Reprinted from the July 2009 issue of Church Production Magazine
Understanding IMAG
What churches need to consider as they contemplate image magnification.
Image magnification, or IMAG, is the live transmission of a video image to a screen with the goal of generating a larger-than-life image of the natural object of an audience's vision. The point is to allow audience members, especially those sitting near the back of an auditorium or other space, a detailed view of a presenter that their eyes would not otherwise perceive. In a church, a typical IMAG application will involve several live cameras trained on the pastor and the choir or band, a video switcher, plus at least one projector and large screen. Facial expressions are an important factor in conveying a point, signaling a joke, or transmitting any emotion. For many churchgoers, these crucial subtleties are some of the key reasons they attend a live service rather than simply listen to a sermon on the radio or read a pastor's book. But the larger a live audience grows, the more likely it is that a significant portion of the members will be unable to grasp the visual subtleties of a pastor's sermon. As the cost of video equipment falls almost across the board, more churches are adopting, or at least considering, IMAG in order to serve their congregation members better — especially those in the back rows.
Consider that the back row of any sanctuary is often filled by those who are new to the church. They might not know to show up earlier for Sunday services, or they might feel more comfortable near the exits. In either case, holding the attention of these audience members should be a major concern. If the back row can't grasp your pastor's dry wit — or absorb his infectious positivity — based on his vocal inflection alone, they might feel alienated.
Who needs IMAG?
So how does a church determine whether its sanctuary needs some sort of image magnification of the pastor and musicians? According to church media consultant Anthony Coppedge, there's no mathematical formula. "Clearly if you're four thousand, five thousand, six thousand seats, it's a given," he says. "But—I've seen churches that are 800 that could use IMAG based on the layout of their room. I've seen churches that are 1,500 that don't even need it."
Steve Reed, senior consultant and vice president with Acoustic Dimensions in Dallas, Tex., agrees. He describes two forms of room layout, "presentational" and "community-oriented." Presentational rooms have straight seating rows, and the pastor doesn't move around the stage too much. Community-oriented rooms have wrap-around seating. "The room might not be that large, but they lose the connection to the pastor, not being able to see his face," says Reed. "While that might be a smaller room, we would think that for a room like that it would be pretty important to have IMAG, just so there's connectivity between the person speaking and everyone else."
But what if your sanctuary's size and shape seem to put it on the fence for IMAG? Coppedge suggests two things. First, listen to feedback. "You're going to hear the anecdotal stuff," he says. "You know, 'Since we built this building I just can't see the pastor like I used to.'" Second, have lay leaders and staff members sit in the back row during services and see what they experience. (Media team members can be biased toward acquiring more and better technical gear, according to Coppedge, so don't consider them an objective source regarding IMAG needs.) Because of the cost and effort involved, Coppedge advises that churches avoid IMAG unless they truly need it and they're willing to do it correctly. That means making it compelling, with multiple camera positions in order to keep the pastor square to the camera as he moves, and actually magnifying the subjects. Without multiple cameras, the only options are seasickness-inducing camera movement and zooming, or a single wide shot that covers everything but doesn't magnify anything. "My joke for that is it's de-magnification," Coppedge says.
With seven thousand seats, Prestonwood Baptist Church's Main Campus worship center falls into the category of sanctuaries that clearly need IMAG. The Plano, Texas, church also has a new campus 17 miles north, in Prosper, that seats fifteen hundred. For Coppedge, this new North Campus location would be an IMAG “maybe” based on its seating capacity. For Reed and Acoustic Dimensions, it was a “definite” based on its wide fan shape. The North Campus's connection to the Main Campus of the megachurch certainly sealed the deal for IMAG: It's serving as a video venue for the campus in Plano.
The Prosper campus also hosts the pastor live for some services. When the North Campus is serving as a video venue for Plano, a center screen shows a lockdown shot from Plano of the pastor, while two side screens display the IMAG shots that are also shown at the Main Campus. When there's a live speaker in the North Campus, the screens show close-up IMAG shots from within the room, as captured by four standard-def Ikegami HK-387W cameras that were handed down when the Main Campus did its HD upgrade.
IMAG Elements
To achieve IMAG-friendly tight shots from the back of Prestonwood's North Campus sanctuary, the media team relies on expensive glass in the form of Canon Digi Super 70X zoom lenses mounted on those four Ikegami camera heads, which in turn sit on broadcast-quality Vinten tripods.
That level of zoom might be a bit of overkill for a room that seats fifteen hundred, but 20X and 40X are often necessary. At that zoom ratio, a lens can easily cost as much — if not twice as much — as the camera to which it's attached. A session with a consultant might be necessary to determine the level of zoom that your sanctuary requires for IMAG purposes.
