Transitioning from Live Satellite to Video Playback
May 6, 2009 by Jeff VanderGiessen
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.
Nice setup indeed. i have worked visuals for many events and churches and always craved the best equipment for a flawless execution. Thought I would point you guys to this solution (you’ve probably hear of it) developed if i’m not mistaken by a guy at North Point church – http://www.renewedvision.com/. Seems they have a solution for Simultaneous playback of video at different locations. God Bless.
I’ve been following your video ministry for a while, and i’m working on growing our video ministry at my church. I’m actually wondering how you specifically record your video. We’ve been using a consumer level hard disk recorder, but the only way to get to the files is by burning a DVD! You mention multiple Mac Pro’s with Final Cut Pro. Does this mean that you’re using multiple mac pro’s for redundancy? What are you using for I/O? I have to admit that i’m a little nervous about trusting the computer to not hickup while recording. I’d probably use my current recorder as a backup.
This is very cool…. I love how your setup is simple, but doesn’t lose any quality. Actually, it sounds likes it better than before since you are recording each camera’s feed. What format are you recording off the cameras?
Also, if you’re not already doing this, I learned a tip from a friend. They start their sermon video from the computer, then the DVD about 10 seconds behind the computer. That way if there is a hiccup with the computer, they can quickly switch to the DVD without the congregation hardly noticing.
Thanks for the info, there’s some great questions answered here.
I wanted to know what you are compressing with.. The h264 settings; is it a built in preset in Compressor or maybe Episode? Were they custom presets that could be posted here?
Thanks for all the knowledge sharing you guys do here!