technology

An Ordained Geek Becomes a Televangelist – Part Four

/ Rev. Eric Anderson / Leave a comment
Church of the Holy Cross with pews.

The last installment of this series, to my surprise, is nearly four years old. Since July of 2020 Church of the Holy Cross UCC returned to online-only worship when COVID infections rose dramatically that summer. In-person worship did not resume until April 2022.

When people returned to the sanctuary, we restored some, but not all, of the pews to the room, maintaining wider spacing. Eventually we returned nearly all of them. We continue to make masks and hand sanitizer available, and we have a policy that dictates when we will require masks, and when we will require online-only services. In the last two years, we have not had to implement that policy.

We found solutions to a number of our challenges during those two years of streaming. Having moved to the pulpit and lectern in the summer of 2020, we remained there, to give more of an in-person feel. We added more music. When people came to the sanctuary, we made some additional changes.

Moving the Consoles

With only the worship team in the sanctuary, we could place the mixing console with its PC, ATEM mini switcher, and remote control for the sound board where it was convenient for cable runs. As I’d noted in the previous piece in this series, we were near the limits of HDMI cable length. With a congregation in place, however, we needed to move the technical station, preferably to the back of the room. How could we get the camera signals there, however?

The answer was fiber-optic HDMI cables, whose prices had plummeted over the last few years. They carried signals over 100′ with no degradation. We initially laid them across the floor with cable covers, but then moved them along the walls above the windows.

In the meantime, Blackmagic Design had issued a series of upgraded ATEM Mini units. We purchased an ATEM Mini Pro. Its four inputs gave us the ability to connect three cameras plus the feed from our internal slides. Best of all, this piece of hardware can display a multiview on an external monitor, allowing us to retire the field monitors.

Camera Upgrades

The little Canon video cameras had done good service, but they were showing problems. They used a mini-HDMI connector, and it was not built for the strains of moving the camera back and forth. We began to suffer short dropouts on cameras, and I began to worry that one or both of the connectors would fail. In addition, we faced the need to move the cameras further back in the sanctuary as people returned. We looked for a better long-term solution.

We invested in three Blackmagic Design Studio Camera 4K Plus cameras. We equipped two of them with longer power zoom lenses and one with a wide power zoom. The wide lens camera stands raised at the back of the sanctuary and provides a shot of the entire room. It has no operator. Volunteers point the other two, permitting us to continue streaming a three camera production. I have really welcomed these new cameras, because for the first time I know which one is active. I recently discovered that a small tweak to their color balance has really improved the look.

Sound

Our Soundcraft Ui24R has continued to serve us well, allowing us to send separate mixes to the speakers in the room and to the live stream. Moving the control console forced us to a new solution for getting the feed to the stream. We’re much too far from the physical mixer to use USB. Instead, we run an analog connection from the appropriate Auxiliary Out port to the back of the room, where it connects to a sound input on the ATEM Mini Pro. With a little bit of delay to compensate for the delay built into HDMI, we have solid sound.

We did add a “house sound” microphone to the mix. It hasn’t been a rousing success. We haven’t been able to place it so that it picks up the congregation without picking up the internal sound as well. We use it primarily during responsive readings, but not much otherwise. I’d still like to improve that somehow.

Movement

When a congregation returned in 2022, one of our members led them in movement, generally to one of the hymns or a musical anthem. As we increased the number of hymns in the service, this became less needed, and eventually we began to schedule the hula with an anthem. Sadly, the member then went through surgery, and we haven’t got her back on the calendar.

On the other hand, there is more movement in the service. The candle lighters go back and forth, and we stand and sit for prayers and hymns. We seem to have returned to that balance of stillness and striding that fosters a sense of worship.

Lights

We replaced the lights illuminating the sanctuary and the chancel with brighter LEDs that have a consistent color temperature. That has improved the video quality as well as the experience of worshipers in the room. It also led us to replace our sanctuary projector. The brighter overhead lamps made it much more difficult to read the screen, and the old projector wasn’t bright enough.

On Video a Lot

In 2016, when I began to serve Church of the Holy Cross, I began a video series called What I’m Thinking, a short improvised reflection on the Scripture text for the coming Sunday. That series recently exceeded 350 episodes. That makes one appearance in front of the camera in a week.

On Wednesdays, I’ve continued to offer A Song from Church of the Holy Cross. I began this program to test camera and microphone solutions, but also to provide some music in what I anticipated would be an all-too-musicless pandemic environment.

On one Friday a month, I offer a one hour Community Concert, which includes songs in the public domain (because copyright) and a few original pieces.

And of course on Sunday, I’m there before the cameras with worship. I’d never imagined becoming a televangelist, but I have to admit I’ve become one.

