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National Community Church Spreads the Word Using Blackmagic Design
by Dave Clark, Media Pastor / Georgetown Campus Pastor
Known for its creative approach to ministry and strong volunteer base, the National Community Church is using video technology to ensure that everyone hears the same message.
With four locations around the Washington, D.C. area, each location uses video to record the message portion of certain services. Every campus has a “campus pastor”, but our “lead pastor” or a guest speaker rotates between the many different weekly services. At the first weekend service the message is captured, edited and transferred to the campuses where video teaching is being used. While each location has a unique environment and community this technology ensures that everyone hears exactly the same teaching. On a typical weekend, the NCC runs eight services across all four locations and they hope to launch two more locations in 2009.
During the five years I have served at National Community Church, the attendance has grown tremendously. Each year we are increasingly growing our reach to more people throughout the broader community. For our Church, it is important to stay ‘close and personal’ to our congregants. To be able to share our pastor’s message with all of our members at our four different locations on Sunday mornings, we have invested in an easy to use and cost-effective workflow that does not compromise quality. We record our pastor’s sermon at Saturday evening services and distribute it at the localized live services held on Sunday.
To capture the pastor’s message on Saturday evening at our coffeehouse, we use a ceiling-mounted Canon XL H1 camera. 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 controls certain 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 on a Mac Pro using the Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Extreme capture card with a live capture into Final Cut Pro using the DVCPRO HD codec. The audio output is sent to a separate sound board, mixed down and recorded to the video track via the XLR inputs on our DeckLink HD Extreme card.
After editing, the final file is exported and transferred to multiple hard drives (RAID 0 and eSata) that go to each of our locations for Sunday morning services. We are using ProPresenter from RenewedVision for presentation of all media; the software allows for easy point-and-click operation of all media elements from videos to graphics to song lyrics, which are played from the external hard drive.
Each of our Sunday service locations has a Mac G5 or Mac Pro equipped with a Blackmagic DeckLink HD Extreme card. These cards have a high quality component output that we connect to each of our Panasonic PT-DW7000U-K (6,000 Lumen 1366×768) projectors. The Macs are all rack mounted in individual carts that allow for easy portability, set up, and tear down, and are stored at the different theatres and facilities where we hold our services.
We hope to add two additional locations next year.
With our multi-site model, the church can grow in resources and locations, and still remain small and do more at each of our different locations. These new locations will require that we increase our ‘redundancy’ and our ‘store’ and ‘forward’ systems.
We’re also trying to think of new ways to share our message, so we go off-site to find a fresh setting for the content we produce. For all of our off-site production we use two Panasonic AGHVX-200 cameras that record to Firestore FS-100 external hard drives or P2 cards. With this workflow we avoid the use of tapes altogether.
Recently, we were in Wittenberg, Germany, attending a conference called ‘The R(e)formation Gathering’. This conference coincided with the beginning of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his ‘Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’ to the doors of the Schlosskirche Castle Church. During our stay in Wittenberg, we shot a timely video of the city’s festivities and celebrations. This added substance to the pastor’s sermon, as it was shown the following week on All Saints Day.
For most of our video series, we do bumpers and trailers to inform our congregation about upcoming events and to generate interest in specific topics. We use Blackmagic Design DeckLink cards extensively to produce those materials.
When we originally started planning our production facility, I learned about Blackmagic Design from friends who were already using these great products. The price point was better than other companies’ and I really liked the great customer support when we got started with our new workflow. Good price point and quality customer service. What more could you ask for?
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