At North Point we are more than aware of the importance of recording our services. With DVD’s, TV shows, strategic partnerships, online services, message streams, CD’s, podcasts, and more–it is imperative that our services are recorded and archived for future reference. If your church does any form of multimedia, you probably record your services in some form or another, whether to tape or to DVD or to a DVR or some sort of live capture system. Archiving your services can sometimes be a nerve-wracking task–if you miss something or forget to press record, it’s as if the service never happened. For our team, it’s crucial.
We record to tape as our primary archival system–DVCPRO50 format on DVCPRO tapes for SD & HD. The Production Team also records the messages to an Omneon system as an additional backup. On top of that, we capture every service live through Log & Capture in Final Cut Pro, straight to DVCPRO50 for SD (side screens - live switcher cut) and DVCPROHD for HD (center screen - locked down wide shot). We use several of the media team’s computers to simultaneously capture the services, and now with the introduction of a new North Point Online rebroadcast, we also use multiple computers to compress the 11AM live service to FLV format and get it uploaded so that it can be viewable again at 6PM for the rebroadcast. All this of course happens on a Sunday and involves a bunch of running back and forth, routing, labeling, pressing buttons, paying attention to details, and most importantly, troubleshooting.
Ryan Tabor usually does this every week, and somehow manages to hold it all together. We got his process visualized (left) so that I could fill in for him last week while he took a vacation day, and it became my roadmap to a formidable world of responsibility. The process of course goes a LOT deeper than this in terms of routing systems and filenames and labels and edits and settings and service flow, but this is essentially the gist of it. If we miss any of these steps, archiving and reproducing our message for DVD, TV, partnerships, or the web becomes nearly impossible.
How do you guys record your services? Have you ever been in a situation where you FORGOT to hit record??
March 3rd, 2010 at 2:54 am
alas not anymore, when I was I was recording to miniDV and acquiring to external drive through FCP. The discs got used up fairly quickly, then I compressed to mpeg2 for DVD which we don’t do anymore.
We do record baptisms and special events, and yes - almost forgot, pressing that record button almost too late, oops. “oh, could you get dried up and do that dunk again”, ha ha ha, no we didn’t.
March 4th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
yeah… So as an audio guy I have always had to make sure I record to our masterlink for all the services. One day after I began power down and as the system was cycling I see the masterlink still going and “poof” everything that was recorded is no longer accessible. Odly enough, some devices need to be stopped properly or you lose your recording.
So I would say… don’t forget to record, AND don’t forget to sop the recording!
March 5th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
I recently set up an older MacPro to do a live capture for our Anglican service. It;s in one smallest venue, and when things get a little hairy on Sunday mornings, it’s an easy venue to forget about. So I also installed QuicKeys, an automation utility. We set our triggers to be timed, 5 minutes before each hour to the end of each hour.Last week was the first week with the system. I didn’t leave FCP in front, so the trigger didn’t fire. Tweaking the process a little, and this week will tell the tale.
March 5th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Wow, what a chart! Looks like you definitely make the most of all your equipment.
We stream live on the Internet and record that feed. We also record each camera’s video individually in the cameras, which we re-capture and re-edit for our weekly TV show. Finally, we record multi-track audio to Pro Tools, which is mixed down for sermon CD’s and the TV show. We also record a board mix to a USB drive as a backup.
We rarely forget to press record. More often than not, when there is a problem, it’s when a tape head is dirty or the Pro Tools computer freezes up. At times like that, you’re thankful for the redundancies you’ve built into the system.
March 8th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Just a couple weeks ago, our team accidentally recorded the preview output rather than the program output… that was fun. We basically recorded all the shots our director/switcher were looking to take rather than the ones taken. There’s a lot of redundancy built into our system of the “just incase this doesn’t work” like extra vtrs and hard disk captures, but its hard to make a redundancy system built around “we pushed the wrong button”. Looking at a solution for that, but not sure if we have the right equipment to get around that problem…
May 17th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
I have friends who don’t have internet access; ur videos are something they need to see; they are not able to get out to a computer; are any of your pieces available on DVD… specifically the one that shows a contemporary ‘worship’ service where it starts with ‘this is the opening song… opening song…’?