Lives Changed By Christ (LCBC): That goal is at the heart of LCBC Church in Manheim, Pa., formed 25 years ago by a group of Christian men and women who saw a multitude of churches in the area not reaching people for Christ. With “others” as their focus, they formed LCBC to reach both the un-churched and de-churched (those burned by/fed up with the church) in their community. And they have been quite successful in this goal—they now minister to over 10,000 people each week.
Like most churches, their facility space is finite. It can only grow so large and hold so many people. “When we were approaching the limits of our campus six years ago, we prayerfully contemplated what the next steps would be,” says Ryan Geesaman, video production director at LCBC. “We didn't feel that God was done with us yet. There were more people needing to be introduced to Christ.”
With no room to add on, they explored other options for growth. The elder board researched how other churches were handling this, visiting churches such as Willow Creek in South Barrington, Ill., and North Point in Atlanta, both successful with the multisite campus concept. Through this process, they wanted to be certain that the multisite plan not only worked, but would work well for them.
LCBC staff has now launched two satellite campuses over the past four years, one in nearby Harrisburg, and another in Lancaster City. Through the process, they decided that their approach was to be one church in multiple locations. “To us,” Geesaman adds, “this means that as much as possible, the experience of attending church at any of our campuses would be identical.”
The worship portions of the service, while identical in song selection, are performed live at each campus. The message is videotaped Saturday evening in HD with a lock-down camera capturing a fixed full-body shot of the pastor. The video is then transferred to the satellite campuses for playback Sunday morning. Stage design is consistent between campuses, within the constraints that the physical spaces put on them.
Each campus, however, is a different size, with different resources. And at Christmas, when LCBC wants to take things up a notch, the constraint of implementing the same theme in different rooms presents numerous additional challenges.
Christmas Service Plans
“At Christmas, we have many more visitors, and we want to take that opportunity to show those in our community [who are] attending LCBC for the first time what our church is like every weekend,” says Geesaman. “So our Christmas service is basically the same as our weekend service—we just add some ‘wow' factor into our Christmas Eve service.”
He continues, “We've done a variety of things in the past to spice things up. We've turned the stage into a Christmas tree farm; we've made a low-resolution video wall behind the stage, etc. For this year, we want to return to the idea of a video backdrop, but do it better.” And with their mission statement in mind, they needed to do it at three campuses, each with different stage configurations and limitations.
At their main Manheim campus that has the largest stage of the three locations, for example, they decided to project onto the location's 28-foot by 65-foot white cyclorama (cyc) curtain. LCBC looked to see what options they already had in-house for projecting onto such a large surface, and realized that they had nothing. Byron Hamm, LCBC's technical director, did some research and came up with two Barco FLM R22+ 22,000-lumen projectors to rent. The projectors were hung from the catwalks, and DVI-to-fiber converters were needed to get the video signal from the booth to the projectors. Renewed Vision's ProPresenter, the church's standard media presentation software across all three campuses, was used for running the video backdrop. To merge the images from the two projectors into one seamless extra-wide image, they used the edge-blending module in ProPresenter, which the church says provided excellent results. Edge-blending is the process of modifying and cross-fading the images so that where they overlap, the images are in line, and the cross-fade between projectors results in consistent brightness across the entire image.
Part of the stage design for the Christmas service included “snow banks” on the stage. These are theatrical set pieces located next to the video screens. However, allowing the projectors' video output to hit the snow banks would ruin the effect of the stage design. Geesaman's team used ProPresenter's masking feature to crop the video along the bottom edge, following the contours of the snow bank, to prevent light from the projectors from hitting the set.
Once their video plan came together for the Manheim campus, they needed to replicate the concept across the other two campuses. At the Harrisburg campus, the stage is very shallow, with no room to either front- or rear-project video onto any sort of screen. The best option for Harrisburg was to bring three flat-panel televisions (two 52-inch and one 63-inch Samsung) over from the Manheim campus and suspend them on trussing. A Matrox TripleHead2Go box was used to get the video to the three screens.
The TripleHead2Go allows connection to three separate display systems running at the same resolution, and presents those to the computer as one display that has triple the horizontal resolution. If you have three monitors or projectors running at 1,024x768, the TripleHead2Go will appear to the computer as a video display with a resolution of 3,072x768. This greatly simplifies managing your video output.
To save money, LCBC chose to run the video for the backdrops from the stage instead of the production booth. This eliminated the need to purchase more video extenders.
