Images by James Kumorek, Spreading Flames Media.
The Summit Church in Apex, N.C. uses a Pandora media server to map the background video that appears on the foreground computer monitor across the three LED walls on stage, as opposed to having the exact same video running on all three screens.
Media servers are a new concept to most churches. While the name is pretty self-explanatory, the usefulness and application to a house of worship isn’t as obvious.
A media server controls and outputs media based on input instructions from another device, typically a lighting console. Media (video or audio) is loaded into the media server ahead of time and occupies specific “slot” numbers that can be easily referenced by a lighting console, much like selecting a color in a lighting fixture.
The benefits of a media server can be pretty significant for a church that makes substantial use of video and media in its services and events.
Media servers allow for multiple layers of media to be played, blending them much like one could do in a video editing application, but in real time. And media servers also allow you to map the output of the media server across multiple display devices and crop that output to prevent them from hitting undesired parts of the stage.
At The Summit Church in Apex, N.C., we use a media server to put up motion backgrounds that span across all three of our screens, instead of having it duplicated across all three screens. The media server also takes care of keying lyrics over those backgrounds and enables us to choose which screens the lyrics will appear on.
Achieving cohesion
One of the nice things about media servers is that they let you tie what’s on your screens tightly with what your lighting is doing. Different elements of the media server’s capabilities are presented to a lighting controller as “fixtures.” For example, there may be a Master fixture that controls overall brightness, contrast and audio volume. Then there would be several video Layers in the media server, each with its own Fixture in the lighting console to control it. One attribute of the layer fixture would be which piece of media should be played in that layer, represented by a number from 0 to 255 (the “slots” I mentioned earlier). Another attribute would be opacity—0 would be completely transparent; 255 would be completely opaque. Others might include position, scaling, rotation, volume, pan, play, pause, etc….
All of these attributes can be programming into lighting cues along with the programming for your lights. Thus, when you press the Go button for the next cue, the motion background cross-fades on the screens perfectly in time with the lighting change. If your church does dramatic presentations and you use video as part of your scenic design, this provides a huge step up in professionalism and in creating a distraction-free environment.
If your church does dramatic presentations and you use video as part of your scenic design, [the incorporation of a media server provides] a huge step up in professionalism and in creating a distraction-free environment.
Programming a media server with lighting does introduce another layer of complexity, and you need to pay closer attention to how you time the various attributes in your lighting cues. For example, if you’re changing from video clip 10 to video clip 50 on your screens, you don’t want all 40 clips in between to flash up on the screen while that attribute changes from 10 to 50 over three seconds. You want to program that attribute change so that it takes place in 0 seconds, immediately jumping to the new clip. And programming the media server will take additional time as you’re programming your lighting.
The benefits of a media server can be pretty significant for a church that makes substantial use of video and media in its services and events. It’s worth exploring what they can do.
