Linc Church streamlines live production with BMD
Published: WORSHIP
SOUTH AFRICA: Linc Church incorporated Blackmagic Design’s live production hardware during the recent installation of its fully integrated A/V solution at its purpose-built campus facility. The system has been designed to enable volunteers from the congregation to produce and stream live content during services to the screens throughout the building.
A reliable video system became an essential requirement for the church as its congregation continued to grow, swelling to more than 1,000 worshippers attending the sermons each week. Blackmagic Design’s Atem 1 M/E Production Studio 4K and Smart Videohub 20x20 video switch have been installed in the campus’ production gallery, with the latter featuring on an SDI network that provides the signal distribution for the facility. The signal is sent to the two IMAG projectors in the main auditorium, as well as supplying feeds to television screens setup in the church’s several community and family rooms, which are linked via a Teranex Mini 12G SDI to HMDI converter.
‘I’ve worked with SDI since the very outset of our introduction to video production and we now feel really competent with it,’ Linc Church’s media director, Simon Wilkes reasons. ‘And so when it came to expanding our audiovisual capabilities SDI was the obvious choice. Now we can send video with embedded audio around the complex reliably, and cost effectively.’
In addition to facilitating the live production and capturing the pastor’s sermon, Mr Wilkes and a team of volunteers also display pre-recorded content, such as weekly notices and a video to prepare the congregation for communal prayer, at the start and end of each service. ‘What we like about the Blackmagic kit is that it not only produces excellent quality video, but it is so intuitive to work with, so the volunteers in our team have been able to get really familiar with the solution in a very short amount of time,’ adds Mr Wilkes.
‘The Linc Campus is an amazing space, built specifically to help us grow the church and nurture our community, so as video had been so central to our development as an organisation, it was essential that we had a reliable and high quality A/V solution to support our weekly worship,’ he continues. ‘Video has always been an important medium for us. Even in the church’s beginning we realised producing video for our website got our message across far more easily than written articles. When the time came to build our own facility, video had been so central to our development, we were ready to evolve our production capabilities and integrate it into a professional level A/V solution. Not only has it brought our congregation closer together, it has also given us a global profile’.