Welcome.

I am very excited to finally be unveiling this site. Our objective in this effort is to best equip Mars Hill Church campus staff and volunteers to flawlessly produce Sunday services. Our plan is to develop and maintain a resource library full of system documentation, training resources for standardized systems, procedures, and equipment information pages. On this site you will be able to find blog posts about what work we are currently working on, frequently asked questions (FAQ), and eventually even line diagrams of standardized campus systems.

This site is very much a site in progress. We have been working this site for a couple of months, and during this time have seen the numerous occasions for needing this site functional. As such is the need, that we are launching in the current state, so as to be able to serve you the best. We know where a lot of the holes are and will be working to fill them in as quickly as we can. In the next month we plan to get the ‘Production Suite’ (the capture facility’s main system) details up, as well as the missing equipment at each campus.

For those of you who are not directly connected to the production teams at Mars Hill Church, we thank you for stopping by. We hope that this site may be of use to you as well. Feel free to drop us a note and tell us what you would be interested in seeing here.

Our Approach to Audio Training

With the launch of this website, will also come the official launch of our online audio training.  Part of the joy of having standardized equipment across all campuses, is the ability to train centrally.  Training centrally means that all volunteers can attend the training that is most convenient to them, while it is still applicable to them, at their campus.

At Mars Hill Church we believe there are three levels of training, foundational, functional, and artistic.  This website will provide for the foundational level of training.  Foundational training is what functional training and artistic training all build on.  In my time at Mars Hill Church the majority of the troubleshooting questions I get are due to a lack of, or forgetting, the foundations of audio.  This forgetting of the foundations is what has driven me to write this curriculum and implement it.  I have taught this material live in a classroom twice (about every 6 months), which works for those that can drive to me.  However for those that can’t drive to our central offices, and still want the training, we want to make this available online.

We generally only do functional training at the time campus and system install/launch.  At this time we train all existing campus volunteers, and the staff member responsible at the campus.  We then will focus our training efforts on making sure the staff member responsible has a functional knowledge to be able to operate, and continually train any new campus volunteers.  (After they have gone through the foundational training curriculum.)  On this website we will also be posting quick start guides and campus manuals which will also help serve as online training for functional training.  From there the Worship department takes over the audio training, for any artistic training that may be required at the campus level.

We want to help out as many people as possible in our training efforts.  Of the material here on this site, some of it is taylored to the systems at Mars Hill Church and our campuses, but a lot of the content applies to any sound system.  In the coming months we will be figuring out how to put the classroom teaching of this content online.  We are also planning on creating short videos focusing in on different equipment and systems.  Feel free to ask us for any specific training and will try to add it to our training pages.

Transitioning from Live Satellite to Video Playback

As many of you have already heard, Mars Hill Church has decided to abandon live satellite broadcasts in favor of a delayed video playback model. For the rational behind this influential decision I recommend you head over to the Mars Hill Blog and read what Pastor Mark Driscoll has to say about the transition.

Since this announcement I have received countless emails, phone calls, tweets, and facebook posts asking how we plan to technologically support a delayed playback model and I would like to quickly shed light onto our new workflow and its overwhelming simplicity.

We are continuing to capture all four services on Sunday at the Ballard campus, but rather than just capturing two copies of the main program feed (a primary and a redundant backup), we are additionally recording each camera’s unique feed. This is so that in the event we have a bad cut in the program feed or someone walks in front of the camera we have a way to edit out the problem before sending it out to all the MHC campuses. In case you were wondering, all we are using right now for capture is a rack full of Mac Pro towers running Final Cut Pro.

On Sunday nights after the last service Pastor Mark Driscoll and the Preaching & Theology branch decide which sermon was the best and that becomes the service that will be sent out to all the MHC campuses for playback the following week.

On Mondays the audio is ‘cleaned-up’, the intro video is dropped in, the in and out points are smoothed out and the finished ‘product’ is set to export as a 720p H.264 (m4v) video file in the 1.1GB file size neighborhood. Once this is complete we push (currently using Apple Remote Desktop, though looking at a few UDP with parity options and even the popular app ‘dropbox’) the file to a dedicated Mac Mini at each of the campuses for playback.

On Tuesdays the campus staff are asked to check the integrity of the file, playing it all the way through. For playback we simply use Quicktime.

As a backup we have the campus staff download a standard definition DVD ISO file and burn it to an actual DVD. In the event of some form of Sunday AM failure with the m4v file the campuses can easily pop the DVD into the player and hit play.

The video systems across all MHC campuses are changing. While doing satellite transmissions with timeshift playback these systems became fairly complicated, requiring greater knowledge and experience from operators than was ideal. In switching to a week delay model, we have been able to remove all of the complicated equipment, leaving only five main components: 2 Mac Minis (1 for sermon playback and 1 for running Keynote, our song lyric application of choice), a DVD player (for sermon playback backup), a Barco scaler, and a Panasonic projector.

The simplicity is beautiful.

Downtown Seattle Delay Speakers

A project that went wrong during the initial install due to budget cuts has finally gotten corrected.  The Downtown Seattle Campus main room is about 60 feet wide and 100 feet long, and was installed with a pair of EAW KF850’s on both sides of the stage, as mains speakers.  There was also plans to install delay speakers throughout the main room, which got cut due to lack of budget.  This budget cut created a volume problem with the sound system, the front was too loud and the back was too quiet.

Why are delay speakers needed?

Delay speakers allow for a more even volume coverage from the front to the back of a room.  Without delay speakers, the front of the room tends to be really loud, while the back of the room is really quiet.  Even volume (SPL – Sound Pressure Level) coverage from the front to the back of the room is ideal, especially as the room gets full and people have to sit in both the “Loud” and “quiet” zones.  This was the case at the Downtown Seattle Campus.  The front of the room was amazingly loud while at the back of the room, you could barely hear it.

So What Happened at Downtown Campus?

Recently, we installed the delay speakers into the main room.  We installed two rows of delays, carrying the stereo image through the room.  With the install of the new speakers, EAW JF590’s, the audio SPL (volume) coverage of the room has increased tremdously.  Meaning that the audio quality of the room has improved.  The people in the back of the room are no longer straining over the din of people talking in the foyer, to hear the sermon.  And the front of the room is no longer asking for ear plugs.

Hopefully with the completion of this project, people will once again be able to forget about the technology and focus on what God has for them.