recording services

[halstonb]

Good morning / afternoon / evening / night (whenever you happen to be reading this.)

I work for a church in the clearwater Florida area, and we are beginning to record and stream our services. currently I am using a canon Gl2 to record to tape while streaming to USTREAM. is there a better way to be recording, is anyone out there doing this and knows a better way or set up. we are not able to spend much money right now but I would like to make some improvements in the future, what should I be looking at doing? I am new to the video side of all of this so any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

I also wanted to know if anyone out there is using a video hosting service and what that would be. I have used podbean in the past but that was for audio only. I have been editing and uploading the videos directly to our website but it eats up a lot of space.

 

[bishopthomas]

I used to work for a church and we would record all of our services to CD. We also did a live broadcast once a week. All of the recording/broadcast went through a separate console taken from a split, and required a separate operator to build the mix. This is the best way to do it, but you're probably not ready to go there yet, so here is my advice:

Get a CD recorder and/or a computer with a line input and record the main mix out of the console. Track increment the CD as you go and by the time it's finished finalizing at the end of the service you'll have something that is ready to be duplicated and distributed. This is the easiest way, but there are many other methods all the way up to multitrack recording through a splitter and separate preamps. I think you're looking at the simple approach, but if you're want something different please let us know and we can make other recommendations.

 

[GreyWyvern]

I used to record to just CD. After we got iMacs for ProPresenter, I started recording into GarageBand also. About a year later, the CD recorder started to have trouble recognizing discs and finalizing after recording. It was too cost prohibitive to fix or replace, so I now only record into GB. That actually worked out well, because I was wanting to phase out the CDs.

Anyway, I just took an Aux out that was open and ran it straight into the computer. I haven't had any issues with it. At the appropriate time, I just reach over in front of my media tech and hit Command+Tab, R (starts recording), then Command+Tab to go back to ProPre. At the end of the message, I do the same thing. It then takes about 3 minutes to cut and fade the beginning and end. Then I share it to iTunes (takes about 7 minutes to render) and put it on the web that same morning. People love having it available so quickly. If you don't have a Mac, then you can't exactly do just what I do, but there are plenty of PC based programs that would allow you to do pretty much the same thing: record, a quick edit and fades, and render to mp3.

Hope this helps.

Dave

 

[Footer]

libsyn // podcasting made easy

Libsyn will take care of your bandwidth issues. It also will automatically roll your upload into a podcast that anyone can download and subscribe to. You could also upload the service to one of the many streaming services.

Getting it into a video podcast form will be the best thing for you and your members. It will allow them to easily get the service every week without thinking about it.

As far as audio goes, how involved is your service? Are we talking a pastor and a choir/organ or we looking at a full band? Your camera does have an input so the easiest way to get audio out would be to use the camera input. That way you can still record to tape for backup and the audio would be there and be synced. If you have an involved service your going to need a separate operator to just feed the camera. Right now though I would just use the camera's mic to get a room mix and go from there. Get your streaming working right, get your RSS feed set up, and go from there when you have cash to expand (and have subscribers screaming for better quality)....

Before you know it you will have a tricaster and multiple cameras!