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Photos courtesy of Hillcrest Covenant Church.
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A small prayer room was converted into space for video control and an editing suite at the church’s main location.
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James “Sandy” thailing (left) is Director of Media and Information Technology at Hillcrest Covenant Church, Prairie Village, KS.
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With no video team or video tools in place at the start of the project, a system was developed that would require just two or three volunteers (shown here) at the satellite location.
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A volunteer camera operator captures the service that is transmitted to the satellite location.
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After 50 years of serving its community in Prairie Village, Kan., Hillcrest Covenant Church began looking for new ways to reach the community. With an attendance of 1,000, Hillcrest reaches out to two communities through a second remote video campus, both located in the suburbs of Overland Park, Kan. With a seating capacity of 500 at the main campus, they currently reach 900 through two services, and an additional 100 in the Blue Valley area.
But it wasn't always this way. Several years ago, Hillcrest was a single-campus church looking for new ways to reach out. Church leadership had read the book “The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many Locations,” by Warren Bird, Greg Ligon, Geoff Surratt, with a group of people who were attending from the Blue Valley area, 20 minutes away by highway. They were inspired to create a video-venue campus in that area and become a multi-site church.
A year prior to this decision, James “Sandy” Thailing was asked to sit on a committee to evaluate the multi-site movement. Thailing later took a full-time position as director of media and information technology at Hillcrest. “When we first started considering the Blue Valley campus, we tried out the idea of presenting the sermon via video on our regular congregation,” Thailing says. “We videotaped the first service, and then for the second service, simply played back the video. There were some people attending that had no idea they were watching a video.”
From sneaker net …
With the initial conceptual tests successful, the church arranged to rent space in a nearby middle school, and launched its first video campus. Stark Raving Solutions of Lenexa, Kan., was consulted on establishing a video capture system for the church.
“What was unique for Hillcrest was that they had no video tools or team at the start of the project. They needed a system at first that could be run with two or three people,” says Jessica Stark of Stark Raving Solutions, “but then expanded as their needs change and the tech team expands.”
A small prayer room was converted into space for video control and an editing suite. “We designed control systems that didn't require as much counter surface,” Stark explains. “We considered available electrical and the heat capacity of the room—and the small footprint was better all the way around.”
Stark Raving Solutions spec'd three Panasonic AW-HE100 HD PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) cameras with an AQ-RP655N control system; one Ross HD 1ME Crossover switcher with 12 HD-SDI inputs, seven HD-SDI outputs (including three aux outputs); conversion/distribution equipment; playback and recording capability; plus a multiviewer and separate program and preview monitors. “Aux outputs are important for churches in particular, because they allow the switcher operator to send different sources to different destinations,” Stark reports. “For example, one source could go to side screens and an overflow space, while a second source can go to a center screen, and a third output to digital signage.”
Stark continues, “The AW-HE100 cameras have HD-SDI out and a very small form factor. The main sanctuary is an octagon shape and the leadership did not want cameras that would intrude into the space. Also, there was one person who could control the cameras from the control room, but not enough volunteers for manned cameras. The size of the space was small, and they would lose too many seats to manned cameras, camera operators and the camera platforms.” One Panasonic AG-HPX170 manned camera was added to both provide for one in-the-room operator as well as a camera that can be used for video capture outside of the sanctuary.
The switcher is configured to provide a 720p/60fps HDTV video signal that was then captured into a video file on the team's Mac Pro running Final Cut 7 editing software.
With just one technical staff member responsible for two locations, a series of innovative solutions were required.
Initially, the first service at that location was one hour later than the first service at the main campus in Prairie Village. This enabled them to simply use “sneaker net” to transfer the video of the sermon to the Blue Valley campus. “A volunteer would get in their car and deliver a hard-drive and also a DVD as backup to the campus,” explains Thailing.
After some time, however, the main campus decided to change service times and move to two styles of worship. Instead of an 8 a.m. service, the church was creating a 9 a.m. contemporary service, followed by a 10:45 blended service. This meant that transferring the video physically would no longer be feasible.
… to live streaming
Thailing looked into a variety of streaming options and what it would take to support them. With the church accustomed to having high-quality 720p video for the sermon, staff did not want to downgrade the video quality. The main campus upgraded its ISP upload speed to 10 mbps (mega-bits per second), with a dual-channel configuration to keep upload and download bandwidth separate. They also upgraded to a fiber-optic connection to the ISP and ran gigabit Ethernet throughout the main campus. The middle school already had a 90 mbps Internet connection that the church was allowed to use—more than adequate to support the HD video stream.
