The COVID pandemic has changed the way many churches think about worship. Will Chapman, the Online Minister at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen Texas, has given it a lot of thought too. After a major technology upgrade, the church is purposefully establishing two video workflows: one for IMAG and a separate feed for streaming.
“For the person viewing the service live and in the room, what goes on the IMAG screen is a value-add --- close-ups of the drummer who they might not be able to see easily, the facial expressions of the soloist and the pastor. They don’t need the context of a wide establishing shot,” Chapman says.
What’s changed since Covid at Cottonwood Creek Church is a new priority being given to the online viewer. “The online audience is increasingly important and so we want to be very purposeful about how we engage with them. For example, the person viewing from home needs a completely different perspective because they are not in the room --- different establishing shots, etc. In addition to different shot selections, sometimes it’s completely different content that people in the room aren’t receiving. For example, sometimes the announcement videos are different, the greeting is different, etc,” Chapman adds.
All of this adds complexity to the video production, and that is difficult in a service where the technology is primarily run by volunteers. The dual workflows is, in part an effort to maintain volunteer friendliness. So the church is assigning a TD and director for IMAG and a separate TD and director for streaming/broadcast. “It can easily get too complex for a volunteer to direct for both audiences at the same time,” says Chapman.
Having two production-quality video workflows not only allows for Cottonwood Creek Church production teams to tailor content for each video stream, but it also offers the teams the confidence that comes with planned redundancy. Redundancy and reliability are key, so the staff and volunteers can focus on communicating what’s happening in the moment, rather than troubleshooting something that’s ruining the experience for the live or online audience. “Part of the teams’ work on Sunday morning is monitoring the health of all the signals,” notes Chapman. “The entire time that we are monitoring our broadcast, I also have Vimeo open, monitoring the solid feed coming from the Teradek Prism Flex encoder. Having the Prism Flex in position, we knew that if something should happen to our broadcast, we would have a real-time option to switch over to in just seconds.
“It seems to me that with the Prism Flex encoder, Teradek has a strong competitor to Resi, placing the Prism Flex somewhere between the Resi Ray encoder and their high-end server-grade encoders,” he adds.
“Our first impressions were that this is a solid piece of gear,” says Chapman in describing Teradek’s compact and portable 4K HDR encoder/decoder. “The Prism Flex has an all-metal enclosure and is obviously nicely manufactured. I could tell that some serious thought had been put into manufacturing this encoder.
“We configured the Prism Flex to handle an SDI feed to the church Vimeo account via Ethernet,” Chapman adds. “It was very easy to set up. We just assigned it an available IP address, powered it up, plugged in the SDI feed, gave it a second to boot up, and–Boom!–the web interface popped up in a browser.
Chapman sees many other potential uses for the Prism Flex in both large and small church productions, in particular because of the consistent quality and reliability of its output. “It gets you away from software-based encoders that can be less reliable,” he offers. “You can think of a hardware encoder, like the Prism Flex, as a sports car, like a fine-tuned machine, built specifically for performance to provide dependability and reliability with a streaming platform.”
Another feature of the Prism Flex that Chapman likes is its wireless capability. “I can see wireless as being very useful for a number of situations,” he says. “For example, you could go mobile and tether it to a hotspot or even to a cell phone to quickly encode and upload a stream to the Internet. Even for on-premises events in an area that doesn’t have a good Ethernet drop, with just a WiFi connection a Prism Flex could get a stream going and out to the Internet.”
For larger churches looking to expand their broadcasting and their streaming, Chapman points to the integration of Teradek’s devices, like the Prism Flex, with Core, the company's versatile cloud platform. “It’s really impressive to be able to go directly from a reliable and portable hardware encoder into their cloud service,” he says, “to deliver multisite broadcasting from one platform.”
Prism Flex packs a surprising amount of functionality into a tiny package, including color-accurate 4K HDR video streaming in AVC or HEVC, with 10-bit, 4:2:2 support. When paired with Teradek’s Core cloud platform, Prism Flex also allows users to remotely collaborate, manage, archive, monitor, and distribute their streams to multiple destinations simultaneously. Using a Network Bonding feature, it can even avoid mid-stream drops with its ability to bond several internet connections together.
"At Cottonwood Creek Church, our services have two audiences, live and online. Our dual workflows, each with redundancy, helps us provide the best possible experience for both audiences," Chapman says.
