iVGA is now on Mac as well as PC).

On a nearby Dell Server (so cheap!) we run a Windows XP setup with Opensong for lyrics presentation and Microsoft Powerpoint for slides.

On another computer we have a Canopus ADVC55 which takes the video feed out of the Tricaster (via Video/Audio distribution amplifier) and turns into digital goodness which the Adobe Flash Media Encoder loves. The purpose in this is to send it up to ustream.tv where we stream our services live to our own website which embeds that ustream channel. We also record some services directly into ustream, which allows them to be watched at a later date.

Meanwhile back on the Tricaster, it has two outputs, a VGA output and a Video output. The difference is that on the VGA outlet you can overlay the CGA graphic onto the video feed, and evenkey out a colour and it looks fairly solid. This is how we get our lyics over the video for the projectors. We mix live video feeds and sometimes animated looping videos from Shift Worship and still images stored on the Tricaster’s hard drive; this feed then goes to the VGA subsystem in the Tricaster, usually with lyrics on top, black keyed out and it heads straight up to the two projectors, two stage LCD’s and the rear projector (monitor for the singers).

The reason we put live video with lyrics on top on our side projectors is because there are a few sweet spots in the auditorium where you don’t have a clear view of the stage, especially when our pastor preaches from the floor and not the stage. The building is an old cinema complex and this auditorium is two old cinemas with the wall down between them, and a single poll in the middle holding the ceiling up now. For services that aren’t being live streamed we do not do live video (IMAG) for praise and worship, we’ll use animate looping videos.

The video feed, which is as above minus VGA keying – so no lyrics – heads out too our baby feed area, the foyer of our church and cafe, the live stream and also gets recorded directly on the Tricaster in MPEG2.

Finally, the iVGA system works great for non animated/moving video i.e. lyrics, powerpoint, keynote. A hidden gem in the system is that it works over any TCP/IP network. So I have an Apple Airport Extreme sitting in our A/V jungle of wires, which is connected to our 10/100 network switch which is connected to the Tricaster (only a 10/100 card installed in mine). So that means we can give a preacher/speaker a laptop with iVGA installed and they have it sit in front of them wirelessly on a pulpit and we take the VGA feed off it, simply amazing. Another secret thing that we won’t tell Newtek about is the fact I’ve installed RealVNC on the Tricaster which gives me remote control of the unit (it seems RealVNC has gone commercial since I last looked). I tried installing Snatch from Hoofien but Tricaster doesn’t let the software control the mouse after it starts.

As any church should be we are always evolving and changing, podcasts and internet based video ministry is looming in our minds as it is for many (NewSpring, LifeChurch, Hillsong) and we as a leadership team are trying to figure out what that means for the body of christ as a whole and also for our little patch of earth God has entrusted to us.

Regarding the Newtek Tricaster, this is in no way an advertisment for the unit, but I do reccomend it. It’s most recent software update to 2.5 makes it a great machine for a house of worship even if you aren’t producing live video or IMAG. The Tricaster, with iVGA and the uStream.tv service (free or watershed) gives me the ability to do productions that are unbelievable and also gives the building a selling point as a conference venue during the week.

Before I leave you with a few photos, the install is very cost efficent as far as professional video installs go: 3 x Sony Projectors, 1 x NewTek Tricaster Standard, 2 x Workstations, 1 x Canopus ADVC55, 2 x LG LCD’s, 1 x Video/Audio Distribution Amp, 2 x Cat5 Video/Audio Balun and 1 x Kramer Cat 5 Distribution install.

SURFCiTY Auditorium 1 from the old cinema projection room

Newtek Tricaster Catalog Image