During his days as a church production leader, Jason Morris didn’t like Sunday afternoons much, because no one considers the work church production leaders have to put in after a livestream ends.
“Once the live stream was done, that was almost the starting gun for a lot of additional work that I had to do every single week,” Jason said. “And if I chose to do it on a Sunday afternoon, well that meant I wasn’t eating with my family. Most of the time I would choose to do it on a Monday, and if everything went well, like all the uploads to all the different destinations, and you have to edit and you got to re-encode and redownload, it was just kind of a lot. And none of it really in and of itself was that big of a deal, but it was just death by a thousand paper cuts. That's what it felt like to me.”
“Once the live stream was done, that was almost the starting gun for a lot of additional work that I had to do every single week...it was just death by a thousand paper cuts.” - Jason Morris, former church tech, now product manager at Resi
No More Paper Cuts
Jason is now a product manager at Resi where he advocates for their most recent iteration of a streaming service many production directors have come to know and love. Resi On Demand, a new evolution of the Resi mission, is designed to take Resi’s renowned reliability beyond live streaming by making post-production and media sharing across social platforms, websites, and church apps more efficient.
Resi wanted to eliminate the “paper cuts” by helping production leaders not only streamline web encoding and campus playback but also everything that happens after service ends on Sundays; think, cutting sermons from service videos, uploading those sermons to church apps, websites, and social platforms, etcetera.
“Part of our ethos is ‘set it and forget it.’ We've done a really good job of that, but haven’t done as much rigor after the stream occurs,” Jason noted.
So the team at Resi asked, “How can we incorporate more automations to save tech directors time so that they can not only ‘set it and forget it’ before the service, but also after?”
Part of our ethos is ‘set it and forget it.
Resi On Demand was the answer to that question.
Jason Morris is a product manager at Resi.
Jason sat down with good friends of Church Production to wrestle with the challenges of being efficient in post-production efforts and effective at providing video for meaningful digital outreach—Justin Manny, the Production Pastor at The Summit Church; Bill Wyramon who serves as the Video Production Director at The Summit Church (unaffiliated with Justin Manny’s church); Will Chapman, Online Minister at Cottonwood Creek Church; and, Jeremy Elder, Video Director at Saddleback Church.
For many production leaders, the old stand-by is Vimeo. You cut your raw capture into a sermon, upload that to Vimeo, let Vimeo do its thing, and then you embed that link into apps, socials, and so on. YouTube is the other option sort of by default, the place where a lot of church content lives forever, as Justin Manny noted and then asked, “YouTube is honestly what lives on forever and then a polished version of the sermon is what's getting uploaded to Vimeo. How does Resi On Demand handle something like that?”
"...in literally less than a minute, you can take a playlist and then have that become its own webpage with its own URL." - Jason Morris
Jeremy Elder is Video Director at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
“One of the first and easiest things to do was to create a web application that consumes the feed engine and just creates a website for you,” Jason explained. “So, in literally less than a minute, you can take a playlist and then have that become its own webpage with its own URL. That can be either a standalone webpage or embedded kind of like how the Resi player works. You can embed it into your own webpage and having the capability of being able to just do it so quickly is what we really wanted to focus on.”
You read that right. Imagine something like your Netflix or Apple TV+ homepage with all the content available for navigation and viewing on-demand, except it’s your church media with its own space on the internet or just embedded into your site. And since it’s embedded in your site, no more worrying about getting dinged for copyright violations even though all of your content is properly licensed. This means Resi On Demand provides an all-in-one solution to media sharing, storage, and playback across websites, socials, with lots of native church app integrations.
Justin Manny is Production Pastor at The Summit Church in Durham, NC.
Using Resi On Demand for Campus Review
Production people are crafty, and Saddleback found a creative way to leverage Resi On Demand to serve their 20+ campuses who all capture their morning service for review by oversight pastors back at the main campus.
Jeremy Elder explained, “All of our local campuses in California have decoders so that they can pull down what we're sending them and play it back, and then they have encoders so that they can send stuff back to us for on-demand—just got a wide lock shot in the back of the room. And that's the way that we use Resi On Demand, to review what's going on at those campuses without those pastors having to literally drive all over Southern California. Jeremy adds, “We're basically taking the embed codes from each of the campuses and…putting them on one page where leadership can scroll through campuses and say, okay, what's going on here? I can say that having features that you guys have in the on-demand, like the media page and all of that, would've saved our dev team a lot of time had they existed when we needed them to build them. So I think that's great.”
Will Chapman is Online Minister at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, Tex.
Video Archive Migration Solutions
Justin Manny expressed concern about what to do with all the media Summit Church had stored so far. “All of our sermons for the last 25 years are on our website, hosted in a single spot,” he said. “So, does Resi have a way [to handle archive migration]?”
Jason answered immediately. “We can do that for you. There are certain platforms that make it a whole lot easier through their APIs to pull videos and migrate across. And then there are others that are so hard, you manually have to go into every video and download them and re-upload them. Resi’s solution for archive migration is designed to be easy.”
Bill Wyramon serves as the Video Production Director at The Summit Church in Kernersville, NC.
No One Else Is Doing This.
Post-service media sharing automation, on-demand sermon media with custom websites, campus review, and migration services for initial implementation, Resi, through its Resi On Demand platform is reaching to serve churches here in ways that other media companies simply haven’t thought about. It’s hard to see the catch, here. And we at Church Production are pleased to partner with Resi to solve problems for production leaders.
>> Here’s where to learn more about Resi, including Resi On Demand.
Watch the Resi On Demand Video >
