So I just finished editing the Saturday evening sermon at Journey and I’m waiting on the video to export. I figured now would be a perfect time to inform everyone that we do this every week - record Jimmy on Saturday night, edit in the lower thirds in (the verses that appear at the bottom on the video at Northwest and on the web), export the raw footage, copy over the video to the Northwest iMac, setup the rest of the songs in ProPresenter on the Northwest iMac, and burn a backup DVD in case the computer dies during the sermon. Sound like a lot? It is. And now its time to go home.

Here’s a video I edited that we showed at church a few weekends ago during the Bailout series. The message is incredible. (Played during this sermon.)

Generosity from Smooth Via on Vimeo.

The title of this post might make you think of a few different things. Some would ask the question “What does theology matter in issues of practicality?” Hopefully that’s not what you’re asking, as any church issue is a theological issue. That is because the church is the body of Christ and theology is the study of God, who we as Christians believe is Christ.

A more common question with multi-site is “Why call it the same church when its really two churches, one which is watching a video of a pastor preach instead of having a live pastor preach there?” (This is actually only one model of multi-site, but it’s the one my church is using, so I’m not addressing the others right now.) This is the question I really want to answer, as I struggled with it when I first discovered that was my church’s vision.

The church, as I said earlier, is the body of Christ. A local church is how this is practically lived out - believers within a common geographic context meeting together as a family. In my tradition (baptistic) there is the need to hear the teaching of God’s Word and the expression of the ordinances - baptism and the Lord’s Supper or Communion. Journey does all of those things as one body, making it one church with multiple services, one of which is in a different location that the other three.

To answer the complaint that each campus should have it’s own pastor - our’s do. The campus that watches the preaching on video still has a campus pastor there for all pastoral needs. He actually is better able to minister to his flock there, since he doesn’t need to spend time during the week prepping for a sermon. We also are able to share resources between campuses, since we are still one church. Anyone who’s ever planted a church knows how important it is to have resources. Well, we do.

I just barely touched the issues, so what are some other issues out there? Or things you’d like me to dive deeper into? Or disagreements you have with this? Feedback is a wonderful thing.

I posted this back in September on my old blog.

Today was the first day I visited my churches’ second campus. It’s our second work week in there - last week the sound was set up and this week I helped set up the video. We’re still working through some kinks in the video quality, since we’re shooting HDV (not HD) 1080i60 and I’ve never worked with that before. The image is enormous, though (about 35 feet wide). I reminisced to the days of meeting in the school - before we acquired our current warehouse. There’s a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork that setup and tear-down fosters that seems lacking when in a fixed location. I definitely felt that today. I look forward to many more weeks, months, and years of that. The current plan at Journey is to reach all of Raleigh, and that involves many campuses.

I’ve been posting a lot of catch-up posts from my old blog lately, but today I want to post on video at Journey Church partly in hopes of showing others what we do, but also hoping some of you out there have suggestions on ways to improve it, streamline it, and make it more volunteer-friendly.

I’ll start with filming. We use a Canon XL-H1 to record our video of the Saturday evening service at Northeast Campus (Tech specs: we use HDV 1080i60 - 60 frames per second interlaced). (Side note: HDV is different from HD because, as far as I can tell, it records 1440×1080 pixels instead of 1920×1080. To make it a wide-screen size, however, it stretches the pixels - instead of square they are anamorphic.) The XL-H1 is equipped with a Focus Enhancements Firestore FS-C DTE Recorder (Tech specs: 60 GB Firewire 400 with an awesome battery!), which records our video straight to hard drive. We record in Sync mode, which allows us to record a backup to DV tape as well. (Tech specs: we set manual focus and white balance every week, our gain is 0, our shutter speed is 1/100, and our iris is whatever brings the light meter to the center). 

Next, post-production. We plug our Firestore drive into our Mac Pro (Tech specs: 2×2.8 Ghz Quad-core Intel Xeon with 8 GB running Leopard) and copy over the captured files. We then add them to Final Cut Studio 2, add in lower thirds, add a flicker filter for our backlit scrim, normalize our audio, add in videos we used that service (intro video, etc.), and export the raw video. We then copy that and the ProPresenter schedule for the weekend over to the iMac from the Northwest Campus and leave that for the Campus Pastor (Paul Crouthamel) to pick up the next morning. As a backup, we also export a DVD (through VisualHub) of the service and leave it with the iMac.

Finally, we post to the web a Quicktime export of the raw file (Tech specs: we export in H.264 1280×720, 3000 kbps multi-pass with 128 kbps audio) and upload to Vimeo. We link to that from our sermons page.

Hope this post makes you feel more knowledgeable. This whole setup has been a major learning curve for me and everyone else involved, but I think we’re starting to get the hang of it. If this sounds like something you’d like to do (and you go to Journey), drop me an email and let me know. Feel free to ask questions or offer suggestions here or through email. I’m always game for talking about this stuff!