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A South African house of worship called LINC is making Blackmagic Design live production hardware part of a fully integrated audiovisual solution in its purpose built campus facility, designed to house the church's growing congregation.
The video system, built around an ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K and Smart Videohub 20x20, allows volunteers from the congregation to produce live to screen content during services. With more than a thousand people attending services every week, a reliable, high quality audiovisual system was an essential element for the church's pastors and leaders.
"I’ve worked with SDI since the very outset of our introduction to video production and we now feel really competent with it. And so when it came to expanding our audiovisual capabilities SDI was the obvious choice."
Simon Wilkes
Media director, LINC Church.
“Video has always been an important medium for us, even in the church's beginning, when we realized producing video for our website got our message across far more easily than written articles,” explains Simon Wilkes, media director, LINC Church. “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 AV solution.”
Signal distribution for the complex relies on an SDI network that features Blackmagic's Smart Videohub 20x20, which in addition to providing content for two IMAG projectors in the main auditorium, also supplies live sermon feeds to television screens located in the campus' various community and family rooms. Each of those television screens relies on a Teranex Mini 12G SDI to HMDI converter to link them into the house of worship's audiovisual setup.
Simon explains his reasons for choosing SDI as the backbone of the campus stems from his own video experience. “I've worked with SDI since the very outset of our introduction to video production and we now feel really competent with it. 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.”
Live production during LINC's services is handled by Simon and a team of church volunteers, who produce all of the content for the live to screen. As well as capturing the pastor's sermon, the team bookends the live coverage with prerecorded content, including weekly notices and an immersive video which prepares the congregation for communal prayer. “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.”
“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 organization, it was essential that we had a reliable and high quality AV solution to support our weekly worship,” concludes Simon. “Not only has it brought our congregation closer together during services, it has also given us a global profile, and that has led to us sharing our insights with other churches.”
