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The Edge is an 850-seat video venue at North Coast Church’s Vista, Calif., campus that provides an “edgier” musical experience.
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On Sundays, North Coast’s satellite congregation in Carlsbad, Calif., views the sermon from the Saturday night service at the central Vista campus.
The advent of affordable digital cameras and projectors—and of new media-replication and data-transmission technologies—has opened up all types of avenues for churches looking to extend the reach of their live-in-person Sunday message. For some it has meant easy, cheap distribution of DVDs to shut-ins, and many ministries now use the technology to deploy their message to the virtual world of the Internet. Those are two ways to reach individuals in their homes, but that sort of outreach fails to replicate the communal faith experience of attending a live service with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of fellow travelers.
In 1998 North Coast Church in Vista, Calif., decided it wanted to offer more than just a traditional overflow room with a video feed when its congregation grew too big for the first room it was renting in the industrial warehouse facility it calls home. The concept North Coast devised became known as a “video venue”: a room that hosts a live church service with its own live music and teachers, but with a sermon that’s either previously recorded or broadcasted live. But to convince potential attendees that they weren’t getting a second-class experience, North Coast decided the video venue needed to offer something unique. “One of the reward elements we offered is a different worship experience,” says Dennis Choy, communications, technology and production pastor with North Coast Church. The video venue hosted an acoustic version of the main live venue’s contemporary worship band.
Technology’s Reach
As a pioneer of the video venues concept in the late 1990s, North Coast was perhaps not as technologically ambitious as a facility with a larger budget may have been. The church’s production team taped the Saturday night sermon of Senior Pastor Larry Osborne with a Canon XL1 DV camera and, using a small Sony MiniDV tape deck, replayed the sermon for the Sunday morning crowd in the video venue on a large projection screen. Meanwhile, the main live venue was viewing Osborne live. The shot of Osborne was relatively static. Choy says the camera sits on a tripod, and a camera operator simply pans left and right to keep the pastor in frame.
A little tighter than a medium shot, it captures the pastor from the knees up. This simple technique became known as the “video venue shot,” according to Choy. “When we started this, churches across the country really pushed back hard on that. ‘You gotta have more than one camera; it doesn’t work that way,’” he recalls hearing at the time. “But those churches now have taken that same idea and done the static HD shot.” For North Coast and other churches that employ the video venue shot, the single-camera, nearly static shot is the best way to recreate the experience of being in a room with the pastor as he or she delivers a sermon.
North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., is a large church that has adopted the concept and amplified it. In 1998 the church already had an overflow room, with a live video feed and a separate worship band and producers talking to each other on headsets to synch the main sanctuary to the overflow room. When Pastor Andy Stanley started speaking, the overflow room’s screen would display the same image that’s projected in the main auditorium on two side screens for IMAG purposes.
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Trevor Boyer is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He likes to write professional A/V and video production stories (like this one) that can be reported via subway travel.
Quick-links
ADVC-1000 video card,
(Buckhead Church and Browns Bridge Community Church satellite locations) Alpharetta, Ga.
www.northpoint.org | 678-892-5000
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