An Ordained Geek Becomes a Televangelist

/ Rev. Eric Anderson / 5 Comments

On March 15, in my Sunday morning sermon to worshipers at Church of the Holy Cross UCC in Hilo, Hawai’i, I said, “When our Board of Deacons meets following worship today, I will recommend that we not meet for worship for at least two weeks. I have already begun planning a worship experience via live video over the Internet in anticipation that we will need to do this at some point. It won’t be what we want. It may not satisfy the thirst of our souls. But we need to satisfy a different thirst first.”

The Board accepted my recommendation. Not long thereafter, Hawai’i Governor David Ige issued a stay-at-home order that prohibited gatherings greater than ten people until the end of April. Church of the Holy Cross shifted to worshiping via streaming video over the Internet, a new endeavor and one with which relatively few of us had any familiarity.

Fortunately, I’d done something like this before when I was on the communications staff of the Connecticut Conference UCC. I also had been producing short pre-recorded videos as part of the church’s life each week for three and a half years.

That gave me some technical background, but I also had to think about reformatting the Sunday service. We simply could not replicate the in-person event. It was irresponsible to bring in the choir to sing. The sermon needed to get shorter. The children’s moment needed to be included, and so a story became the first section of my meditation. Music was still important, but we would have to feel our way into it for practical and copyright awareness reasons.

What are the essentials of worship? A moment to call ourselves into that place… a prayer to bring ourselves to God… reading of Scripture… a story… a message… an invitation to give… a consecration of those gifts… a blessing.

Others will have their own ideas about the essentials I’ve omitted (confession and assurance, for one). This was how I started, and it has turned out to be a good framework.

The next questions were all technical. First, how to share? I wanted to make it as painless as possible for the end user to view and participate in worship. There were several options, boiling down to three major groupings.

One that many churches have used is Facebook Live, a live video option within the social media platform. It offers some limited interaction – rather delayed by processing time – and Facebook is a widely used platform. It was not, however, widely used in my existing congregation. Requiring people to subscribe to a social media service in order to worship seemed like a bad approach.

A second option was a video conferencing application like Zoom or GoToMeeting. This had the strong advantage of offering interaction during the service; lag time exists in these technologies but is usually not noticeable. Although there are in-browser options, the principal players in this field require the end users to download an application. That seemed to me like a significant barrier for people unfamiliar with these technologies.

So I chose the third option: Live streaming over a video distribution service, in this case YouTube. I had an advantage. I’ve had a personal YouTube account long enough that I was already authorized for live streams. That resource was in place. I’d had plenty of practice embedding YouTube players into the web pages of our church site, so people could find us in a familiar interface. Best of all, YouTube has worked hard to be a “visit us and it works” technology. It almost never requires an end user to install anything.

Streaming, however, was not enough. There might be audio or video issues. There might be breakdowns or technical failures. There might simply be people straining to hear from a small computer speaker. Live subtitles didn’t seem practical without special equipment (I’d be willing to be proved wrong about this). I had to provide the texts easily and in advance.

As a result, the worship service text gets posted to a web page, including links to a PDF version of the service so that people can print it and follow along while they keep the YouTube box centered in their screen. I write and post a text for the sermon and pastoral prayer as well, generally early on Sunday morning, so that people with hearing or audio difficulties can follow along. Subscribers to our email newsletter receive the link to the service’s web page on Thursday or Friday, and then again a little over an hour before worship begins. Nobody should have to search very far for the link to the service text and video.

Now it was time to test things. There is a camera in my laptop computer, but I doubted that it would work well (or that the microphone would work well) for worship streaming. One test later, I was on my way to the electronics supply store looking for a better webcam and a long Ethernet cable. With the webcam, a Logitech C922, mounted on a camera tripod I could separate the camera from the computer that controlled everything. It also improved both video and audio quality (with one persistent audio problem I’ll discuss later).

Early tests had showed an undesirable number of freezes and drop-outs. Why? Wifi, of course. The long Ethernet cable immediately evened out the audio and video.

Still eager to test this in a small but “live” environment, I settled on performing a song each Wednesday. So on March 18, I went live for the first time.

The audio quality is… odd. The spoken portion of the video has a fair amount of room echo in it, but by and large it works. During the music, however, the input level rises and falls without rhyme or reason. I would discover that this is a frequent issue on Windows – some process adjusts the sound input levels based on its best guess – but finding it proved to be a more time consuming than I could manage.

We went into our first worship service with this setup: one webcam and built-in microphone feeding into a “Webcam” stream on YouTube Live. We simplified the setting. We placed two chairs on camera, which remained fixed. Participants moved in and out. I stayed on camera for most of the service, a practice we later changed.

