Back in early 2020, First Baptist Church in Minden, Louisiana had no active live stream or media ministry at all. Of course, COVID changed all that – they purchased JVC cameras, a Blackmagic switcher and used Resi for streaming. Now they’re taking a deep dive into AV over IP networks. “Yeah, we had a chance to demo the AJA Dante AV 4K-T transmitter and the AV 4K-R receiver,” says Kevin Stevenson, the media communications director at the church.
"It was easy to get these connected and running within five minutes.” - Kevin Stevenson, Media Communications Director, First Baptist Church, Minden, LA
The AJA Dante AV 4K-T Transmitter and 4K-R Receivers have received the Church Production Road Tested certification.
As part of Church Production’s Road Test User Experience, Stevenson and his team tried out Dante AV 4K-T Transmitter and 4K-R Receiver. “We were able to connect them really easily. All the connections were very straightforward. Having hardly any network knowledge at all was not a problem. It was still easy to get these connected and running within five minutes.”
Transmitting audio and video over IP networks has a lot of benefits over the copper cabling of SDI and HDMI. AJA has been at the forefront of this technology and recently introduced this line of Dante AV 4K converters. These allow users to get virtually any AV gear onto a church's IT network using a revolutionary protocol called Dante AV, which promises to connect all video gear the way Dante digital audio networking began years ago – all at 4K UltraHD resolution 60p with a RGB 4:4:4 color space.
“The Dante matrix was super easy to navigate. It allowed us to see visually where we were sending something to and where we were sending it from. We loved having the product,” Stevenson enthuses. “There was virtually no latency. That was the first thing we wanted to check. Is there going to be latency with this? Because it seems like every time we try any other product to convert SDI or HDMI to anything involving a network, we get latency and we didn't find that with this product.”
Stevenson says he was surprised by the built-in KVM options. There’s USB, infrared, and multiple jacks on each end. “At first, I thought, nobody's going to use those. But the longer I thought about it, I realized it's very convenient to have that there when you need it,” he says. “When I first had the AJA Dante AV converters, I didn't know for sure what application I would need them for at a church that has one auditorium. But as we continued our demo, we started to realize these could be used for so much on our campus. When we have had events where we would run SDI longer than 300 feet, we had to put an extender on that. We've had to put extenders on HDMI. These AJA Dante AV 4K converters would allow us to do that much faster, much easier, probably give us a better result. It seems to me the possibilities are endless.”
To see Stevenson’s story and hear more about his Dante AV 4K demo, click here. To learn more about the AJA Dante AV 4K converters, click here.
