When Dave Kalahar, director of media and broadcasting at Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield, California, came on board with the church’s tech ministry 16 years ago, he found that he and his team didn’t know what they didn’t know.
“Back then, we didn’t know anything about social media, and we didn’t really know what YouTube was. If you saw streaming video, you were using Windows format or QuickTime or RealMedia, if you remember back that far to some of those formats,” Kalahar laughs.
Fast-forward to today, and through time Kalahar has become a walking encyclopedia of knowledge revolving around the evolution of broadcasting and streaming in the church setting. And he has very specific tools that he relies upon after years of real-world experience.
The backdrop
“One of the first things I did when I arrived was to produce feature videos,” he remembers, describing the three-minute creations he and his team produced that focused on various ministries at Valley Baptist, along with individual testimonials. “And that was new at the time, the ability to deliver feature production.”
Under Kalahar’s direction, the church’s video team added video announcements, which evolved from simple voiceovers and slides to featuring on-camera talent—a young woman at Valley Baptist serving as on-camera talent and delivering news and announcements before a green screen.
“We did a lot of heavy graphics around her to talk about what was happening at the church,” he describes of the somewhat rudimentary set up, by today’s standards.
Although Valley Baptist’s early broadcast ministry efforts were ahead of their time, at the time, and the team has innovated every step of the way up until today, nothing could prepare them for the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the new and urgent communications requirements that were thrust upon church technical ministries.
“COVID certainly brought up some challenges when we could not meet in-person live on Sundays,” Kalahar notes. So he and his team quickly and flexibly sprang into action, setting up its sanctuary to serve as a TV studio, pre-taping a multi-cam recording of the pastor’s message in the morning followed by a pre-taping of music in the evening. “We do multi-cam recording and we’re able to record any of seven cameras or whatever feed we need.”
The team’s control room facility, though, is in an entirely different building from its sanctuary studio. “It was just like shooting a ballgame or sports,” Kalahar describes, “you get a remote truck, and that’s kind of how we treated it.”
He continues, “We would sometimes do several runs to do multi-cam in our studio production environment. And then, of course, that gave us the ability to do multitrack and a mix-down for the TV broadcast and for the stream on Sunday.” They would play the stream out from a video server, live, and by 11 a.m. a local TV station would play the file that Kalahar’s team provided.
The tools that helped the Valley Baptist team make sense of its workflow and properly handle the myriad of cameras and video feeds proved to be ones that Kalahar has come to trust over his extensive span in the church broadcast setting.
A longtime FOR-A devotee
“Way back in my early days of broadcasting, FOR-A was making equipment used to stabilize video to play back in broadcasting, called time-based correctors,” he says. “And there are probably some of the original 40-year-old FOR-A time-based correctors out there that still work today.”
Knowing firsthand of the quality of FOR-A’s gear and what he calls its proper pricing and features for the church market, Kalahar relied on the company when Valley Baptist made its leap from standard to high definition. “We took a real strong look at FOR-A and ended up buying an awful lot of their gear,” he notes.
What are Kalahar’s sticking points that made FOR-A a frontrunner when it came time for current-day upgrades? “I needed the flexibility to have multiple control panels on the switcher, so that we could have a producer/director doing IMAG and a producer/director doing web production, simultaneously,” he says of Valley Baptist’s choice of FOR-A’s HVS-2000 production switcher.
Kalahar and his team also rely upon FOR-A’s MFR 5000 routing switcher, MV-4210 multi-viewer, Insight multi-channel video server, FA-505 signal processor, LTO media archiving server, and MAM file management software in their workflow.
Knowing what he now knows and has learned throughout the years in the church broadcast setting, Kalahar can easily rattle off the somewhat intangible traits that make FOR-A his go-to. “Their engineers understand what it takes to have reliable equipment, where the common links of failure reside”—typically with power supplies and processors, for instance.
“So, in critical areas, they understand that having dual processors, one active and one inactive, is very important … as well as multiple power supplies. So that if one goes out, the other is there to take over on FOR-A’s systems,” he states. “This is very, very important in a full-time operation when failure on Sunday is just not an option.”
If a problem should arise with the gear or if the church user has a question that requires prompt response, FOR-A scores high in that area for Kalahar, as well. “Doing multi boxes or memory or macro things, that can get very complex,” he says. “They’ve always been there to quickly answer my questions and take care of whatever problem there might be.”
The ability to upgrade, too, is a critical area that Kalahar says FOR-A’s engineering team nails in its product development, and he notes that the company doesn’t charge customers for most of these upgrades.
Still another plus is the company’s willingness to listen to customers and innovate accordingly. “As time goes on, they have added features and looked at requests from customers for adding things to the software that is running in the background of their systems,” he says.
Summing up, Kalahar says the FOR-A choice for Valley Baptist’s workflow can be boiled down to two key factors that he has come to recognize as mission critical over the years: reliability and flexibility. “It’s just rock-solid equipment,” he closes.