With assistance from AVI Systems in Lenexa, Mo., the church purchased a Haivision Makito HD 1080p H.264 encoder to create the compressed video stream needed. “The Haivision system was the highest quality solution available at the time for point-to-point streaming with minimal delay,” says Stuart Fedt, project developer for AVI Systems. “Once we understood the requirement of Hillcrest, the only solution that made sense was the Haivision Makito.” With some consulting from AVI Systems, Thailing was able to install the Makito and configure both it and the church's firewall to enable proper operation. He set up the Makito to provide a 720p/60fps feed for the remote campus, and a 480p/30fps lower-bandwidth stream for a feed to the uStream video streaming service for lower-bandwidth on-demand playback.
While it's possible for a client video player to access the video stream directly from the Makito, a media server is necessary if you want to be able to pause the video stream and resume playback at a later time, or to provide access to a stored version of the stream in the future. Thailing initially chose QuickTime Media Server (QTSS) to provide access to the video stream for the remote campus. The plan was that the remote campus would pause the stream on the receiving end right before the start of the sermon at the main campus, and then resume playback when they were ready to start presenting the message at the remote campus. However, frustrations quickly mounted when they needed to pause the stream for more than a couple of minutes—which would oftentimes cause the audio or video to drop out when playback was resumed.
Then, at one point, the school's IT department decided to restrict access to the school's wired network—only the guest Wi-Fi network could be used by the church. And the stream provided by the QTSS became more problematic over this lower-bandwidth network access.
A consultation with streaming specialist Ian Beyer, “chief everything officer” of Nerd Herd Inc. in Overland Park, Kan., resulted in a new media server approach.
“Hillcrest was using QuickTime Streaming Server and was unhappy with the results,” states Beyer. “I'd been using Wowza Media Server for several years by that point and really liked the product. In this case, Wowza offered a better streaming experience and also integrated seamlessly with their existing Haivision encoder system.” Additionally, Wowza's network DVR (nDVR) capability enabled them to pause the service stream for as long as needed without the issues of video or audio dropout they experienced with QTSS. Nerd Herd also configured the Wowza server and nDVR for the church, which was able to run on an available Mac Mini running OSX Server.
"Ninety-five percent of what happens on a Sunday morning is run by volunteers."
James "Sandy" Thailing
Director of Media and Information Technology, Hillcrest Covenant Church, Prairie Village, KS
“The Wowza Media Server has been great,” Thailing reports. “The only time we've had a failure is when the building lost power.”
Audio for video
The actual video stream is only half of the media, however. Audio is equally important to video streaming.
“Initially, we just took the front of house (FOH) output of the room's audio console and used that for the audio component of the video stream,” says Thailing. However, the FOH feed is mixed to support the live presence in the auditorium, and isn't what will sound good when it's the only sound source like in a video stream. “We then upgraded the FOH console to a PreSonus StudioLive system, which enables us to mix an Aux send for the video feed remotely via an iPad app. However, this required the use of laptops connected to the audio consoles, which aren't always available,” Thailing continues. So Hillcrest has plans to add a separate mixer to create the dedicated broadcast audio mix. “Sound mixing for broadcast is something we need to get better at. With more people watching the entire service online, the sound mix for music is becoming more critical,” he adds.
Multi-generational teamwork
Thailing is the only full-time tech staff member at Hillcrest Covenant Church, and like most churches, relies heavily on volunteers to make each weekend's service happen. “Ninety-five percent of what happens on a Sunday morning is run by volunteers,” he states. “I have about 40-45 members on the tech team, and I try to schedule them [so] that they serve one Sunday per month—sometimes two.”
Originally, Thailing required that a volunteer be at least 15-16 years old. However, over time he reevaluated this requirement. His daughter started serving when she was 12 years old, and at this point, he has team members ranging from 11 years old up to almost 70.
Through this relaxing of the age requirements, an interesting thing happened. One young boy who was running camera on Sunday mornings kept hinting to his father that he should come and try serving on the tech team. The father acquiesced, and found that he enjoyed it, as well as the opportunity to serve in the same ministry with his son. “They now serve at church together in a way that the father never imagined they could. We now have several parent and children teams,” Thailing says. “It's become a great team to serve on together as a family.”
There are some challenges with utilizing younger children, Thailing admits. “Sometimes they just need to leave in the middle of service to use the bathroom,” he laughs. “And sometimes they need extra help at the manned camera, and I need to come out and help them with the controls.”
He continues, “I find that the boys are often too fidgety to run the manned camera, and that the girls have better focus for that role. On the other hand, the time the boys spend on video games makes using the joystick-controlled PTZ cameras a natural fit.”
Through careful selection of technologies and creative technical team recruitment, Hillcrest is now able to reach more of its community for Christ.