Coppedge and Reed agree that at minimum, a church needs to deploy at least three cameras for an IMAG application to function properly. For certain applications, such as transmission to an overflow room or capturing services for posterity, a single camera might cut it. But for the task of magnifying the pastor as he moves around the stage, one is simply not enough. With multiple cameras, of course, come the requisite video switcher and trained personnel able to operate all the professional-level equipment.
With all that gear and training in mind, IMAG starts to look very expensive. And it is. Coppedge estimates that at an absolute minimum — meaning a small church with limited distances — the startup cost for doing IMAG is about $75,000. "You're just getting started and there are things you're not doing at that point," he says. To folks like Reed and the clients he's used to working with, that figure looks rather small. He says that the advent of more affordable studio-controllable cameras in recent years has pushed down the startup costs significantly.
Reed mentions JVC, which manufactures the HD200 and HD250 ProHD cameras, two low five-figure models that both can be configured with CCUs, or camera control units. With CCUs set up, a shader—a live person—can then control the iris and black levels of the cameras from a remote location while the camera person handles the framing, the zoom, and the focus. Chris Hinkle, director of media for Prestonwood Baptist Church North, explains why this is important for IMAG. "You want to keep all the cameras on the same level, make sure one's not brighter than the other," he says. "A pastor wearing a gray suit, make sure it doesn't look like he's wearing a dark gray suit instead of a light gray suit." Remote control of a group of cameras' finer parameters can ensure that there's no jarring change as the shot switches from camera one to camera two.
Attempting to do IMAG on the cheap can have some even more dire consequences than mismatched colors. Even if a church has the correct number of cameras to capture tight, uniform-looking shots for IMAG, latency is a common pitfall that results from weak links in the video signal chain. Frames of latency are added to a video system every time there's an analog-to-digital conversion (or vice versa), a FireWire connection, or an instance of scaling a signal from one resolution to another. All of these add up to a truly distracting effect: the pastor raises his arms, and a third of a second later, his video doppelganger does the same. A systems integrator can, of course, help your church avoid these weak links.
Making It All Work
To add to all the camera-related items I've discussed, there are also, of course, projectors to consider. There is also video lighting and sometimes theatrical lighting, which both compete with the projector's lamp. "We typically try to do rear projection because you can get higher contrast ratios when there are higher [light] levels in the room," says Reed.
For proper IMAG, you need at least a good basic lighting setup. High brightness is not as important as evenness. "You're really going to need to have nice, even, smooth lighting, minimum 80 foot candles — 80 to100 across," says Coppedge. "That tends to be a pretty good range for video lighting for front lighting." Reed and Coppedge bothstress the importance of backlighting. "Backlighting is critical, just to make sure the image stands out from what's behind it," Reed says. "So it doesn't look like they're flat up against what's behind them." Coppedge also recommends low-intensity kicker lights that cover from below the areas under the chin and the eyes. This is all pretty elementary stuff for a lighting designer, but the church itself will have to make some tough decisions about its priorities. Lighting for broadcast is similar to lighting for IMAG, but both of these are quite different from theatrical lighting. Theatrical lighting often involves deep, saturated colors that don't look great on camera. So the church has to decide which takes precedence on a given Sunday or holiday: the look of what's on stage, or the look of the video as it plays above the stage (or later, as a broadcast or as a DVD)? Other tough decisions stem from a church's broadcasting needs. For IMAG, a video team will never need to capture wide shots of the audience: for churchgoers, it's simply redundant. For broadcast, these shots are sometimes necessary. If a church is planning to do both IMAG and broadcast, the media team will need to determine how these divergent requirements might be served. Is a separate switcher—or at least a second switcher output—necessary? For live broadcast, it probably is. "But now as a director I'm doing two different things," says Coppedge, "so that takes a pretty good amount of talent, training, and the right kind of gear to do that." For taped broadcast, one camera might be devoted to recording wide shots for later insertion into a program for broadcast. Again, it's all about priorities. As if all these choices weren't intimidating enough,, Coppedge emphasizes that to do IMAG well, your media team needs some options to put on screen besides the standard tight IMAG shots. "If I have to do IMAG it means I'm not doing something more effective," he says, citing text treatments, graphics, and pre-edited video programs. "I think that more often than not, there's way more compelling material than a talking head. There are times you can make beautiful art on those screens with video. You really can." But for most churches, the bottom line is the pastor's message. And if that's not being conveyed properly to the sanctuary's back row, image magnification might figure into your church's future.
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.