Glitches?

[memcowboy]

On the other hand, our Good Friday service, which saw all of us working the service running around like crazy people trying to find out exactly what everyone thought was happening when, went off without a problem. It was maybe the most powerful service our church has had.

[zactommo]

Easter is one of the biggest christian jobs I do in the year: Live video setup for a youth camp of about 4500 young people.

We had one very major incident during the sunday evening meeting which marred what was otherwise a great weekend!

A mutlibox which contained an RCD decided to trip about half way through the meeting, so we lost power to the projectors, secondary switcher, and the main side of stage VDA which almost all of our input and output sources go through. Took about 1 minute to find where the fault was, and began powering everything up. It then tripped again about 2 minutes later as when we almost had everything back in operation! The projectors then refused to power on properly, and when one did, it was going crazy, so the decision was made to go without video in the main meeting for the rest of the meeting, less we ruin our projectors for the rest of the event. RCD was removed afterwards, and the last monday morning meeting ran flawlessly.

The interesting thing for me, is that the response to the message by the young people was amazing! It just goes to show, God doesn't need our fancy gizmos to move in powerful ways. Funny line from the MC trying to gloss over the technical difficulties: (said tongue in check) You know, sometimes when the holy spirit moves in powerful ways, it causes disasters for the electronics.

Was some great achievements during the weekend though. Managed to pull of a live-cross during the meeting with my home-built wireless video link, and we shot lots of our highlights on a Canon 7D, with absolutely amazing results!

[petereit]

Praise God! We had a great potential for a technical glitch but the Holy Spirit came in for our service a smoothed everything to perfection.

Our worship leader asked me to cut video from The Passion of the Christ to Chris Tomlin's "Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone)" and provided me a performance track. Video turned out great!

So I show up for rehearsal on Saturday and find out that the band is going to back him live instead of us using the performance track I laid down with the video. I begged and pleaded with him to reconsider, as that would create no end of timing issues. He assured me that our keyboard player would play with the metronome in his headphones so he could maintain a solid tempo.

Problem is, Chris Tomlin's pianist did NOT play with a metronome.

So I had my sound guy route my audio through our keyboard player's headphones. Surely he wouldn't have any problem playing along, right?

Uh no. They decided to play it in a different key.

Could I replace the audio with a click track? Sure! If this was LAST WEEK!

So I came up with a solution. I would put on head phones, solo the track from my video and direct from the sound booth. That seemed to work OK in rehearsal until the last verse where, for some unexplained reason, my worship leader decided to start singing after a 4-bar break instead of the 2-bar break in the actual song, which obviously had him singing for two measures after my video ended.

By this time, everyone's ready to go for each other's throats, so we decided to wrap Saturday rehearsal and hit it again Sunday morning pre-service.

Maybe the coffee hadn't kicked in yet, but pre-service rehearsal was a big mess. It took 3 times for us to work out my visual cue to just START the song. And then our keyboard player just started playing at his own pace, "forgetting" to follow my direction. At this point, I just decided to treat this like a live performance and see if I could work it out in real-time. So I slipped the headphones down around my neck so I could hear both my track and what was actually being played, and adjust my directing to see if I could get the two back in sync. Man! What a mental workout! Listening to two different performances of the same song, in two different keys, being played at two different tempos about 1.5 measures apart. Once my worship leader and keyboard player both realized that they needed to be watching me, I picked up the tempo just a bit and managed to get the band in sync with the video just as we hit the tag and finished the song in sync. Whew!!

I wasn't thrilled with that last rehearsal, but at least now I knew what I had to do and how to fix things if they got off again.

During the actual service, my keyboard player hit the first chord exactly in sync and stayed in sync the entire time. I had the headphones on listening to Chris Tomlin, but watching my worship leader's lips in perfect sync through the whole song. It went flawlessly! GLORY TO GOD!! And the following clip from the resurrection scene (show 'em what those subs can do! Rattle their dental work!! YEAH!!) had everyone in the sanctuary on their feet cheering.

And on a completely unrelated topic, our first multi-cam HD direct-to-disk live video capture also worked flawlessly. It was a beautiful thing to pull up FCP multicam 10 minutes after the service and see all four camera angles with all 48-tracks of digital audio sitting on the timeline, perfectly synced and ready for post. THAT'S what brought tears to MY eyes.

[bladeaudio]

Only a minor "excitement." As the prelude was playing for our first service, our worship pastor ran up to the booth and said "Do you have the call to worship for the screens?" Of course this was the first time we'd heard anything about putting a call to worship up on the screens! Apparently there was going to be a congregational response back and forth with the pastor that needed to be up on the screens.

