It's not that Calvary Spokane no longer needs professional sound engineers and lighting designers to help them deliver powerful worship services with exceptional sound, engaging lighting and media—they just need them much less often. Decisions that the church's young worship leaders have made about production technology are allowing them to do more for themselves, as well as allowing them to better apply their interns and volunteers. If you ask them how they are doing it, they'll tell you it's simple.
The team's plan is about employing powerful technology that's carefully chosen to be easy to use and efficient. The approach reflects the attitude of a new generation of tech-savvy musicians who have entered Calvary Spokane's ministry internship program and are charged with facilitating a very busy production schedule.
Calvary Spokane delivers two Sunday services and a Thursday night service for an active congregation using several praise teams with two live Internet broadcasts each week. In addition, they produce CDs and DVDs of the events, a weekly radio show, support a dynamic website, and regularly host visiting praise bands and worship events. It's easy to see why the systems they implement must be of the highest quality, but also easy for interns and volunteers to operate on a day-to-day basis.
An all-inclusive history
The campus of Calvary Spokane is located in a re-purposed mall. Its 1,600-seat sanctuary serves about 2,000 of a total congregation of nearly 4,000 at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Sunday services. The sanctuary is flanked by a busy family center that can seat roughly 400, a common gathering area and youth stage, each just under 200, and second floor children's rooms.
As Calvary Spokane's young musicians and interns became more engaged in the church productions, church staff realized that the sanctuary's aging 56-channel analog console presented a formidable challenge for them, as well as for training volunteers. For many years, the church had resorted to hiring professional engineers to operate the console on Sunday mornings. In early 2011, however, the team decided to remake the sound system into something that could be more easily managed by volunteers, while maintaining outstanding quality.
Audio professional Darrell Smith of Newbury Park, Calif.-based Kungpow Production was called in to replace a massive analog console with a Soundcraft Vi1 Digital Live Sound Console, Compact Stagebox and network infrastructure—with a budget of $40,000.
The Vi1 provides an intuitive mix surface and powerful routing capabilities, plus it's easy to reconfigure the Vi1's custom fader banks for different operators and their associated worship team. Having a console that can store and recall a team's settings from a similar performance keeps things simple.
The goal of Smith and the technical team was to make their new audio system as transparent as possible, so it wouldn't get in the way of the worship team's goal of reaching the congregation with the Word and their music. “After carefully considering a number of approaches,” Smith says, “we decided on the Soundcraft Vi1 for two main reasons: No. 1, it sounds phenomenal and No. 2, it's so easy to train volunteers on this desk. We had them up and running after a couple [of] hours of training. That's pretty remarkable considering how new they were to mixing sound.”
Additional equipment upgrades
As part of the audio upgrade, Smith also integrated a Digigram Ethersound card into a Soundcraft Compact Stagebox and installed a Yamaha DME24N digital mixing engine to replace the outdated analog outboard gear and to provide greater programmability. All connections are networked to a central processing hub via an Auvitran AVY16-ES100 that provides up to 128 channels of 24-bit, 48 kHz or 44 kHz audio transmission over Ethernet. From there, the Digigram ES network nodes provide multi-channel audio feeds to and from the video production room and nearby family center. The Auvitran AVY16-ES100 also connects to a PC running ProTools at FOH as an affordable way to track and play back rehearsals and services via the Vi1's second input available on every input channel.
Smith's concept of designing systems where the most frequently used set-ups are pre-configured and readily accessible is key to the plan for making Calvary Spokane's new technology easier for volunteers to handle. For more in-depth technical issues or rerouting, the Ethernet infrastructure put in place with the upgrade allows Smith to “jump in” from anywhere via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection to help.
In addition to the upgraded audio console, something needed to be done to better control the mix of PAR 56/64 fixtures and Source Four 750w ellipsoidals that cover the stage, as well as more than 130 PAR38s employed for house lighting. For the church's 22-year-old musician and technology ministry leader, Keith Harris, a user-friendly lighting control system represented a good place to start an upgrade.
With the help of their contractor, Kungpow Production, the team decided on the ETC Element with dual touch screens for lighting control. The Element is designed for medium-sized applications. It supports two full universes of DMX control in a stand-alone lighting control board designed for ease of use and maximum manual fading control. Two features that make this lighting console particularly suited to venues like Calvary Spokane, where operator efficiency is key, are channel faders that can switch to become 40 submasters for simple playback of live shows, as well as the system's ability to record up to 10,000 cues and fade times into a single cue list for simple playback of more complex shows. The system also features a “go button” that the team really likes. Designed to playback a cue list, the one-button operation is simple for inexperienced operators to understand and easy for volunteers or technicians in training to use with minimal training.
As with the audio upgrade, Harris's ultimate goal is a system that better conforms to industry standards. “We want to get to a system where we are using the right fixture for the right purpose,” says Harris, “and a system that will provide adequate lighting for our video production. Of course, other drivers for the system will include simplicity and efficiency.”
Video gear selections
Calvary's technical ministry includes a busy group of media interns and volunteers who produce two live Internet events each week, along with CDs and DVDs of the services and a weekly radio show. For video capture and live broadcast from the sanctuary and family center stages, the team uses four Sony BRC-300 3CCD all-in-one robotic cameras with pan and tilt mount and 48x zoom (12x optical, 4x digital). Each stage is covered by two cameras that feed a Broadcast Pix Slate 2100 digital switching system and two Eiki LC-X85 3-LCD projectors. An Apple Mac Pro running Final Cut Pro 7 suite is used for video capture. For live video broadcast, Calvary employs Adobe Flash Media Live encoder 3.2. All audio capture is done via Pro Tools 9.
The editing process is a good example of how the teams at Calvary Spokane use media technology on a day-to-day basis. It is a tightly timed series of events that counts on the efficient use of carefully selected media tools and the coordination of staff members, interns and volunteers.
Immediately following a service, recorded CD and DVD masters are delivered to the replay center for immediate duplication so that five minutes after a service has ended, unedited CD or DVD of that service are available to the congregation ($1 for CDs and DVDs or $3 for either to be delivered by mail). At the same time, Harris and an intern start post-production of the video and audio capture. One person takes video editing and website prep tasks while the other handles audio editing and preparing the podcast.
After editing in the video booth, the video source is encoded by Apple Compressor. It takes three to four hours to compress content to a file size usable for the web and DVD production. A video team member can then create the sermon on the website using SilverStripe. This open-source software provides an intuitive user interface that allows the team to manage changes to the website without using HTML or programming languages.
The audio editing process begins by clipping off worship segments in Pro Tools. The audio is then equalized and normalized. The treated .wav file is then imported into iTunes where it is converted into an mp3 file, and the text description and artwork are added. At this point, the audio master CD is burned and the mp3 uploaded to the web server via Cyberduck, an open-source FTP management program. A podcast is then created using Feeder, a Mac OS X application for creating, editing and publishing podcasts and news feeds. Quality and ease of use are the primary considerations for the team's software selection.
After an event at Calvary Spokane, the entire editing process is generally completed in less than three hours. The next day, the compressed video is uploaded to the web and a master DVD is created using Apple DVD Studio Pro.
Fourth-year intern, worship leader and musician Collin Johnson describes the use of new technology at Calvary Spokane as effective and essential for its praise and worship leaders. “This new technology allows the technical aspects of our work to be transparent to the congregation,” he says. “We are driven by the Gospel and our goal is to get the Word out effectively—that's why we're here. We look for technology that will help us do that.”
