If you are a church techie or involved in church media/av/tech in any way at all then hopefully you already know about “Church Production Magazine“.  And if you don’t… Then shame on you. =)  “Church Production” is a great resource for churches of all sizes and covers all things associated with production houses of worship. With church-specific coverage of audio, video, lighting and duplication, Church Production Magazine is presented in an editorial context that is designed as a reference for churches to use in their decision-making process. CPM has become a leading resource for news, new product announcements, trends, product reviews, tours and installations in facilities across the country. It’s very good stuff and I would definitely encourage you to use this resource.

CPM is also one of the major presentors and parties responsible for “WFX – Worship Facilities Expo”, an educational conference and tradeshow designed to bring together teams of decision makers from churches around the world. It’s a great event to take your tech teams too and dream.

I recently did an article for BlackMagic Design that was featured in CPM this month on the production setup at National Community Church and how we leveraged the products from BlackMagic Design to make it all happen.  My apologies for the article being a little dated.  It states that NCC is 4 locations, and leaves out the latest location Kingstowne, Which lauched after this article was written.

Here is the link and hope you enjoy! – http://churchproduction.com/go.php/article/8590

So, one thing that are implementing is a reference sheet for EQ settings. You can take the time to get your standard setup tweaked and everything EQ’d to perfection. Then you can write down a reference for your individual channels. So next time the youth group comes in and uses the system =)… everything is not all lost. You can just put things back within miniutes. Obviously things might change a little bit week to week and might need minor tweaks here and there, but this will give you a great place to fall back to.

If you are running a digital console then you can just ignore this because lucky you… It’s all saved right in the system… The rest of us will just drool in jealousy. =)

Well the other big piece of this puzzle that most people aren’t aware of is Wireless Mic systems. If you are involved in Media or Tech at your church, you should check and make sure that your church is ready for the switch and is complying with FCC regualtions. There are two major reasons you should do so. One, That specturm is going to get crowded very quickly and could comprimise your system even working at all. And two, your church could actually recieve fines from the FCC for not complying in the not too distant future. There is a possibility that your wireless gear could interfere with emergency or public safety communications.

If you are not sure where you stand… Read this article – http://www.prosoundnews.com/article/19448

Both Shure and Sennheiser have replacement programs setup for those of you who have wireless systems that are currently operating in the 700 MHz spectrum

Shure – Units purchased prior to February 1, 2007, and to any competitive 700MHz wireless systems. Trade in your old wireless system against a new one and receive up to a $1,000 mail-in rebate. For information on wireless systems purchased on or after that February 1, 2007, contact Shure at 800-257-4873

Sennheiser – Rebates will be offered for purchases made between December 1, 2008 and December 1, 2009, for new Sennheiser wireless systems with the trade-in of an old 700MHz wireless system from Sennheiser or a competing brand. Single components will be rebated at half the system rebate value. The rebate values are tiered depending on the system and when it was purchased, and will range from $40 to $2,000.

Technorati Tags: 700 MHz, Spectrum, Wireless, Mics, Shure, Sennheiser, Digital Television, Broadcast Televsion, Analog Television

For the capturing of our Saturday service message we are using a Canon XL H1 camera, which is mounted on the ceiling. The mounting does involve an adjustment option so we can modify the camera height for different speakers. The XL H1 may also be adjusted using Canon Console, which is Windows-based software that allows you to control the functions of the camera remotely via Firewire. The XL H1 camera has a HD-SDI output that delivers an uncompressed HD signal.

The video from the XL H1 is captured via a Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme HD Capture Card. We capture live into Final Cut Pro using the DVCPRO HD codec. The audio send is sent to a separate sound board, mixed down and recorded to the video track via the XLR inputs on the Decklink cards.

After editing, the final file is exported and transferred to multiple hard drives (RAID0 and eSata) that go to each of our locations for Sunday morning services. We are using ProPresenter for presentation of all media. The software allows for easy point-and-click operation of all media elements, which are played from the external hard drive.

Each location has Mac G5 or Mac Pro equipped with Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme cards. These cards have a component output that we connect to our projectors. The machines are all rack mounted in individual carts that allow for easy portability, set up, and tear down. Our projectors are Panasonic PT-D7700U (7,000 Lumen 1400×1050)

For all of our off-site videos we use two Panasonic AGHVX-200 cameras which record to Firestore FS-100 external hard drives or P2 cards, which allows us to avoid the use of tapes.

Technorati Tags: HD, DVCPRO HD, Canon XL H1, Panasonic, HVX-200, Blackmagic Design

Let me first start off and say I think its great that Final Cut Studio 2 supports the AVCHD codec and I’m so glad that they integrated the ability to use cameras that use that codec with Final Cut.  However my problem is that Final Cut actually transcodes the h.264 based codec of AVCHD to Apple ProRes 422.  This is great in one way because ovbiously Final Cut deals with ProRes 422 natively, so this way you can easily bring your clips in and edit them in real-time do everything you want to do. But the downside is that ProRes 422 is about 4 times the size of the original AVCHD video files.  So for example, a 2-minute native AVCHD file is about 200 MB. After transcoding to the Apple ProRes 422 codec, the file size can be as large as 2 GB.