One challenge the church staff ran into with this implementation is the TripleHead2Go unit requires a “real” DVI connection to the computer—the newer Apple mini DisplayPort system wasn't supported by the DVI version of TripleHead2Go that LCBC owned. A computer needed to be located that had the required DVI video output connector.
At the Lancaster City campus, more stage depth was available which opened up using projectors and a video screen. A Da-Lite 10.5-foot by 18-foot video screen was set up for the backdrop, and the LCBC staff set up a rear-projection system using an existing projector. With only one projector being used, they were able to take the output straight from ProPresenter and run it directly to the projector through an Extron VGA-over-CAT5 extender.
The Service Flow
The video background walls were used to add visual depth and “eye candy” to the stage through the use of motion backgrounds and still images, with many of the motion backgrounds coming from Digital Juice. For their opening musical number, a contemporary version of “The Little Drummer Boy” set to a “Stomp”-like percussive style, multiple motion backgrounds were used, with each being tailor-fit to the specific part of the song it was used for. The percussive elements were performed not only on drum kits, but numerous people playing trash cans spread throughout each of the auditoriums, enveloping the attendees with sound.
The attendees were then welcomed to the church with a special emphasis on greeting newcomers, followed by two more contemporary arrangements of traditional Christmas songs, all accompanied by motion backgrounds that match the mood and pace of the songs.
After an abbreviated offering and announcement time, the church celebrated the missions work in which it participated earlier in the year through the children's ministry, youth ministry, and adult ministries with a video showing highlights of the different programs that were implemented.
The theme of the Christmas message was based on the prodigal son, and how Christ came to seek out and save the lost. Video was used to introduce the message through a comedic drama skit the church produced in a “Modern Family” style of production, showing a family reaction to a wedding ring being lost while baking Christmas sweets.
Following the message, LCBC staff stepped out of their comfort zone and planned a rap song, “Just Come Home,” originally done by South Carolina satellite-structured Newspring Church. “We're always interested in seeing what ideas or material may already be available,” states Executive Pastor of Worship and Arts Andy Martin. “If there's something good out there that fits what we're trying to do, why reinvent the wheel?”
Rap isn't a genre that the church normally performs, but by searching through LCBC's membership and utilizing connections outside of LCBC they were able to find three rappers that could pull off the song with quality for each of the campuses.
Getting it Done
Although a large church by any standards, LCBC has chosen to remain volunteer-driven as much as possible. Staff support across all three campuses includes four on the video team; a technical director over three technicians whose primary skill is audio; and a lighting director. This team trains a group of volunteers to cover many of the technical functions needed to execute the church's services. “Some churches move to all staff by this point, with the argument being better quality and consistency,” says Martin. “However, we are getting great results utilizing volunteers by providing solid staff leadership and training, saving thousands in the budget for salaries.”
Video of the pastor is recorded using Doremi 3D digital video recorders, with one channel of the 3D video recording the HD lockdown shot, and the other channel recording an up-converted version of the SD IMAG side-screens. The 3D recorder is ideal for this application, even though 3D video isn't what is being recorded. A 3D recorder is designed to record two video signals (left eye and right eye) keeping them perfectly in sync. The hard drives are then transferred to the satellite campuses via sneaker-net (i.e., driving/walking them to each campus), and played back via another Doremi deck.
“We've tried other options before,” states Geesaman, “but getting the two separate videos to play back in perfect sync was always a huge problem. When the Doremi devices came down to an affordable price, we made the move, and the video is now always in sync.”
To facilitate making the best use of volunteer and staff talent, equipment brands are standardized as much as is reasonable so that when a volunteer is trained on a position at one campus, they can also be productive at the other campuses without retraining.
Yamaha digital mixers are the standard across all the campuses, with PM1Ds at FOH and monitors at the Manheim campus. At the satellite campuses, M7CLs serve at FOH, and monitor mixing is handled by Aviom personal monitor mixers with Yamaha LS9s sub-mixing channels down to the Aviom's 16-input channels.
For lighting, the main campus has been using MA Lighting's GrandMA lighting console for its ability to work with large numbers of conventional and intelligent fixtures. The satellite campuses used ETC Express consoles, recently upgrading to the ETC Ion as they added LED and intelligent lighting to their arsenal.
Looking Back
It's always good to look back at what you've accomplished and see what could have been done better. Geesaman comments that during the first few services at the Manheim campus, the video playback out of ProPresenter was somewhat stilted. Through a little research they realized that they created their background videos at too low a compression setting, and re-rendering them at a higher compression setting cleared up the playback. “It would have been nice to have figured that out earlier,” comments Geesaman.
