The new approach drove an infrastructure upgrade led by (left to right) Technical Director Tim Miller, Associate Producer Timothy Khadvongsinh, and Creative Director Josh Rivas at Christian Life Center in Stockton, California.
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If you asked a room full of church techs to raise their hands if they produced worship services primarily for people sitting in the seats, two years ago most of those hands would’ve shot up high. Today, ask that question and many of those same hands don’t rise. Because post-pandemic, the worship experience that’s crafted is equally for people engaging through a remote screen—TV, computer, tablet, phone—as much as from the physical worship space.
The difference is all in point-of-view, and it’s forcing church teams to think differently, envision their services in a fresh way, and rely on innovative new tools to spread the Word.
"...we realized we needed to simplify our broadcast by removing long announcements and long pauses." - Josh Rivas, Creative Director
Nobody understands this critical shift better than the production team at Christian Life Center in Stockton, California. The Christian Life team has moved full-circle since 2019, and they sat down with Church Production Magazine to say why they did it, how they did it, and what tools they use now to capture and share worship from a whole new point of view.
Church meets 2021, head-on
Stockton sits beside the San Joaquin River in California’s Central Valley, a city of roughly 310,000 in a mecca of nature.
The goal of upgrading to a 4K infrastructure led the church technical leadership team to explore, and ultimately purchase Panasonic's AK-UC3300 4K HDR Studio Camera Systems.
“Christian Life Center has been in Stockton for over 85 years now,” says Technical Director Tim Miller. The worship space holds 5,500 attendees, and on a normal basis, pre-pandemic, that space did not go to waste.
Then hit March 2020. And even though Christian Life Center was doing live production streaming historically, as early as 2002 when Miller came on board, the ministry found itself behind the eight ball. Both its approach to live streaming services and its use of technology would have to change.
"...we needed more engaging camera shots during our worship sets with more camera angles and cuts.” - Josh Rivas, Creative Director
As Josh Rivas, the church’s creative director, describes, “When we first went entirely online, we realized we needed to simplify our broadcast by removing long announcements and long pauses. Some viewers were tuning out because they didn't feel engaged.”
Along with tightening up its service format to better speak to an online audience, Miller describes, “We can’t just rely upon what’s going on in the building. Now we’re relying upon what people actually see—not just our attendees and other local churches, either, but people outside our realm, friends, people watching the stream on their iPhones.”
The tech staff also realized that it needed fine tuning in the area of its camera work. “We saw that we needed more engaging camera shots during our worship sets with more camera angles and cuts,” Rivas notes. “It's still a work in progress, but we are getting better.”
“[Our pastor] wanted it to be a 4K output directly from the camera, which led us to our eventual Panasonic purchase.” - Tim Miller, Technical Director
The team’s live stream audio mix, too, proved to be an area that needed improvement—with viewers reporting a lack of “in-person live sound.” So JS Sable, Christian Life’s broadcast sound engineer, committed himself to enhancing the sound and bringing it up to the high-quality level the church needed, Rivas reports. "Pre-pandemic, we did not have a live stream sound engineer. When we went entirely online, we realized our sound quality was terrible. After assessing our weakness, JS Sable was appointed as our broadcast sound engineer. He committed himself to enhancing the sound and bringing it up to the high-quality level we needed."
Before the technical aspects could truly help bring home the message in a new way, though, the delivery of the message itself had to morph into a format that online viewers could embrace.
As Rivas describes, for example, "Our senior pastor instructed our pastoral staff to prepare their announcement remarks of what they needed to say—using fewer words. But at the same time, still following the prompting of the Holy Ghost. We never want to rush a move of God during our service. Most of our viewers understand that is part of our culture at CLC." Alongside the effort, the production team worked toward better communication between its worship, video, and audio teams so that it could be more prepared during live broadcast.
A camera dilemma and technical upgrades
The church’s new point of view in crafting its services could only be as strong as its method of capture. And the team’s pre-pandemic cameras, Miller says, an “old standard-definition studio camera system,” were no match for the streaming requirements of worship during and after the pandemic.
