Livestream Installation: February 2021-April 2021
In February of 2021, Emily Turner did a lot of research and purchased equipment to create two livestream systems for Incarnation Lutheran Church (one for the Sanctuary, and one for Incarnation Hall) with the goal of livestreaming by Palm Sunday. On March 7th, 2021, the inaugural livestream in Incarnation Hall was launched with great success and the next week on March 14th she streamed in the Sanctuary, all well before Palm Sunday.
The first versions of the livestream were made up of 3 laptops that travelled between the Sanctuary and Incarnation Hall with a lot of other equipment. One computer was for livestreaming the services, one did the PowerPoints for In-Person worship, and the other did the slides for the livestreamed worship. There were two sets of PowerPoints as well: one looked like your average worship presentation while the other was adapted with a green/orange/pink background (depending on the least used color for announcement slides that week) that would be chroma keyed out (like a green screen) to present lower thirds graphics during each service.
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It's been incredible to watch the exponential growth of the livestream and Emily is so excited to watch it continue! Over the last 3 years, she grew the Sound and Livestream Team from a tiny duo to a full team of 11+ skilled technicians who help to research, set up equipment, and operate the soundboards and livestream equipment each week. This team has a lot planned for the next couple of years, including moving the livestream soundboard and livestream media equipment into separate studios, installing more cameras to provide increased visual variety to the livestream, and much more. Emily is so proud of what the Sound and Livestream Media Arts team has accomplished and looks forward to all of the projects she has slated for them over the next few years.
Incarnation Lutheran Church's very first livestream: (Incarnation Hall)
Primitive as it was, this was an incredibly successful first stream! This set up was pulled together over the course of a week using gear that was rented from a colleague while we waited for the equipment we ordered to arrive.
Incarnation Lutheran Church's very first livestream: (Sanctuary)
At this point, we were using half our own equipment and half borrowed gear. This was the point at which we discovered we weren't going to be able to fit both the livestream and the sound equipment in the sound booth.
First Stream With Incarnation's Own Equipment:
This was the first stream we did with all of our own equipment, although we discovered while setting up that some of the pieces we had been sold wouldn't actually work with our set up so we had to adapt and improvise.
Improved Incarnation Hall Set Up:
By the time we started streaming in both the Sanctuary and Incarnation Hall, we bought livestream soundboards to improve the sound that went out to the stream and we improved the layout of the equipment as well. By September, we consistently had one person operating FOH sound, one person on livestream sound, one person operating slides and cameras, and another person operating cameras and monitoring the stream for a total of 4 technicians each week. By this point, we had a team of 6 techs!
Chroma Key Graphics
We discovered early on that we would need to use two almost identical PowerPoints each week for each service if we wanted to show the slides both for the in-person crowd and for the livestream viewers. By using the ATEM software's chroma key feature, we were able to key out whatever color we wanted and get a lower thirds overlay effect on our livestream. This required two laptops to run slides, and a third laptop to monitor the stream and manage the chroma key.
Service Transitions:
I wish I had taken videos of us sprinting from one end of the building to the other! We'd run drills with each new tech to make sure they could properly close up the computers and gather all of our equipment up to run from one space to another. On average, we had about 20 minutes to pack up, run across the building, set up, and then troubleshoot anything that went wrong in between when we checked the equipment earlier that morning and when we started streaming on it. The orange cord that you see below was a key part of making sure each livestream happened so that, along with our 3 laptops and bucket of cords came with us to each location.
