BRAVE Church is a multi-site church based in Englewood, Colorado. The church is in the midst of a video upgrade that involves streaming in 1080p/HDR, upgrading the content sent to the multi-sites, and adding an LED wall to the stage area, and LED HDR IMAG screens to the main auditorium.
When it comes to technology upgrades, churches always struggle to determine how to get the best bang for the buck. Is hardware the correct answer? Is software something we should
The AJA ColorBox has earned the Church Production Road-test certification. Learn more here.
consider? Do we need to update our infrastructure? This is precisely where BRAVE Church, in Englewood, Colorado, found themselves, and their Production Director, Robb MacTavish had some fascinating insight into their upcoming technical upgrade. Rather than jump to 4K video, he decided HDR might be a better option. On the upside, HDR doesn’t require an infrastructure upgrade, as the current cabling could handle HDR but would not handle 4K. “You look at televisions that are coming out, they're HDR-ready,” MacTavish says. “It just looks like that's the progression of the future.”
BRAVE Church recently acquired an aging facility from another church. The obvious first step was an upgrade to the video system. But moving entirely to 4K required an entirely new wiring infrastructure, plus a new router and switcher. Instead, in an intriguing move, Production Director, Robb MacTavish is transitioning the church to a 1080p/HDR workflow.
For a long time, the race in the video world was for resolution. First, it was HD, then it was 4K. Now 16K is something that you can find as an available option on some devices. However, more pixels don’t necessarily translate to better video; if your image quality is terrible, then in 4K, it’s just bad at four times the resolution. This is why focusing on the image color might be a better investment. The industry does seem to be moving in that direction. “I think sports were the first ones to really look into going HLG, which is the hybrid log gamma so that you can not only support people that have HDR displays but also support people that have SDR displays,” says MacTavish.
Another benefit of moving to HDR is that it can compensate for many of the struggles churches have regarding video. Things like dim rooms, LED walls, or windows tend to cause issues because the cameras must expose for either the highlights or the shadows and lose the image fidelity in whatever they don’t select. Robb mentions, “My thought process and my perception is moving to HDR opens up a wider spectrum for allowing to have more intense lighting, brighter LED walls for the room, or also support when you have a situation where it's very dark lighting and very ambient and, you want to control that and create an experience in the room, but you're not translating it very well in camera.”
The AJA ColorBox is designed for productions that are transitioning to 4K/UltraHD HDR workflows. Colorbox offers color and LUT management offering essential processing for creating and achieving state-of-the-art looks for live and scripted content. For more information, visit.
One of the struggles MacTavish discovered with moving to HLG is the cameras can handle the change, but the graphics computers and ProPresenter could not. In order to add key and fill from a graphic source into an HLG workflow, the source needs to be converted from SDR to HLG first. The plan involves working with integrator Lucid AV and sourcing the AJA FS-HDR, so all inputs can be converted from SDR to HLG including those used for graphics. But that leaves the problem of the receiving campuses not benefiting from the HLG workflow. MacTavish continues, “My thought process is to move from HLG back to [Rec] 709 and then stream that to the campuses where then I can have another ColorBox from AJA and I can come out HLG, and I can stream that directly to YouTube, for example, and take the benefits of HLG.”
Tim Walker from AJA adds, “A lot of times you'll have your production switcher that'll be running in HLG HDR, but you'll have other source material that'll be in SDR, and you need to somehow bring that into the production because you want… all the signals to have the same color space and dynamic range.
“And so, whether there are SDR sources that may be historical content or from cameras that aren't quite HDR-ready, the AJA FS-HDR video processor and the ColorBox are there to solve that problem and do a conversion from SDR to HLG to get it into the production switcher.”
It turns out that moving from SDR to HDR is not always a clear-cut well-defined process. I can see it working a few ways. First, many churches use mixed format cameras or some combination of ENG and PTZ cameras. With multiple kinds of cameras, sometimes it is difficult to make them look the same. Also, cinema cameras have started making inroads into the live production environment. With the ColorBox, it would be possible to use a cinema camera with a LOG gamut, getting you the absolute most out of that camera’s image and applying a LUT to it before it ever gets to the switcher. While the ColorBox can’t make a GoPro look like an ARRI Alexa, getting your cameras to have the same colors coming in goes a long way to getting them looking good going out.
Also, the ColorBox could be used to apply a LUT to the program out going to a live stream. This could be beneficial to recovering much of the image itself; getting information from the darkest shadows and toning down the brightest highlights goes a long way toward making your video look good. Also, if you have an HDR system but have some overflow rooms or TV around the building that can’t utilize an HDR signal, the AJA ColorBox could get the image back to a Rec 709 for that distribution.
