How To: On Campus Simulcast
It’s that time of year again. Secret Church is tomorrow night. Madison and I just left church from a late night of lighting the new set. I’m thankful for a hard working intern that doesn’t mind staying late to get the job done. I think Mandi is working on a post that includes some details and pictures of the new set and the construction process, so I won’t give any details on it now. All I will say is that it definitely falls in line with “The Radical Experiment” that we are conducting as a church next year.
The theme of Secret Church #7 will be Angels, Demons, and Spiritual Warfare. I’m pretty excited to hear David teach on this. The response has been overwhelming. Tickets sold out in three hours, and the number of people on the waiting list quickly reached over one thousand. This promoted us to open up our student building as a simulcast room to try to accommodate more people.
So the task at hand, get video and audio to the student building. Here’s what we used and how we did it:
The Gear:
1 – Ross Video FSR 9241 miniature fiber optic to HD/SDI module
1 – Ross Video FST 9242 miniature HD/SDI to fiber optic module
2 – AJA HD10AMA audio embedder/de-embedder
1 – AJA HDP2 HD/SDI to DVI converter
How we set it up:
Video is currently distributed throughout the main building through an HD/SDI distribution system. HD/SDI is cool because it carries high quality digital audio and video over fairly cheap digital coax cable. We tapped into this system on first floor backstage, and ran a new HD/SDI cable up to the amp room on second floor backstage. This is where we used one of the AJA audio embedders to embed live audio from the worship room onto the HD/SDI cable. Next we put the Ross HD/SDI to fiber module inline. This Ross module converts our HD/SDI signal from the worship room to run over the fiber optic cable that already exists between the main building and the student building.
We had to pull some fiber optic cable from the communications closet on second floor of main building, through the offices to the amp room backstage. Believe it or not, we happened to find a roll of the exact fiber that we needed while digging through some dumpsters to find some materials for our current set. The Lord provides. Thank you to Joseph, or I.T. director for helping us pull the fiber and getting the ends terminated.
Down in the student building communications closet, we installed the second Ross module which converts the video signal back to HD/SDI from the fiber optic cable. We pulled a new HD/SDI cable from the closet, through the ceiling, then down the wall on stage and then installed a wall plate. An HD/SDI cable runs from the wall plate to the AJA HDP2 where the video signal gets converted to DVI. This DVI signal is then run into the projector which is set up on stage, rear projecting onto one of our 7′ x 12′ screens. The HD/SDI signal is looped off of the AJA HDP2 and run into the AJA HD10AMA where the audio from the worship room is de-embedded and run into two inputs on stage. After a few tests, we worked out all of the kinks, and now everything is ready to go.
This was a fun project to work on. I’ve never messed around with anything that uses fiber optics before. It’s pretty cool stuff. We had our cell phones out while testing the audio portion of the system. Madison was in the main worship room talking on a microphone, while I was in the student building listening. I was hearing audio faster over the the simulcast system than our cell phones. Fiber is so fast. The specs on the Ross modules say that they can transmit the HD/SDI signal up to 30 km. Hmmmmmm……Where to next?……..
-Matt-
P.S. Thanks to our friends at Media Visions that helped us get everything we needed.
How To: Multi-Screen Video Display
Every now and then, I have people ask me how we display a video across multiple screens at Brook Hills. For the last series, “Love Story” we used three 7’x12’ screens all hanging in the same plane with a 1’ space between each screen.
Here’s a picture:
www.brookhills.org
We’ve done several different screen configurations, but the hardware and software we use is the same. Here’s what we use to do it:
Software-
Renewed Vision’s Pro Video Player. We have 1 HD license and 3 Network Node licenses.
Hardware-
3 – Apple Mac Mini
1 – Apple Imac
3 – Da-lite 7’x12’ fast fold screens
3 – Panasonic PT-DW5100U – we picked these up used at a great price from Elite Multimedia.
Here’s how the system works-
The Imac is the brain of the system, and it runs the HD license. It can be located anywhere on the network. Most of the time, ours lives in video master control. Sometimes we move it to front of house. The HD license allows the Imac to drive a projector, but we are not setup to do that right now.
Each Panasonic projector shoots onto a Da-lite 7′x12′ screen, and is driven by a Mac Mini that is strapped to the projector. All projectors are shooting a resolution of 1280×720. Each Mac Mini is hard wired to the network via cat5. If we are using the system to display a single still image that will not change, I can get away with using a wireless network. However, if we are going to run multiple images or video clips, I use a wired network. This assures that the images and videos stay synced correctly.
All of our content is built at a resolution of 3840×720 (3 screens wide x 1 screen high) and then broken out into three 1280×720 images or clips. Each clip is then loaded onto the appropriate Mac Mini and the Imac. Once the content is on the computers, I then add it to the Pro Video Player library on each computer and build the playlists.
Pro Video Player is very user-friendly. You can have multiple play lists, each with different images and video clips. When you click on a playlist on the Master computer, each Network Node moves to that playlist. Click on a video clip in a playlist on the Master, and each Network Node will start playing that clip. It’s that simple.
There are several different configurations of hardware that are available that can be scaled to meet your specific needs. There are also several advanced features in Pro Video Player that we haven’t used yet. I recommend browsing Renewed Vision’s website for more options and ideas.
-Matt-