Woohoo!! Next phase done!!

[petereit]

Hallelujah! After 5 weeks of totally gutting our platform, we finished everything just in time for Ricardo Sanchez to come and do a concert at our church. I'm editing video right now and thought I'd just share a still.



Not bad for a bunch of cheap LCDs and stuff hacked together by a bunch of guys who have no idea what we're doing.

[TideJoe]

Looks great. You should be proud.

[tedanderson]

I love it when a plan comes together.

[riafekim]

I'd be interested in what you have setup. Looks nice

[james tucker]

looks great, congratulations on your upgrades.

[jksbc]

Those LCDs don't look cheap to me. I love it. Give us more details please. And, if it's not too much to ask post more photos.

[petereit]

I've been up to my eyeballs editing the video and mixing the 24-tracks of digital audio from the concert. Here are a few more random screen-grabs I exported during my editing sessions (shot from the back of the house on a JVC GY-HD110U, stock lens):

















(My pastor likes blue.)

We got an incredible deal on a lot of 14 Chauvet ColorStrips and used them as wash over the side scrims, behind the translucent panels that hang between the columns and under the band risers. I found a steal on four open-box Chauvet LEDsplash 196 that we use to warm our four 12-foot vertical trusses.

Also thrown into the lighting mix are four American DJ Accu Spot 250 Hybrids on the main house truss, and four Elation Design Spot 1400E's on the stage. (Kick in the prisms and we can pretty much light the whole place with gobos.)

Screens are lit by four Hitachi 4000-lumen wxga projectors, connected by 75-foot HDMI cables to an Octava 4x4 matrix switch (no amps). The two outside screens (not visible in any of these pictures) are 25' x 14' and primarily serve as our EasyWorship screens, but we also switch them to IMAG.

The two remaining projectors are edge-blended to light our VERY wide center screen. I create custom motion graphics in Apple Motion, then pull them into Final Cut Pro where I created a mask to perform the edge-blending. That results in a .mov loop that I run through Keynote on an iMac into a TripleHead2Go. Not a solution for the faint-of-heart, but it works for us until we either get a switch that does edge-blending or buy the appropriate TVone modules. (In a couple pictures it looks like the center screen is washed out by lights. It's not -- those lights are actually part of the motion graphic that's playing on the screen.)

Eventually we'll go ProPresenter with the alpha module and key lyrics over IMAG, but I have cameras, chains and a big honkin HD production switcher to buy first.

[petereit]

Man, I feel like the last year was a constant, slow, uphill climb. But now I feel like we finally crested the hill and we're picking up speed.

Posted my first sermon video on Vimeo. Took me 3 days just to find the sweet spot between quality and file size (needed to shrink 58 minutes of 720p30 footage from 8.5GB down below Vimeo's 1GB limit).




There are some rough spots, but my focus right now is to get the video posted to our web site as quickly as possible. Each week I note my "lessons learned" to (hopefully) improve on the next week.

Here's my workflow:

Florence, South Carolina: Sunday Morning
Capture Sunday morning sermon video to MacBook Pro via FireWire
After service, transfer raw video to Mac Pro.
Do 15 min. quick edit (fade head from black, fade tail to black, check audio)
Export self-contained QuickTime
Kick off compress for Vimeo
Go home!

Florence, South Carolina: Sunday Evening
Come in 30 min before evening service, begin upload to Vimeo
Enter sermon title and tags into Vimeo
Email embed link to Web Admin
Upload runs a couple of hours, then Vimeo does their conversion

Spain: Early Monday Morning
Vimeo tweets our web admin as soon as conversion is complete
Web admin adds embed code to our web site
Web admin posts Vimeo link on our Facebook and Twitter
Video is streaming from our web site first thing Monday morning

Lessons learned this week
Check bubble level on tripod.
Work with sound engineer to improve incoming sound quality
More cowbell! Er, um...lighting!
Make a better freeze-frame image for the video

[petereit]

I must be learning. It took me until Wednesday to get last Sunday's sermon up. I had today's up by 6:00pm.

[waynehoskins]

I've found that by doing some pretty hefty compression on my end, I can get my sermon video up online by early mid-afternoon, and that's on just a T1 circuit. I like that.

Yeah, quality=good, but this is the interweb we're talking about. It's in the user's web browser the size of an index card. 240 lines is fine, and it saves everybody some bandwidth.