We frantically opened up an old slide show (in SSP) that I knew would already be properly formated and began typing. Just as the prelude ended we hit save and put it up on the screens just a second after the pastor began to speak.

[BPoese]

We had a "new" sound guy running the sound board for our Good Friday evening service. Everything went well. He did a great job. Sunday morning we had our veteran sound guy back on the board and everything seemed ok. I know he had replaced all the batteries in all the wireless mics, etc... He is generally a very detail type of person anyway. So our Pastor started the service in the rear of the sanctuary, but as he started speaking, nothing came out of the main speakers. No sound at all!! The sound guy and I glanced at each other in horror trying to figure out what happened. He starts checking the settings on the sound board and everything is looking good. We are seeing mic input sound levels moving but no sound coming out. Suddenly he shouts to me, "Check the amps!" So I go running into the closet where the amps to our mains are and sure enough, the sound guy that ran the service on Good Friday had turned them off. We normally leave them on all the time so we never thought about checking them that Sunday morning. So I start pushing the Power buttons on all 7 amps and suddenly we had sound. We missed about the first 40 seconds of the opening but it seemed like 10 minutes to us in the sound booth.

What was funny was that the sound guy said he was in the closet replacing batteries on the mics and he never noticed that the power lights on the amps were not on. He did say that he did notice that it was quieter in there than normal – since the fans on the amps were not running! I find it interesting that the sound guy notices the sound level in the there but not the visual of the lamps not being on. Go figure….

[frank]

Originally Posted by osborn4

Much worse is the windows startup sound coming through the church sound system. I haven't had that happen in many years, thank God.

You can disable all Windows sounds to keep that from happening. All other sounds work fine, but no startup, shutdown, stop, error, etc. nasties grace our speakers.

[frank]

Originally Posted by memcowboy

This morning, right after the service began, right in the middle of the first song with our special children's choir, something tried to update and crashed SongShow Plus to the desktop. Picture if you will, a nice Easter picture of the empty tomb "He is risen, He is risen indeed" and a special song written by one of our praise team members. Then BOOM windows desktop wallpaper (at least it was a nice picture of a tropical island)!

Our desktop graphic is the same one we use for the "bailout" image in SundayPlus, three medium-blue crosses on a dark blue background. If there's a technical problem or if no presentation program is running, we have an appropriate default background that's sent the the screens and hallway monitors.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by frank

You can disable all Windows sounds to keep that from happening. All other sounds work fine, but no startup, shutdown, stop, error, etc. nasties grace our speakers.

Yes. I should have said, thank God and Windows Settings and the wisdom God (eventually) provides to use them.

[sempei13]

I've set our secondary monitor to the series graphic for this reason. Even if software quits, you'll see the graphic.

Originally Posted by osborn4

That's one reason I keep a black desktop on my projection machines, just in case.

[DTV-Engineer]

We had our graphics computer's version of PowerPoint "upgraded" to 2007 a few days prior... unfortunately, none of the people on schedule to run graphics either knew about the change, or had any familiarity with this version. Also unfortunately, the "upgrade" managed to corrupt some fonts, including Arial -- so there was much scrambling to figure out how to fix all the slides that were playing with text in odd positions or text that was partly cut off. We got most of it fixed before the first service on Saturday evening.

We also lost power to part of our overflow room on Sunday morning. Turns out extra lights had been connected to the same circut that feeds the subwoofers... the person doing the installation didn't know how the room outlets were wired, and apparently didn't consider that the pair of powered subs already plugged in might constitute a substantial load when they're running. ("Why would we turn on the sound to test the lights?") As a result, we had a successful test but a real-world failure.

In spite of all this and a handful of other minutiae, we had over 2,400 folks this weekend (our typical attendance is now pushing 1,500), and a number of people made decisions for Christ. I have to admit to being mightily frosted about the glitches -- especially since none of them would have happened given better communication -- but the outcome certainly puts things back into perspective.

-- Jeff

[Paris MkVI]

We spent Saturday afternoon replacing a lot of gels, so color lighting would be fresh and vivid. (And boy, were they due!) One of my guys had a great idea for some uplighting. It was so good I immediately incorporated it into our cues. That all turned out terrific and looked fabulous Sunday.

When we were done, I pulled up the projectors and ran the welcome loop. I just wanted to be sure we had not bumped a projector and misaligned it to the screen. They were fine. But one of the guys also noticed the slide text promoting the Beth Moore simulcast later in the month was courtesy of "CNN" instead of "CCN"!

It's so nice to find those sorts of things before Sunday!