"We don't have the distractions of [a camera operator] wandering around the church disrupting the services since these [cameras] are all hard-mounted and have excellent angles and locations for a really wonderful production,” says Father Brian Christensen from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Rapid City, SD.
The pandemic thrust a multitude of smaller churches into the live streaming world almost overnight. But high-quality streaming isn’t always possible with consumer-grade products, and professional-grade systems can often be too complicated for volunteer production teams.
The critical question becomes, what do smaller churches need—or even larger churches with limited time and resources to put toward streaming? Church streaming in a box? That’s what Broadcast Pix, a Boston-area integrated production solutions provider, is now offering to churches like the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Rapid City, South Dakota. The cathedral recently installed The BPswitch FX series complete video production solution with a pack called ChurchPix. It’s designed to be everything needed to make professional-grade programs, integrated into a single software package with an easy-to-use interface and a layer of automation to enable professional live stream content to be produced at the touch of a button.
We're very much focused on the end content and less on the technology,” says Graham Sharp, CEO at Broadcast Pix. “We try and make the technology as easy to use and as transparent as possible, but to focus on helping our clients and customers make better content as an output now.” Learn more in this Dave.video conversation with Sharp, Nickolaus Dunn from KT Connections, the integrator on the project, and Brian Blackmore, editor of Church Production Magazine.
“The system that we have from Broadcast Pix has been instrumental in us being able to reach out to our church members, parishioners, and others who are looking for an experience of the church when they're not able to be physically there at the church,” says the church’s leader, Father Brian Christensen. “We use it for our regular Sunday services and our masses that we broadcast to our local community. But again, because of the wide reach of the internet, many people have joined us across the country and even around the world.”
It's about enabling people who are not broadcast-trained to produce broadcast-quality content. - Graham Sharp, CEO, Broadcast Pix
The church now broadcasts daily and Sunday masses, and the system has been instrumental in allowing families to join together for occasions like weddings and funerals. “They can now be part of the celebration, part of the event, part of the liturgy with their family and friends through the internet with Broadcast Pix and the capabilities that we now have here at the church,” Christensen says.
"I am always pleased when manufacturers build products with the house of worship market specifically in mind. Our needs, end-users, and budgets are just different than other markets. The great thing about a product like the ChurchPix is that it was designed with this in mind," says writer, Mark Hanna in this Church Production First Impression article.
Graham Sharp, CEO of Broadcast Pix, says even prior to COVID the company was already evaluating its product line and looking for ways to help non-professionals more easily use their professional broadcast equipment. Then COVID hit and accelerated that line of thinking. “What we're trying to do is make a tool set that one day is being used by a professional producing news for a local station, as well as making that same tool set available for a volunteer who shows up to work in a church production environment,” Sharp says. “It was all about trying to figure out how we could make that tool set easy to use and accessible to what we started terming ‘non-broadcast trained operators,’ or people that have not been trained by a broadcast organization. And so, from that strategy spun out several products and packs and different sorts of product families specifically aimed at volunteer-run organizations to make the tools available to enable those guys to produce professional-looking content, just as if they were a broadcast TV station or something like that.”
In addition to being easy to operate for live streaming, ChurchPix allows churches to record video keepsakes for events like weddings etc.
The goal of the product line is for everything needed to come ready in a box, focused on a specific market. So the company created a line called ChurchPix that could be used as-is or customized, as was the case with the solution for Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The cathedral’s tech staff started with the church pack templates and content and then added items as needed with the help of Broadcast Pix professionals who are trained in helping users produce a custom look in the field. “So, we're very much focused on the end content and less on the technology,” Sharp states. “We try and make the technology as easy to use and as transparent as possible, but to focus on helping our clients and customers make better content as an output now.”
Nicholaus Dunne of KT Connections, a local IT services company, also helped Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help get the installation just right. He says, “We had a lot of hard surfaces and very complicated areas to get through without causing aesthetic damage. With the imported marble and trying to mount to that and get cabling to the locations where the cameras were going to be located, so the cable is not exposed, was definitely a challenge. I'd worked in the building before doing the audio system, so I was pretty familiar with the pathways, etc. So it worked out really well.”
“We've learned a lot about what churches are trying to do and we've tailored our packs,” says Sharp. “Now, with ChurchPix specifically for those markets, the idea being, you can take it out of the box, plug it in. When it powers up, it powers up the user interface that is suitable for a church. It powers up the templates already preloaded. They may not be perfect, but they're a great starting point for the volunteer operators.”
Father Christensen says the church has seven or eight volunteers who have gone through basic training on the Broadcast Pix program and who can now record or live stream. He also says the system is attracting younger volunteers. “There’s a young man just going into high school who really is interested in broadcast, film, and art,” says Christensen. “And he came to me a couple of months ago and said, ‘Father, how do I get trained up on this? You know, I've seen it online and I want to get involved.’ I said, ‘you're in, come on down.’ We gave him a few training sessions and he loves it. He's eaten it up because he really sees a future for himself and this is an easy way for him to experiment and, with trial and error, to learn his skills.”
Sharp says that’s not surprising since the system is designed to be so user-friendly. “So instead of having to set up shots every time, we can automate things,” he says. “We can save camera angles and shots and zooms, and we can transition between them. So we try and automate as much as possible and then do so in a way that the next-generation user is used to thinking.”
Father Christensen says in addition to the new system being easy to operate for live streaming, parishioners appreciate the team’s ability to record video keepsakes for events like weddings. “They're finding that when they have the video of three cameras, and they can use all of that raw video to put together their wedding video, they're pretty excited that that's all built in and they don't have the distractions of somebody wandering around in the sanctuary or in the church, disrupting the services since these [cameras] are all hard-mounted and have excellent angles and locations for a really wonderful production.”
Sharp concludes, “Everybody's so wrapped up in the technology speeds and feeds etc. It's not about that. It's about producing better content and enabling people that are not broadcast-trained to produce broadcast-quality content, because that's what keeps your audience enthralled and making compelling content. And that's been the focus for the last year and a half within Broadcast Pix.”
