Mars Hill Church in Seattle is a church of about 10,000 people spanning 11 campuses across several states. But it didn't start out that way. It began like most churches, with one location and an expanding congregation that was pushing the physical boundaries of the facility.
“The building we owned seated about 1,200,” says Jeff VanderGiessen, director of project development at Mars Hill. “It was full, and we were at the point of having to turn people away. We bought a building about a block north and were going to expand the existing campus by adding a second venue there, but we got caught up in permitting and dealing with approvals. The city wouldn't allow a church to be built that was larger than we already had. So it was either start remote campuses at remote locations, or we would have to send people away.”
Not satisfied with the latter solution, Mars Hill launched its first remote campus at the Shoreline area of Seattle, north of the existing Ballard campus. “We had a pretty strong contingent of committed members who had been coming down from the North,” VanderGiessen says. “So we started the campus at a Christian school in Shoreline who let us use their space for free for a few years. So this was a really low-cost experiment that was very successful.”
And while the experiment did turn into a successful model for growth at Mars Hill, it wasn't smooth sailing right from the start. The church felt that asking a group of people to watch the sermon via video would be enough of a potential barrier to acceptance. They didn't want to add another barrier of it being the previous week's sermon as well. Therefore, a primary goal was to deliver the sermon live via video—a significant challenge when budget dollars are tight.
“It was tough,” VanderGiessen concedes. “We absolutely did not have the experience to do something like this technically, and we didn't have the money to pay someone to tell us how to do it. So we had to figure it out ourselves. It's a good thing the initial core was a very committed group of people.”
INTERNET TRANSMISSION
The church's first implementation of providing live video was through the Internet. Staff leased multiple T1 lines (an Internet connection providing dedicated 1.5 Mbps upload and download speeds) to achieve a higher total bandwidth. The broadcast video signal would be fed into an encoding system from Streambox, and then into a multiplexing system that spread the high-bit rate video signal over the multiple T1 lines. At the remote campus, a de-multiplexer reconstructs the video signal from the multiple T1 lines, passes it into a video decoder, and then into the video system in the auditorium.
“The biggest problem we had is the network connection wasn't a direct link,” VanderGiessen says. “It went through numerous telecommunications companies. There were a lot of hand-offs, and when we had problems, there was a lot of finger-pointing between companies. There was no one company that would own the problem. It was a really rough experience, with lots of drop-outs. We operated that way for about a year, and it was pretty miserable. But people kept coming back, because it wasn't merely about the sermon—it was about the community that was created at the campus.”
SATELLITE TRANSMISSION
When Mars Hill explored adding a second remote campus, it became clear that paying for multiple dedicated T1 lines to each campus would not scale well financially, and they started exploring other options. Still desiring to keep the sermons live, they chose to switch to satellite transmission. After spending time with the technical team at Lifechurch.tv, they chose the same satellite provider, TBC Integration in Laguna Beach, Calif., to serve Mars Hill Church.
“We installed a 2.4 meter uplink dish at the main campus, and 1.8 meter downlink dishes at each remote campus,” VanderGiessen explains. “It was much more reliable, but it was a very complex system. You need to have the staff with the expertise in order to execute it well. We contracted a lot of that out, and it worked well, but it had its own issues with portable campuses.”
The video signal goes into an encoder to compress the video signal into MPEG-4. The encoded video signal and the audio signal are then fed to a modulator, which combines the two signals and modulates it into the frequency range assigned to the church by the satellite service provider. From the modulator it passes on to an amplifier, and then out to the dish for transmission to the satellite. However, as this is a shared service with specific time slots assigned to each customer, you can't just fire it up whenever you want.
“Before we could bring it up we would have to call the satellite provider and get clearance to come up,” explains VanderGiessen. “The satellite provider would instruct us on how to adjust the signal to make sure it was just right for optimum transmission.”
While signal reliability was greatly improved, it didn't work so well for the portable campuses due to dish size, and bad weather would add another level of problems. “When it snowed, we'd have to send guys out there with brooms to try to keep the snow off the dish—otherwise the signal would cut out,” says VanderGiessen.
“We had a couple of big windstorms come through that knocked the dishes out of alignment,” adds Matthew Josey, A/V/L systems engineer at Mars Hill. “Everyone at the campus had to know how to do the alignment for emergency situations, and it's not the easiest of tasks—you have to know what you are doing. We're in an environment with a very small staff, and [we] rely on volunteers a lot. It was just too much to ask a volunteer crew to handle.
“On the downlink side, we wanted to do time-slip, and this was before there was a cheap time-slip device,” he continues. “We were recording to consumer-grade DVD burner devices, which wasn't great. Then we switched to a Doremi recording and playback device, which was really expensive, but we needed that ability, and it led to its own complexities which was a lot to ask volunteers to handle.”
