Tag Archives: sunday

Sunday 2/3/2008

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Stage shotLast Sunday was again a great day of worship.  The choir was again sounding better than before the EQ change we made last week.  Today we moved some of the worship to the end of the service and the songs were an extension of the message.  It was an awesome change.  I had spent most of my week in the lift working on refocusing some of the lighting.  We also hung some new source four pars for color wash.  My goal was to get even video lighting for Pastor Mark and really improve on the praise team lighting.  The praise team wash was a big improvement.  I don’t know if I will ever get it “perfect,” but it was much improved.  Our pastor wash was not awful, but over all was a little dim and had a few dark spots on the edges of the lighting.  When I was up in the air, I found that we had a mix of 19 degree and 26 degree ellipsoidal fixtures in the lighting for the pastor.  This was leading to some hot spots.  I was able to replace all of the tubes to 19 degree but two.  This left me 2 spots on the stage that were only covered by 26 degree fixtures and gave us big dark spots.  You can guess where Pastor wanted to stand…  Yup in the dark spots.  My video directors, Tim and Jason had their hands full shading the cameras.  19 degree tubes replacing the 26 degrees are on my list for this week to fix.On Wednesday, Tim and I decided to move one of our cameras to a new position.  This camera’s previous position was only really useful for shooting up stage and was very limited during the message.  We moved the camera back about 15 feet and over toward the center about 25 feet.  We can now take down stage shots until about the center of the stage. Still not great, but a much better position.I would love to know how many church technical production teams are using light meters to set wash lighting for video….

Sunday 1/27/2008

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Wow what a day. Since the day that I started working in the production department our worship leader has been expressing his discontent about the choir sound.  We have tried hanging the mics, putting them on stands, and moving them to many positions.  Never have we been able to get the sound that we are looking for.  I had resigned to start looking for other mic options.We are currently using six AKG C3ooo mics in two rows of three.  The first row of mics is in front of the choir about 1 foot above the head of the second row and about 2 feet in front of the first row.   The second row of mics are in the same configuration.  At rehearsal on Wednesday I decided to try a few other mics that we had lying around.  In the process of doing this, I started enabling and disabling the EQ on the channel strip.  Come to find out the process our audio guys were using to ring out the mics was really choking the sound.  For the rest of that rehearsal we flatted the EQ and did just some very minor changes to clean up and take out some ringing frequencies.  We also found that the overhead choir monitors had many of the wrong instruments and that was being picked up by the mics.I couldn’t tell that the change we made really helped that night because we discovered the issue late in the rehearsal.  So I was excited to see what the effect would be today.  Let me just say that the choir sounded much better and we were finally able to balance the praise team and the choir.  It was great to finally start making some headway in this area.As happy I was with the choir mic changes, I was even more surprised at how awesome the worship was in our Mosaic service.  Currently most Sundays, I’m filling the role of producer.  In that role I’m always looking ahead to make sure that the team hits the next cue, but today I found myself worshiping.  The music was great and the entire room seemed to be involved and I just couldn’t help but worship.  It was amazing to see how great worship songs matched with a good mix (Amanda and Steve did great today) really brought the congregation into corporate worship.  What a great day.

Tech Issues Sunday

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Wow!!! Today was video issues day. Our confidence monitor was not displaying the right content and was patched wrong. We found a really big short in the RGBHV cable that feeds the left and right side screens. This was causing the random blinks in the screens and finally the right screen just stopped displaying content. Last but for sure not least, the graphics coming from the CG machines are being washed out on the production switcher. None of this is going to be difficult to fix which is great, but it is strange how it all happens at once. For the past few weeks I have spent my limited tech time improving our system. Sometimes you have to step back and do some repairs before you can move on to the bigger and better things. It is good to have great volunteers that put up with me freaking out when something doesn’t work.