“Our senior pastor, Nathaniel Haney, really felt the need to upgrade—he’s more of a long-term vision kind of leader,” states Miller.
The necessary move to UHD, although highly relished, was something that Miller believed was outside the realm of Christian Life’s financial feasibility. But by 2020, the urgency to upgrade overtook the hesitancy to put the money toward a 4K UHD system.
Following a number of discussions on the upgrade, the team came to a decision crossroads over one issue in particular. “The big question was do we want a more cinematic option or a traditional broadcast camera,” he says. “Because our volunteer crew was already so used to our studio system, we wanted to stay in that similar realm.”
Ultimately, Pastor Haney’s guidance sealed the deal for the studio camera choice. “He wanted it to be a 4K output directly from the camera, which led us to our eventual Panasonic purchase.”
Challenges meet streamlined solutions
In the summer of COVID, Panasonic’s AK-UC4000 4K camera was in the minds of the Christian Life team. But by late winter 2020, Panasonic’s team came to the church tech team with another new option it believed would be an ideal fit for the ministry’s needs—the AK-UC3300 4K HDR Studio Camera System.
“They’d come out with the AK-UC3300, which was a better fit for us than the 4000, since we didn’t need its ultra-slow motion capabilities,” Miller explains.
The church’s move to 4K and its chosen system meant that its old system had to be replaced from the ground up.
As Miller says, “We had to put in new SMPTE fiber cabling throughout the facility for the three cameras we implemented there. And we added HDMI over fiber for a 4K POV camera that’s in our drum booth.”
Further down the road, Christian Life also plans to add Panasonic AW-UE150K PTZ cameras.
Of the upgrade, Miller says the church was fortunate that it had the necessary conduit to handle its fiber cable run—a component of the upgrade that the church self-installed. “The three of us installed everything from nothing,” muses Miller of the work between himself and his fellow techs, Timothy Khadvongsinh, associate producer, and Rivas.
Looking back on the new upgrade, only one item from Christian Life’s old system made it into the new. The team kept its Clear-Com intercom system, which Miller says works with the team’s tally light interface with no glitches.
Projection, too, is an area that’s slated for an upgrade further down the road. The team had upgraded its projection system just five years prior, and although that system is not native 4K, it will accommodate HD. Thinking ahead to make life easier in the future, Miller says the team installed an Ethernet over HDMI adapter.
“For now, though, we still use the same 4x3 ratio screens, and the projectors themselves are still 4x3. But we’re just allowing that black bar to go on the top and the bottom, and we’re using the HDMI,” he explains.
Of those components that are new, it took serious ingenuity to get every player in the chain to speak the same language.
The team’s current internet ability will also be addressed as part of the larger upgrade. “Our current internet is 300Mbps download/30Mbps upload. When we upgrade, it will be 1Gig for download and upload,” Miller notes.
Lessons learned
If anything, the new remote-worship reality of the pandemic has served to strengthen Christian Life Center’s approach to and processes for online worship—as well as the quality of its virtual services.
Once the local church audience that was present in-person for every service started watching online, and then they saw other churches’ services online in comparison, Miller says, they realized that their church had to seriously “up” its game.
So in essence, the situation gave Christian Life the nudge it needed to pull the trigger on an upgrade it had already known it needed for quite some time. And it also provided impetus for the congregation to give toward the critical project. “Our senior pastor is very much not wanting to go into debt. He wants the funds to be there,” Miller states.
These days, Christian Life Center’s 5,500-seat worship space has accommodated a much smaller physical number in accordance with the guidelines of the state. “If we’d get above 800, we’d stop,” Miller says of admittance to physical services as of May 2021.
“Right now we’re doing two live feeds every week, one with some people in the seats,” he notes. “We’re finding that the person at the pulpit is now addressing those online, rather than kind of ignoring that they’re there, because they know that half of the church is still watching online.”
As the pandemic fades further into the distance and the new reality takes hold and shapes worship behavior, Miller says, “The good thing, in my mind, is that our pastor has historically always been focused on multimedia. And one thing he said he never wants is a pre-recorded church service”—giving Christian Life Center a new, ever-evolving point of view on how to craft its worship in the 21st century.
