With 11 physical campuses currently serving the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill triangle of North Carolina, The Summit Church is focused on growth, and key to their continued expansion are the broadcasts and streaming of their dynamic worship services and teaching of Pastor J.D. Greear. In the past, production teams at the church have been frustrated by streaming content that didn’t always match the quality of the Sunday broadcast. But when the church recently auditioned Teradek’s Prism Flex, a portable 4K HEVC/H.264 encoder, they saw a remarkable improvement in the quality of their live streaming.
“I don't think I've even thought about how that video feed looked until I saw how much better it was when encoded by the Prism Flex.” - Justin Manny, Production Pastor, The Summit Church, Durham, NC
“We were disappointed with the quality of some of our live streaming when we compared it to our broadcast output,” recalls Justin Manny, the church’s production pastor. “But when we encoded with Prism Flex, streaming video and audio quality became very close to our normal broadcast,” he said. ”It was easy to use, too. We took an SDI signal from a record deck getting the main program feed and plugged in the Prism Flex and went DHCP to the network. From there, it was just a matter of hitting one button and the stream was sent to multiple places at one time.” For further comparison, Manny embedded the stream encoded by Prism Flex into the church’s online platform. “I alerted some of the key players on our team and asked them to check it out. They were all very, very impressed.”
Prism Flex allows users to input up to 4K video via HDMI or 12G-SDI and output video via Gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi for live monitoring on a LAN, streaming to the Internet, or streaming to a remote destination over a cellular network. It supports encoding high-quality, low-bandwidth HEVC/H.265 and H.264 codecs as well as up to 4:2:2 10-bit HDR video.
“[Our video director] particularly appreciated the way colors and black values translated in the live stream from the Teradek,” Manny recalls. "Personally, I thought audio sounded the best, compared to all of the ways that we encoded.”
In addition to the options for input, something that Manny noticed right out of the box was the build quality of the Prism Flex. “It’s definitely built to be a quality piece of gear,” he noted. “I liked the metal chassis, as well as the desk stand–I thought that was a cool touch.” Manny also noted how the metal chassis and physical design helped to dissipate heat generated as the device was processing signal.
A particular issue that Manny and his production staff have noticed is that the output of some encoders is not received equally by YouTube. “We’ve noticed a ton of audio compression problems with some encoding processes,” says Manny, “so this presented a good test for the Prism Flex to prove the value of using a hardware encoder.” Manny was impressed with the result as he checked the feed in the church's broadcast room. “The encoder was surprisingly fast and the audio sounded amazing,” he said. “I don't think I've even thought about how that video feed looked until I saw how much better it was encoded by the Prism Flex.”
To further evaluate the quality of the Prism Flex, Manny elicited comments from other team members including the church’s broadcast director. “She particularly appreciated the way colors and black values translated in the live stream from the Teradek,” recalled Manny. “It actually compared very well with our typical broadcast quality. Personally, I thought audio sounded the best, compared to all of the ways that we encoded.”
Manny also saw possibilities for using Prism Flex at remote locations. “It’s not unusual for people to ask if we can stream in this place or that,” he says. “Until now, we’d say that we have four rooms equipped for streaming, but a truly portable streaming device would provide a quick and easy mobile setup. You could just walk in, plug it in, hit stream, and go. Really, you just plug in SDI and you're done. I think there's a lot of value in easy remote streaming.” Particularly useful for remote streaming, Prism Flex supports Network Bonding, a feature that can eliminate mid-stream drops and improve performance by binding several internet connections together.
The production team at The Summit Church put the compact Prism Flex through its paces and found that it could not only improve the quality of their live streaming, but that streams encoded with the Prism Flex were hassle-free and on par with the equipment in their broadcast workflow. “I would put the results we saw up there as some of the best quality video and audio that I've seen from an encoding device–especially one of this size.”
