Producing live events in front of an audience or congregation week-after-week is a high-risk operation in any setting, but add to that a small production team with mixed skill sets ranging from industry experts to eager, willing volunteers, and the stakes become even higher.
Simple Truth About Purchasing Equipment
In today’s live production industry almost any manufacturer can provide you with a good product—be it a production switcher, graphics system, server, or anything else—different products will have different specifications, interfaces and unique features. But can they do the job you need them to do? The answer is generally yes, you just need to learn the specific nuances of the product.
So, if virtually any product will do the job, what criteria really matter when building out your project? One criterion is how the products come together as a whole integrated solution. Many churches are working off an equipment-centric blueprint that has been formulated over the years by the big-broadcast old guard of live production, a model centered around molding operator staff or volunteers to specific pieces of equipment. Church production crews shouldn’t limit themselves to this equipment-centric mode of thinking, because each church faces a very unique set of challenges that aren’t adequately addressed by this workflow.
Put Your Production Goals & Volunteer Success at The Forefront
Producing live events in front of an audience or congregation week-after-week is a high-risk operation in any setting, but add to that a small production team with mixed skill sets ranging from industry experts to eager, willing volunteers, and the stakes become even higher. Schedule these events on weekends when support can be limited and the pressure continues to rise. Finally, after weeks of training, you may forge a Most Valuable Volunteer (MVV) who is a rock-solid operator in any position you put them in, only to have them leave for other obligations. Next thing you know, you’re going through the training process with a new volunteer all over again. And let’s face it, we aren’t working with equipment that is necessarily intuitive to a layperson with no prior production experience.
Instead of abiding by the traditional equipment-centric model of operator training, church staff should be thinking about ways to tailor equipment to their operators—namely, in the church world—volunteers. With the development of wide-interfacing, programmable control systems in recent years, we can start to look at all the component equipment of a production solution as an “under-the-hood” engine for achieving our production goals, while creating a control overlay that is agnostic to the products underneath.
Churches can’t do what they do without their volunteer workforce. We need to stop letting equipment get in the way of volunteer success and leverage control technology to ensure they can operate with excellence.
Take Control of Your Workflow
One example of these control systems is Ross Video’s DashBoard network control software, which was developed partly in consultation with church production focus groups that were brought to Ross Video’s R&D campus to discuss the challenges they face, particularly with volunteer operation staff. DashBoard is an open, programmable, and third party-friendly technology that allows users to create an integrated control interface tailored to production tasks, rather than equipment. Not to mention, DashBoard is freely downloadable from the Ross Video website.
Here are some examples of how church production crews have leveraged this technology to simplify production operations:
Condense the Control Room into a Single Panel: This is especially useful when you have multiple pieces of equipment driving content for different destinations. Say, for instance, we have two production switchers, where one switcher is dedicated to feeding the main IMAG screens and the second is the master switcher used for internet, hallway and overflow feeds, with the switchers tied together by a router. We can condense all three components into a single control interface tailored to what needs to be executed during production. With one operator at one control interface, we can make everything happen at once—greatly reducing complexity and the number of required operators.
Simplified Stage-Screen Management: Many churches use displays for IMAG, lyrics and sermon notes. If we examine all of the things that occur on those displays during the course of a service, we can distill it down into a handful of scenes/layouts. We can then program control of the switcher, graphics, presentation software, clip servers, etc., into custom control macros that recall those scenes exactly as needed. Then embed those commands into a touchscreen panel with big, well-labelled buttons—allowing a volunteer to run the screens without having to worry about any of the equipment under the hood. Say goodbye to long learning curves for volunteers, because you can literally take someone off the street and have them running your service in minutes with this kind of workflow.
Off-Site Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Full-time staff can face a lot of pressure managing a crew of volunteers. DashBoard’s network-connected technology makes it easy for the supervising engineer to remotely monitor and troubleshoot any of the issues that can occur during a service. In a pinch, staff can even shade, TD and direct entirely from off-site if the need arises. This reduces stress for all staff and volunteers involved.
Kids-Room Notifications: Although highly specific and somewhat comical, this is a great example of how tailored your workflow can get. At one church, they had a dedicated volunteer sitting at a desk with a computer and a telephone. That volunteer would receive a call from the kids room when a child was acting up and be given a three-digit number assigned to the child’s parents. The volunteer would enter that code into a presentation-program, yell over to the TD and the number would be downstream-keyed onto the stage screens to notify the parents. With DashBoard, they were able to create a system that allowed staff in the kids room to enter the code onto a laptop and, with the push of a single button, assign it to a keyer in the switcher and initiate a timed key (the TD didn’t even have to worry about taking it off-air). DashBoard was able to take that mundane task out of the control room in a way that was accessible for the kids-room staff and free up that volunteer who spent every service sitting by the phone.
By rethinking our approach to control workflow, we can stop basing our decision-making around equipment and orient it toward our goals as a church and the success of our volunteer operators. Not only does this allow us to focus on delivering the best production services possible, but it reduces the number of people required, the opportunity for error and the overall operations cost. The next time you’re preparing for a new control room build or system upgrade, try to imagine the perfect-world workflow for your volunteers—it might not be as far-fetched as you think.