Once more, we had issues with sound during the musical performance.

To try to fix that, we turned to better microphones and an audio mixer. It improved things a little, but we still had the curious problem with levels changing by themselves. We reduced the room echo, however, and that was all to the best.

We also brought in a guest preacher via Zoom.

I have to hand it to Zoom: their online help is superb. Setting up an account to stream a Zoom meeting to YouTube is not an easy task, nor is setting up a meeting to be streamed. The instructions they provide, however, are clear and detailed. I did a test (of course) that included the audio mixer (it connects via USB) and Zoom simultaneously. It worked.

And on Palm Sunday, our preacher addressed us from 6,000 miles away.

We also added prelude music that day. Worshipers had told me that they really missed that time of music. It helped them center their spirits. A member recorded a piano performance in audio, and we played it through the board. One of our three-person production team began moving the camera, so it was no longer quite as static. We were slowly adding technical capability as we went.

For Easter Sunday, our piano accompanist offered a video recording of a piano adaptation of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. That meant adding a new level of complexity, because combining pre-recorded video with live video meant using a video switcher. I’d been experimenting tentatively with OBS, which is both powerful and free, but had avoided adding that level of complexity. Well, now we needed it.

Using OBS meant three changes. First, it meant configuring the software for our combination of video and audio inputs. That took some experimentation. Second, it meant switching from YouTube Live’s webcam interface to its stream interface. I was somewhat familiar with that from prior experience, fortunately. Third, it meant that one or two of us would need to be familiar enough with OBS to make the switches happen during the service itself.

We made those changes, and discovered something else: using OBS eliminated the strange changes in audio levels we’d been hearing. I immediately switched to using it for the Wednesday songs as well.

If you’ve lost track, we currently use:

  • A single webcam on a tripod,
  • Two dynamic vocal microphones in mic stands,
  • An analog audio mixer with a USB output, and
  • A laptop computer running OBS using a wired Internet connection.

We have plans. We’re not entirely happy with the video. It’s difficult to move a video camera smoothly. It’s awkward to move one that doesn’t have its own viewfinder. The camera operator has to use a side view of the laptop screen. We have ordered a hardware switcher and have camcorders available. Using their HDMI output, we hope to be able to produce a better looking video. The switcher, however, has been on backorder for weeks and I do not know when this will change.

Finally, I determined to do something different and special for Good Friday. Some years ago I wrote a song based on Psalm 130. I set up several cameras and microphones, recorded several takes, and assembled a final video using the editing software I’ve used for years.

Enjoy.

Gadgets in Gadgets

/ Rev. Eric Anderson / 1 Comment

It’s probably no surprise (given the title of this blog) that I have something of a gadget addiction. It’s not limited to computers or electronic devices, either (though I have an enduring affection for them, despite the fact I spend much of my working day keeping them functioning). I like all sorts of gadgets.

I’m a guitarist and folk musician, which gives me endless opportunities to compare the relative merits of different microphones, pick-ups, mixers, and (yes) capos. I will literally sit and wonder at guitar players who use a capo (that’s the device clamps across the neck to quickly change the key of a song) that has never worked for me.

And let’s not get started on tools. Yes, every project is an excuse to buy a new tool…

My real addiction, however, is to gadgets that you put other gadgets in. What’s more fascinating than laptop briefcases, cell phone holsters, tablet cases, notepad folders, and camera bags?

Oh… camera bags.

I bought my primary camera, a Nikon DSLR, in 2007. I’m still using the same body, but I’m now up to five lenses and a wide angle adapter. I’m also up to four different bags that will hold the camera itself, plus various lens holders, accessory bags, belts, and even a duffle bag designed to put other bags in.

My excuse for all this is that different circumstances demand different equipment, differently available to my hands. My everyday bag is a sling design, which gives me quick access to the camera, flash, memory cards, and lens cleaning supplies. Other lenses are there, well protected, but if I really need them I have to take the bag off. In another situation, I might find myself changing lenses more often, in which case a separate lens case, fastened to the outside of the main bag or hanging from its own strap, might make more sense.

When I need to travel lighter, I use a bag that holds pretty much just the camera with lens attached, with some more places to tuck a flash, batteries, and memory cards. And when I need to haul more gear, there’s the full backpack (with a side opening that means I can get the camera without taking it all the way off) and a belt loaded with equipment loops.

My next one will probably be a relative of a messenger bag; I’m looking for something that will hold camera, one extra lens, plus some recording devices for doing interviews and covering press conferences. And yes, there will be a next one.

The inventiveness of the human species – we marvelous tool makers – is striking in its breadth and variety. My greatest affection belongs to those who create the tools to carry other tools.