January 16th, 2008
The Switch
Posted by Church Video Ideas under Audio, Books, Church Media, Churches, Continuing Education, Devotional, Funny, Greg's Favorites, HD, Intros and Announcements, Media ministry, Products, Software, Specials, Worship resourcesI’m sure many of you have done this and many of you will do this in the future - that’s making the switch from 4:3 to 16:9 (widescreen). Once I’ve been through the entire switch, I’d be happy to share any thoughts, lessons learned, feedback, etc. with those that are switching in the future.
For now, I’d love to here from any of you that have already made the switch. We’re in the process of uploading all new backgrounds, lower-thirds and creating the lower-third titles that we do for staff members (Pete Briscoe - Senior Pastor, etc.). If you have any words of wisdom, please email me at: greg@churchvideoideas.com.
Obviously, widescreen or 16:9 is not necessarily HD, but HD is 16:9. We are starting out with a total HD system, so if your church is full HD, I’d really like to hear from you. I’ve got lots of questions. 
*** Especially if you are using HD backgrounds in EasyWorship - HOLLA AT ME! I came home yesterday so frustrated and drained that I just stared at a piece of paper for about an hour and a half. I think I’m losing it!
We’re switching from another presentation software to EasyWorship campus-wide and I’m in the process (which I’ve done before and helped other churches with) of setting up EasyWorship for the first time and downloading all the codecs, etc. I’m sure it will eventually work, but we were having issues as of yesterday.
With the video card that came with the computer and the special (Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme) video card that we had to get to stay HD, we have 3 video outs. The guys from Clark ProMedia did the initial/hardware setup and I’m trying to setup EasyWorship itself. Again, if you are HD and using EasyWorship, PLEASE give me a shout.
* My friend, Dave Clark, of National Community Church, just wrote an article entitled “Church Media: A 2008 Forecast“. I think it’s worth checking out. As he said, “High-definition video also will appear on the screens of many more churches this year. The prices of high-definition cameras and equipment have become affordable, even for average-sized churches.”
BONUS:
This just in from blog sponsor Worship Leader Magazine: The Upgrade Your Stage state-of-the-art giveaway is your chance to win an assortment of resources with a retail value of over $15,000 (for the grand prize) for your service of worship. We want to equip one church, so they can use their financial resources in other ways. There are also 1st and 2nd place winners who will also receive significant prizes.
Anyone can enter, as long as your church fits the guidelines, but the church chosen will most likely have the most need along with the best story. Though there is no set cap of church size, the finalists will likely be churches of 500 or less.
EXTRA:
I started a Shelfari group for Church 2.0 leaders - this is where you can list your favorite books that you recommend other Church leaders read. Check it out HERE.
EXTRA, EXTRA:
Anyone getting a MacBook Air?
January 16th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Some time ago I switched all my personal setups (except a linux computer with an old CRT) to 16:9 and I’m loving it. One of the shortcomings is that so many backgrounds aren’t ready for 16:9.
There are some in a flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/worshipgraphics/pool/
As for the macbook air… it’s too expensive. If I had money to blow I’d buy one. But, I need an ethernet port and to be able to swap batteries on long trips. So, it’s a no go.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:42 am
MacBook Air is the bomb-diggity, but I just got my 2.6 MacBook Pro, and I won’t give up that sucker for anything!
January 16th, 2008 at 10:42 am
We’ve made a partial switch to 16:9 in our sanctuary. We added some plasmas for backdrop/ eye candy on our stage. We use ProVideoPlayer to play a mix of SD and HD content from Digital Juice, 12″ Designs and stuff I create. Our main projectors are still 4:3 SD.
The SD stuff does not look good on the screens. But it’s background stuff that’s viewed from a distance so I’m not too worried about it. We are slowly adding more and more HD content and it looks great. We’ll probably switch our main screens in the next 2 years or so.
But ProVideoPlayer and ProPresenter have been a breeze to play 4:3 or 16:9/ SD or HD. It’s just a matter of the computer keeping up.
I’m praying for ya man! Hope everything goes as smooth as it can!
January 16th, 2008 at 10:44 am
We are considering the switch as well. Let us all know what you learn.
Thanks so much.
- john
January 16th, 2008 at 11:51 am
We are currently building a new campus with a move in date of early summer. 6 months ago I was ready to say “Don’t go to HD, it is too expensive, and won’t add much.”
But now, I don’t see why not. The cost that it adds is a low percentage of the overall tech budget, and going HD now is a lot cheaper than upgrading in a few years.
Matthew
January 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Hi everyone,
We switched to 16:9 during a remodel of our sanctuary almost 3 years ago (they were just finishing the remodel when I came on staff), and I love it. We don’t do a lot in HD yet, but our system is all HD capable. (We work in 1366×768 resolution in MediaShout through Kramer VP-724XL switcher/scalers to 2 Sanyo projectors. The Kramers, while nice, don’t deal with 16:9 inputs natively. Strangely they handle 16:9 outputs natively, but not inputs. Weird. So they’re the first in line to be replaced.) The biggest benefit for me is song lyrics - they can be big, yet still fit enough on text lines to make them sensible. We use indenting to make them more readable too, and it still gives us lots of room.
The 2 more challenging things have been 1. finding 16:9 (both SD and HD) resources for backgrounds, etc. (We create all our own images, so that’s not a biggie, but motion’s been another story - I’m just starting to learn AE, so we’re starting to do more in-house too. Sermonvideos.com has been a good resource for me for HD stuff); and 2. dealing with groups who come in and have their own Powerpoints or videos (weddings, funerals, etc.) - they need to be content with the vertical black bars, since most people don’t create 16:9 stuff by themselves.
But overall I highly recommend it to anyone who’s in a position to do it.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:29 am
We are SD 16:9 as of last November, install done by Platt Design. Very well done. 12,000 lumen sanyo projectors, it looks very crisp. We are using ProPresenter, and it will fill the screen with the background file if you want it to, which works with most files, obviously some just don’t look right. But our favorite resources for backgrounds recently have been sermonvideos.com and ignitermedia.com. I like the Digital Juice stuff, but it more and more is looking dated. revostock.com is also a sweet site for HD stuff, but a bit pricey if you download a lot of stuff. Overall we are extremely happy with having gone to 16:9. It looks more current, you can make the text fit much nicer, and having such bright projectors, everything is gorgeous!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
We also went 16:9 last year with MediaShout. We really enjoy the larger displays and the more “current” feeling aspect ratio. However, we’ve been stuck running 1024×768 and then using the projectors to scale to a wide-screen format. This is in spite of the fact that our graphics card and projectors support 16:9. Our tech guy couldn’t get MediaShout to send it’s output to the graphics card in a 16:0 format - the best we could do was to use narrow fonts to reduce the effect of the horizontal stretching. Anyone know how to do this?