The Worship Streaming Silver Kit features products from a range of professional AV manufacturers with an eye on providing exceptional value for churches.
Some churches have been focusing on streaming for a long time in an effort to reach new people. Others have been dragging their feet. Regardless of which describes your church, even those who had no interest in streaming have had their hands forced due to the pandemic.
So for the churches who didn't have time for a capital campaign to ramp up their streaming ministry and are now trying to figure out what they should be doing, Adorama has heard your cry for help and has come up with an answer—three of them actually. The company has put together three live streaming packages for churches: Silver, Gold, and Platinum kits.
The Worship Streaming Silver Kit was specially designed to help churches start streaming content. Churches that have been streaming for a while could use Worship Streaming Silver Kit as a secondary video production system for remote shoots, shooting in a small studio, or for those mid-week updates from the pastor’s office, or they could upgrade to the more full-featured Gold or Platinum versions.
For all but the most sophisticated operations, Adorama has done the integrator's job and has made three different turnkey solutions that should be flexible enough to serve the needs of most any church.
Adorama has done the integrator's job and made a turnkey solution that should be flexible enough to serve the needs of most churches.
Worship Streaming Silver Kit
The Worship Streaming Silver Kit comes with everything a church would need, right down to the cables and memory cards. "It was designed to get the best bang for the buck," says Tom Galanis from Adorama, who designed the kit. He selected products from a range of respected manufacturers with an eye on providing exceptional value for churches. For instance, the kit includes two Sony Alpha a6100 Mirrorless Digital Cameras with 16-50mm lenses. He had two motivations for this selection. The first was the versatility of the 16-50mm lens, which, because it's an APS-C sensor, functions more like a 24-75mm due to the crop sensor. The second was the superior low light performance. Galanis knows that most churches don’t have enough lighting, so the low light performance from the camera was important. Also he added some lights to the equipment, in the form of Litra Litra Pro.
Worship Streaming Silver Kit includes:
- Sony Alpha a6100 mirrorless camera with 16-50mm lens
- NEC E245WMI 24-inch desktop monitor
- LitraPro with Litra Soft Box Light Stand
- Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro ISO Live Production Switcher
- C2G 5m Select High-Speed HDMI with Ethernet Cable
- SanDisk 64GB Extreme Pro memory card
- Sony MDR-ZX110NC Noise Canceling headphones
- StarTech 5-inch 19 Pin HDMI Cable Adapter
- C2G 10-foot High Speed HDMI Cable
- Sony ACPW20 AC Adapter for NEX Series Digital Cameras
- 3Pod Video Tripod and Head Bundle with Flashpoint 144 LED
To switch the Sony cameras, Galanis selected the Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro Iso video switcher. The ATEM is an easy and obvious solution for churches that want to stream and record. The ATEM Mini Pro Iso's power is unrivaled for switchers at the sub $1,000 price point. Its ability to record independent isolated camera sources makes it an excellent option for churches who want to have a post-production workflow, because the ATEM Mini Pro Iso can produce a DaVinci Resolve project file right on the drive it records to. It is also capable of streaming to YouTube and Facebook live. To monitor cameras and the ATEM, the kit also includes an NEC Widescreen IPS LED Desktop Monitor, an excellent option to use as a multiviewer. Add to that all the needed HDMI cables, memory cards, tripods, headphones, and A/C adapters for the cameras, and you have a solution that has been thoughtfully crafted from start to finish.
Where this Kit Succeeds
The Worship Streaming Silver Kit is a win for small churches that have no cameras or limited streaming capabilities currently. It’s also a great option for churches that can start doing messages differently, like more of a "fireside chat" rather than from behind the podium. That said, it's not a silver bullet; if you have a vast auditorium and large band, look into the Gold or Platinum kits. Which brings me to my favorite thing about the Silver version, it's a starting point. If you have a bigger budget or know that you want to use different cameras, all you have to do is call Adorama, and one of their reps can walk you through selecting another package or adding other pieces and parts to replace in the kit and customize more to your specific needs. It's like having access to an integrator all the time.
On Paper
While we’re waiting to review the package in person, we can only speculate on how it actually performs. But I have a hard time finding fault with the selections Adorama made. I have some personal preferences that I would change if I were designing this, but their selections are reliable, and my choices definitely would have been more expensive. I think the Worship Streaming Silver Kit is an excellent general-purpose small production streaming solution. I especially like the option in lenses for the Sony cameras. The 16-50mm selection gives the user great versatility; my everyday carry lens is 24-70mm, so using an APS-C equivalent makes sense.
The only thing this kit is missing is an audio mixer, and I think for most churches, it's a pretty safe assumption that they have that covered. Even if all you have is a small audio console, the Fairlight audio enhancements on the ATEM Mini Pro Iso give you some options. As long as you can get audio into the switcher, you can do a lot with it in terms of a compressor, gate, limiter, and six bands of parametric EQ.
Regardless of how you feel about streaming church online, I think everyone can agree the last thing any church wants to do is put content online that is of such poor quality that it's going to be a barrier to people experiencing what a church is really like. The Worship Streaming Silver Kit is designed to allow any church to put a polished production online.
The price point for this kit is $4,275.90, and for a turnkey plug-and-play solution, it's going to be pretty hard to beat. Be on the lookout for our hands-on product review in the coming weeks.
