Often a camera will boast a huge zoom, but in reality, you’re left wanting more. According to the tech team at The Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock, Arkansas, that’s not the case with the Marshall CV-730 PTZ camera.
“It's advertised as a 30x zoom. Sometimes those numbers can seem a little ambiguous,” explains Nick Burt who is the executive director of communications at The Church at Rock Creek. “You don't really know what that translates to in your room or to feet or yards or whatever. When we started playing with that zoom, I was blown away at how long that camera could reach out and get a shot.”
"When we started playing with that zoom, I was blown away at how long that camera could reach out and get a shot.”
—Nick Burt, Director of Communications, The Church at Rock Creek
As part of the Church Production Road Test series, we sent several Marshall CV730s to The Church at Rock Creek for a test drive. In this video, Church Production’s Marcel Patillo talks with Burt about his experience with the cameras.
The Marshall CV-730 PTZ Camera has earned the Church Production Road Test Certification. Learn more here.
“It was a great camera for what we were trying to use it for. It was a 4K capable camera, although we just used it at 1080. It had a broad range of movements and it had a really incredible zoom at 30x,” Burt explains.
The Marshall CV730 is extremely compact and can do 4K resolution at 60 frames a second, which makes the footage future proof. “Our whole system runs 1080p right now,” says Burt. “But just knowing that's available, it helps to soften the blow of that expense a little bit, especially if you're trying to sell it to an executive pastor or somebody who makes the spending decisions - that you're really buying a product that can work for you right now and if you go to 4K in the future, that product can transition to that as well.”
Just having upgraded their sanctuary cameras, the team wondered how they would put the PTZ to use. They found it worked well during mid-week Bible studies which typically have a one-man-band tech team. And even in the sanctuary during services they found the CV730s worked well on stage. They put it on top of a truss and Burt says they were able to get really creative cutaways at unique angles they never had before.
“It was really nice to have the ability to move it, to pan it, to tilt it and to zoom because we could get shots of guitarists, we could get shots of our keyboard players, we could get shots of the worship team in the room. It really just allowed us to get creative with what we could get. And I really liked the preset option for that because I would come in during rehearsal, set up all of our shots, and as I'm directing calling shots, I can just sit down and press buttons to call up a preset and it would get those shots for me.”
Burt also explains that Marshall’s technical support team was very help getting the camera set up and customized to their unique needs to be creative as possible. “So, he was able to go in and tell me how to change the IP address on the camera, change the IP address on the controller and make some adjustments to the Mac address and those sorts of things.”
Burt concludes by saying the quality of the CV730’s images were a big surprise to him. “I thought the quality was on par with all the other cameras we use. We have a couple of other Marshall cameras we use on stage. We have Panasonic broadcast cameras that we've been using. But you couldn't look at the image and say that's a PTZ camera. You really could blend it in with all of our cameras quite well.”
The Marshall CV-730 PTZ Camera has earned the Church Production Road Test Certification. Learn more here.
