Many of the products from Visual Productions are designed to make lighting control easy for non-technical users, something that can take the stress and time demands off of church tech directors and other production folks. As part of the Church Production Road Test User Experience, Visual Productions sent three new products out to Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas; The CueCore3 Multi-Protocol Architectural Lighting Controller, the B-Station2 Wall-mount Button Panel and TimeCore Timecode Toolbox.
“The CueCore3 product from Visual Productions kind of blew my mind just because it's a fairly small box, pretty simple,” explains Prestonwood Church Director of Media Brian Bailey. “You can think of it in a number of ways, but think of it as a lighting console in a box, you're going to be prerecording things into it and it's going to be able to generate DMX of just about any flavor.”
Prestonwood Campus AV Manager Mark Mobley calls it a whole package in one element. “So here I've got [a unit that allows me to, for example] trigger music via any device we want to, whether that be a controllable CD player or MP three player or whatnot,” he says. “We can trigger an architectural lighting product. For example, a children's area in our atrium. We've got old fashioned architectural lighting that's installed by an electrical contractor. But if you wanted to trigger digital signage, for example, this is the product that you would go to. The interface for the volunteer is as simple as a button push. Anyone can step into this and begin the programming procedure and be successful at it.”
For users who are not professional programmers, the Prestonwood team says CueCore can take just about any input and make things happen via DMX. And the B-Station Wall-mount Button Panel can be used for either controlling CueCore or as a standalone DMX device.
In describing the Visual Productions TimeCore Timecode Toolbox, Bailey says, “So, you can actually have this generating the time code you need if you are needing something to create that time code that then is sending out to maybe record decks or things like that. But it's a very simple way for you to get some time code generated in your system.”
The team says one of the biggest problems in the past has been timecode not at the proper level. Sometimes it’s the wrong frame rate and that interferes with video playback. So, it’s not enough to just see timecode, you need to be able to diagnose it.
“Anybody that's using time code just knows whether we're chasing it or whether we're sending it. It needs to be solid from point to point in order for that time code to make sense to anyone or any device at the other end,” explains the church’s Media Operations Manager Armando Escobedo. “It can go wrong once we are relying on it in that you could trigger the wrong video file, the wrong background, the wrong tracks. It could also, if it isn't solid or if something is intermittent, you could also start to skip or move within that timeline. So, once you're in it, you have to really be sure that it's solid.”
TimeCore gave the Prestonwood production team all the details they needed to solve those problems.
To hear more about how these systems improved production at Prestonwood and see them in action, watch this video.