Ok so that’s my rant for today.  When your shooting on your consumer grade HD camera you can get lots of footage on that 8GB flash drive.  But watch out when you start to ingest that stuff into Final Cut.  Your gonna need lots of space.

Basically my workaround for this is to export my final video as an h.264 MOV or MP4.  Quality will be good and you’ll save on file size. If your trying to basically keep everything you recorded onto a SD card or something.  Just copy the entire contents of the card to a folder on your drive.  Then you can keep it for later when you want to pull clips into FCP.  Another great app to check out for fast H.264 encoding is Visualhub.  But I’ll save going over all the deatils on that app for another day.

Technorati Tags: AVCHD, Final Cut Studio 2, H.264, VisualHub

Video Stuff

Digital Juice – http://www.digitaljuice.com/
Video CoPilot – http://www.videocopilot.net/
CreativeCow – http://forums.creativecow.net/
Lynda.com – http://lynda.com
Videomaker Magazine – http://www.videomaker.com/
NAB – http://www.nab.org/

Design

iStockPhoto – http://istockphoto.com/
Photoshop World – http://www.photoshopworld.com/
lynda.com – http://lynda.com

Music

Digital Juice – http://www.digitaljuice.com/
Free Play Music – http://www.freeplaymusic.com/
Getty – http://www.gettyimages.com/Music/

Tech Blogs

Apple Insider – http://www.appleinsider.com/
Godbit – http://godbit.com/
Engadget – http://engadget.com
TUAW – http://www.tuaw.com/

Ok, That’s all for now. I will update this periodically

First and foremost… AOL stinks. No seriously… I’m not harping on it just to harp on it. The fact that everything is proprietary and basically locked down so exporting it out to any other program is virtually impossible is awful. They definately need to adopt some standards. So here is what I did in order to fulfill the quest to get AOL content to our Exchange server.

First I had to go into AOL and change all of the email that was set as “saved on my computer” to saved on AOL. And of course you couldn’t do it! Horrible UI they have got going there. So I found this handy little app called Transend. It was well worth the $50. It couldn’t do calendar or contacts for AOL 9.0 but it was prefect for email. The program ran for about 5 hours. Thats not the apps fault. That just how many emails there were. Once it was done, every email and folder from the AOL inbox were sitting nicely right inside Outlook. It kept the attachments too.

Next was the task of Contacts. The way I did this was to use a service that most are already probably familiar with called Plaxo. Plaxo will now sync with an AIM address and pull your contacts from that AIM address into Plaxo. Then I was able to install the Outlook Plaxo client and import the contacts into outlook and then drag them over to Exchange. The only thing I wasn’t able to recover on the contacts side with distribution groups that had been setup in AOL. I couldn’t really see any way to yank those out of AOL. Basically they would all have to be recreated by hand.

The final thing was his calendar. Fortunately he kept his calendar on his phone only. So I didn’t have to worry about trying to rescue that from the clutches of AOL’s death grip. =) The next step was to format the computer and reinstall XP Pro. No Vista for this house, we got enough problems as it is now. =)

After getting everything reinstalled properly and back up and running, he was good to go. Now he’s managing his calendar, sharing calendars, checking email the right way and we even got him setup on a Motorola Q which syncs over the air with our exchange server. I think it’s all rocking his world now. =)

Technorati Tags: AOL, Exchange Server, Outlook, Transend, Plaxo, Email Migration

Right now we are using 2 Panasonic AG-HVX200. It’s a HD camera that shoots in 1080i, 720p and 480i. If you are shooting in SD, you can record straight to Mini-DV. If you are shooting in HD, you record to either P2 cards (like PCMCIA cards) or a hard drive. The image quality is phenomenal. Link

For our audio set-up, we are using a Sennheiser EW100 set of wireless mics and receivers. They are great because the person that you are filming can hide them nicely so that your audience doesn’t even know that they are there. They also deliver great audio and I have never had problems with static or interference. Link

I hope this gives you a basic overview. If you have any questions, just throw some comments my way and I will try to answer them.

Technorati Tags: High Definition, National Community Church, Washington DC, Buzz Conference, AG-HVX200

Well, we’re post Buzz Conference here and starting to get back into the swing of things. I will post some thoughts and reflections on the conference later. It was awesome to connect with so many pastors at the conference and try and help answer some of their questions. I am going to post a few articles on here that will address some of the questions that were asked about NCC. Right now, I am working on an article on how we acomplish HD here at NCC.

I wanted to throw this article your way. Pretty cool stuff! Is Jesus the next killer app?

Check back soon for more updates, peace =)

As some of you may already know NCC (National Community Church) will be hosting a conference this May called BUZZ. Well, I came across one church that is trying to create some buzz for themselves. Check out The Metropolitan Baptist Church of Houston (www.themetonline.org). There doing a new series called the Theology of the iPod. You may think this is sacrilege (hahaha) but you have to admit its some good buzz. Check out the piece that Fox News did on them here.

For more info on the Buzz Conference check out the Buzz Conference website at www.buzzconference.com, Be sure to check back often as updates are coming real soon!