Glitches?

[[Admin] danroth]

Some say that when a third of the angels were cast out of heaven as demons, they went to live in technology.

Any Easter glitches with computers, people, etc. you can share for our enlightenment, entertainment, or empathy?

[memcowboy]

Glitches...you want to hear about glitches?

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)!

So here I am with a destop wallpaper on the screen for our full house to enjoy while kid's are singing about the wonder of Easter morning and I can't find the stupid projector remote to black out the screen. On top of that, I am still trying out SongShow, so I am not as smooth with problems as I would have been using the old software. I added a couple of elements to the program right before we started and obviously did not save them, even though I thought I did. I finally figure out how to get the program running again, find the new elements and add them again, start the projecter again, and shoot the slide to the screen only to have the display format properties change to something I had never seen before. HUGE BOLD TEXT with no shadow filling the entire screen with words. Fortunately that song only had 2 slides to it and I could change the rest of the songs during the prayers.

In short, I am very glad that service is over and that I have a very understanding pastor. At least we only had this minor problem on the most important Sunday of the year.

[memcowboy]

Oh, I forgot one thing. There weren't even any youth helping that I could blame the problems on. Of course, I wouldn't have it any other way. If something messed up, I would much rather it happen to me so I could fix it and so nobody else felt like it was their fault.

[[Admin] osborn4]

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

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

[TimW]

This could also be placed in the other topic asking for amazing stories of blessing this Easter, but it started out as a couple of glitches.

We don't have a live band, and this morning most of our songs were from iWorship videos (lyrics on auto-pilot... I love it!).

After our Sunrise service, the pastor asked me to pray for the 8:30 service (our contemporary service), and especially her sermon. Her Easter sermon was "Reacting to the Unexpected"... Mary Magdeline's and the apostles reactions to finding Jesus' tomb empty.

I prayed for His hand to guide our service, and provide the pastor with His words.

The first "unexpected" was when Easy Worship managed to skip an entry in my schedule and it cued up our second song first. The praise team didn't miss a beat, and picked it right up. I cued up the first song next and the rest of the schedule went as planned. After the service (as I was apologizing), the pastor told me that order of the two songs worked much better and the "unexpected" energized the praise team's singing.

Next "unexpected" came as the pastor was beginning her sermon. All of her notes fell off the lectern onto the floor in disarray. She picked them up, tossed them onto an empty pew, looked up, smiled to Him and said "Thank you", and proceeded to deliver an awe-inspiring sermon from in front of the lectern with no notes at all.

The power of prayer.

-Tim

[[Director] Joseph B]

Yeah I bought the stained class video - took us about 15 minutes to get sound from the computer to the sound system. Once again someone decided it was more important for them to have the patch cord then for it to be left where it was at.
Didn't anyone ever tell them thief's go to hell?

[waynehoskins]

Originally Posted by osborn4

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

Me too. Thankfully we haven't had a program crash, but there have been times that the youth operating it has minimized the program to check the internets or such.

[[Admin] danroth]

I posted this question before our service. I probably shouldn't have.

We had a problem in that the countdown (five minutes with music) didn't launch as programmed at 5 minutes before the service started. Thankfully our projectionist noticed it, and started it up (albeit about a minute late). Well, we found out what the problem was - when 55 minutes into the worship service the countdown started! The startup time was off by an hour.

Unfortunately, unlike many (most) churches, our numbers go down on Easter because when you live in the inner city, family Easter celebrations are usually elsewhere. So, for lack of any media team members, we were actually running in "slideshow" mode using a remote control . There was no way to rectify the problem without me running up to the balcony to fix it - leaving the ushers standing up front for about a minute holding the offering baskets and looking lost.

[dewknight]

Our switcher has been dieing for quite a while. It decided to restart in the middle of service, so we had to get some audience shots to cut in later during editing. Our projector also didn't feel like playing videos today.

[Esoteric]

We had 5 almost flawless services. A few moments were touch and go for us, but overall the congregation would never have noticed. So here were our issues....

1. Saturday night there was no rehearsal, so the lighting design was a little off (some levels were not where I wanted them).
2. Sunday morning the first two services were perfect.
3. The third service we had two wrong button presses that resulted in odd light cues, but we recovered quickly.
4. Our videos took about 10 seconds to cue up in Pro Presenter. Our Pro Presenter iMAC has been slowing down recently. I also messed with the color balance on our projectors between services and threw it off a little, but I was able to fix it during a prayer.
5. In one song a BGV was a bit louder than the lead vocal (musician error).
6. They decided to Skype the service to a missionary overseas and didn't tell anyone. So we had to set up a new matrix in our LS9. I didn't know how to do this. Neither did the sound guy. Luckily I have a technician on speed dial and he walked us through how to patch an existing matrix (used for our cry room) to an additional output. Problem solved with 55 seconds to go!
7. The late service was perfect.

We also networked our projectors this week (although they won't turn on via network we can do everything else).

We also had 2100+ people come on campus this weekend. That is up from 1500 at Christmas.

Mike

[tedanderson]

We had glitches and failures all day today.

First when we played our announcement video, this would be the day that the DVD wants to skip and play crackling noises! No problem- We burned a new DVD and were ready for the second service.

When we get through the second service, we discovered that the DVD recorder was on the wrong channel so it recorded 45 minute sermon with the CG test pattern on the screen. This is exactly why we run a backup DVD recorder in 4-hour mode.. but there was a problem with that one too! Apparently the weight of the heavier audio cables (which are XLR to RCA on whirlwind rubber mic cable) caused it to slide out of the jack on the recorder. So here we had a DVD with no audio, another dvd with no video, and an anxious pastor waiting for us to bring him a copy!

And we had a few others throughout the day but it wasn't that big of deal. We were expecting larger crowds which are common on certain holidays, however, it didn't seem like anyone was in much of the Easter Sunday spirit so it was pretty much like a regular church service.

[memcowboy]

Originally Posted by osborn4

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

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

Well that would have been great information to have had a few hours ago.