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.
Thanks guys for your hard work. I traveled from Florida for my second Secret Church event. Initially, I was disappointed to be in the Simulcast instead of the main building, concerned that I would not experience the fullness of what I did before. Silly me, it’s the Spirit that moves and not the building.. Actually, I would like to share that those of us in the Simulcast may have gotten the better deal. Audio and Video were of such quality, lacking the crowd effect, we may have had a better exposure.
Thanks again.