The website is www.TheaterChurch.com, the slogan is “One Church, Four Locations,” and they minister to the people of Washington, DC in theaters and public venues located at Union Station, Ballston Common Mall, Ebenezers Coffeehouse and Georgetown.
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt created Washington’s Union Station four blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building by signing legislation that stated: "An act of congress to create a Union Station, and for other purposes." More than a century later, this elegant rail station and regional transportation center is also serving God's purposes through the ministry of National Community Church, which held its first public service in the movie theaters at Union Station in 1996.
National Community Church uses video technology to convey the message portion of some services, although most services have a live speaker: the head pastor or a campus pastor. This technology ensures that everyone hears the same message, but also so each location has a unique environment and community that we proudly embrace.
To share the pastor’s message, the church invested in easy-to-use and cost-effective technologies. The pastor’s sermon is recorded on Saturday evening and distributed to the smaller local services on Sunday.
A ceiling-mounted Canon XL H1 camera feeds a Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Extreme capture card into Mac Pro computer running Final Cut Pro using the DVCPRO HD codec. The audio output is mixed down and recorded to the video track via the XLR inputs on the Blackmagic Design DeckLink Extreme HD card.
The final video file is edited and transferred to multiple hard drives (RAID 0 and eSata) and then transported to each of remote location for Sunday morning services. National Community Church uses ProPresenter from RenewedVision to present all media. This allows for easy point-and-click operation of all media elements from videos to graphics to song lyrics, played from the external hard drive.
Each remote location has a Mac G5 or Mac Pro equipped with a Blackmagic DeckLink HD Extreme card. These cards have a high-quality component output that connect to Panasonic PT-DW7000U-K 6,000-Lumen projectors. The Mac computers are rack mounted in mobile carts for easy set up, and tear down, and storage at the different theatres and facilities where the church holds its services.
In describing the Blackmagic video cards, Media Pastor, Dave Clark says, “The prices were much better than other products we evaluated, and we really like the excellent customer support we always get from Blackmagic Design.”
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Dave Clark, media pastor at National Community Church in Washington, DC for contributing this article.
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