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NewSpring Church, in Wichita, Kansas, is a non-denominational Christian Church focused on community outreach, and providing active ministries geared to the needs of children and families.
Every weekend, over 6,000 people attend NewSpring Church in four different services, including two services on Saturday evening and two on Sunday mornings.
For those who can't regularly attend, the church also produces Newspring TV—the weekly sermon from the Sunday 9:45am service—as a half-hour television program that is broadcast by KWCH-DT, the local CBS affiliate, and KCWE-DT, the CW affiliate serving Kansas. The entire service also streams live at www.newspring.org, with video on demand of prior sermons. This ministry is viewed as an extension of the church's mission to reach out to the Wichita community.
The broadcast operation, which is manned by several A/V volunteers, consists of six HDTV broadcast cameras, an HD control booth on the second floor of the main auditorium, a record server and other production equipment.
Once the service is recorded, the recorded file is retrieved from the control booth and nonlinear editing and post-finishing software is used to prepare it for transfer to the stations as an MPEG-2 program stream file.
Since the program airs on broadcast TV, it must be fully compliant with FCC CEA-708/608 closed captioning regulations, including the FCC's latest quality rules calling for captions to be accurate and spelled correctly, complete from beginning to end, synchronized with the video and positioned properly on-screen.
“Using Telestream MacCaption Desktop Edition for closed captioning and Switch for quality control, we are able to cost-effectively create a program with legally compliant captions, in-house,” says Stephen Hoover, who is Director of Broadcast and Assistant Pastor at NewSpring Church. He continues, “MacCaption is critical to our broadcast efforts and making a positive impression on TV viewers. Along with Switch, it gives us complete control over our closed captioning process so we can ensure quality results. Before sending the program to our stations, I'm able to review the quality of the captions, and make sure we're meeting FCC standards every step of the way. And I have no doubt that the captions are there, they're compliant and ready for the stations to air.”
Hoover says one of the biggest challenges, however, is making sure that the captions are positioned correctly on-screen. In every half-hour program, there's a two-minute introductory segment and a two-minute invitation at the end. The remaining 26 minutes are devoted to the sermon, featuring one of the pastors speaking on stage to the congregation.
The captions cannot occlude the speaker or the big-screen monitor next to him that displays a verse of scripture as he is referring to it. Also, the NewSpring Church logo in the lower left corner of the TV screen animates in a way that brings text of scripture on-screen as a lower third super. This also must not be blocked by captions.
Hoover says, “With MacCaption, I can select a single caption or hundreds of captions and choose the spot where they need to go, and they move there instantly. I can also fix any mistakes I find quickly and easily at any stage of the process. It's really important to us that everyone watching the broadcast is able to read legible captions that don't detract from other featured program elements. MacCaption enables me to produce legally compliant captions that are very professional looking. If we did not have MacCaption, we would just have to trust that FCC rules and guidelines—as well as our own high-quality standards—were being met.
“Since closed captioning is just one my many job responsibilities, I appreciate that MacCaption offers a user-friendly interface and intuitive, straightforward workflow. It also enables high-quality, legally compliant captions at an affordable price. And since it also fits seamlessly into my own desktop production environment, it gives me creative control over the final product.”
Hoover says Telestream has also been a game changer in perhaps the most challenging arena of preparing a captioned video in-house. Using Vantage 7 with Time Text Flip, it's possible to take a caption file created in MacCaption Desktop Edition, merge it with a high resolution recording of the message, and create an MPEG 2 program stream or transport stream file with captions embedded in it. This makes it possible to create a more universal file type that most TV stations will accept.
“If we didn't have Telestram software, we would have to outsource all of the work related to putting closed captioning on our TV programs. Besides transcribing the video, we'd also need to have a third-party service merge the caption file with the video and review/fix the captions. Over time, this would greatly increase the cost of producing our broadcast.
“This software is saving us a great deal of time, and it's projected to save us thousands of dollars per year. That's a blessing for a growing community church like ours.”