MOVING TO A ONE-WEEK DELAY
With the launching of the Albuquerque, N.M., campus in a different time zone, aligning service times between two time zones to enable live transmission to New Mexico was an issue. And the complexities of satellite transmission were wearing on the staff and volunteer teams.
“After coming through all that pain, we came to a place where we just wanted it to be really simple,” states VanderGiessen. “We wanted to be able to focus on creating more seats for people to hear the Gospel instead of focusing on the technology.”
At this point, Mars Hill made the decision to go to a one-week delay for all remote campuses, and completely eliminate the complexities of transmitting the sermon live.
“We explained to the church that it's expensive, complicated and very restrictive to do things live, and that we wanted to go to a one-week delay at the remote campuses,” says VanderGiessen. After anticipating a lot of pushback on the idea, the change actually went unnoticed by many. “After several weeks being on the one-week delay, people were asking, ‘So, when are you going to switch to the delay?' Yeah, we did that already!”
Mars Hills' production sequence is now much simpler, and gives church staff the flexibility to edit and clean up the sermon video before the remote campuses see it.
“On Sundays we capture three camera feeds using Red Digital film cameras,” describes VanderGiessen, “and produce the sermon video on Monday or Tuesday. We produce a 1080p AVCHD file at an 8 Mbps variable bit rate, which makes the file about two and a half gigs, and create an ISO image of a Blu-Ray movie disc to send to the remote campuses. We use dropbox.com to transfer the file—it takes about four to six hours to upload. The remote campuses just burn that ISO image to a DVD-R disc, and we use Pioneer BDP-V6000 Blu-Ray players for playback, which can read a Blu-Ray ISO file from DVD media. It looks absolutely flawless and it's bullet proof for volunteers.” Mac Minis or MacBooks are used as backup playback devices in case there's an issue with the Blu-Ray player on Sunday.
STANDARDIZATION OF EQUIPMENT
Keeping training needs to a minimum is also a desire at Mars Hill, and the staff accomplishes this by trying to standardize equipment as much as possible.
“All of our campuses use volunteers in every aspect of live production,” Josey explains. “If a volunteer needs to move from one campus to another, we want them to be familiar with the user interface that is in front of them (sound board, lighting console, video switcher, etc.), and not have to re-train them. This also allows for groups of campuses to get together and have combined training that would be applicable across multiple campuses, thereby making the training more effective. Another big reason we standardize equipment is for any telephone troubleshooting we may have to do. With standardized equipment we know how it should be hooked up and can talk through most problems via telephone.
“We realize that one piece of equipment does not work in every venue,” Josey continues. “Each time we do a system design, we seriously look at the equipment standards and evaluate if the equipment we have selected will do the job well. For instance, in a 1,000-seat venue, chances are high that you will have a large band, so you don't want a 32-channel console; but a 32-channel console may work well in a 300-seat venue.”
For audio consoles, Mars Hill uses the Roland M-400 V-Mixer for the portable venues; a Yamaha M7CL for mid-sized venues, and a Soundcraft Vi series for the larger venues. d&b audiotechnik is spec'd for loudspeakers when budget allows, and Sennheiser wireless is used for both microphones and in-ear monitoring.
For video switching, the church is moving to Analog Way switchers for all venues, and using Panasonic DLP projectors for projection.
For lighting, Mars Hill has standardized around the Jands Vista series lighting consoles, with Leprecon LDS-610 dimmers. Elation LED fixtures are also being integrated into the campuses.
WORDS OF WISDOM
So what advice does VanderGiessen and Josey have to offer churches looking to add remote campuses to their church?
“The biggest thing, honestly, is connecting with other churches that are doing it well,” states VanderGiessen. “Find a church that's doing what you want to do, or several churches that do things in a variety of ways, and talk to them about how they do what they do. The NAB and InfoComm shows are helpful, but find churches that are a few steps ahead of you and hang out with them, buy them lunch, and just talk about what works and what doesn't. That's been the most helpful for us, and what we encourage others to do. You can pay consultants to do all the design work, but you often end up with something that isn't really what you need. Get educated on equipment and techniques that are working for people. We've been able to meet a lot of guys through the Church Technical Director Roundtable forums (www.ctdrt.com)—that's been a great place to connect.”
“The other thing I would caution about is not to go multi-site just for the sake of going to multi-site,” adds Josey. “Going multi-site is difficult, it increases the work load, and will probably require a staff hire, so make sure the reasons for going multi-site are good, because it's a lot of work.”
