March 13th, 2008
Digital Signage
Posted by Church Video Ideas under Blogs, Branding/Design, Churches, Communication, Consulting, Continuing Education, Ideas, Leadership, Media ministryBesides this Sunday, Easter and a lot of other things campus-wide, one of the projects I’m working on is digital signage for our community space. I have several ideas and thoughts about what I’d like to do. I’m still very open and looking for ideas on the how to do it.
I’d love to hear what you’re doing at your church for digital signage - both content and how you do it (what hardware and software you use). Here’s more food for thought on digital signage.
EXTRA:
I know some of you are new readers of my blog (that I met at NRB). Here are the 2 articles I mentioned in my classes: One is called “Firing a Volunteer” and the other is called “Refining the Team“.
BONUS:
Today I’m attending a creative brainstorming meeting at Fellowship Church. I’ll also be meeting with their worship pastor, Pace and getting to know him better. You can check out his new blog HERE.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Greg-man it was great to hang out with you today! Thanks for your input on our creative brainstorm. The door is open anytime.
As far as digital signage goes- we have several plasmas all over our campus that we feed content (upcoming events, current series, images, etc…) through our control room.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:20 am
I’ve several things done at different churchs. What is on our five-year plan at FBC-Mexia is to fit our regulaly used meeting rooms with 42 or 50 inch plasmas/LCD’s that have both network and local computer feeds. The system that we purchased to get started on video came with a Kramer scaler-switcher that gives us up to four HD feeds all we have to do is run the wiring. We felt going to this method would give us a “video screen” in all of the meeting rooms, since most of the presentations are being done via PowerPoint and using ELMO’s (or somesuch device). Two of those four feeds will go to a screen in our foyer and in our Christian Life Center. All of the screens will have a scrolling “calendar of events” with announcements, upcoming events, sevice & Sunday School information, and community information. We have a similar presentation that airs on television prior to our Sunday Morning Service right now. I hope this helps!
March 14th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Greg,
I don’t remember if we talked about it when you gave me the tour at Bent Tree a few weeks ago, but we’ve had a digital signage system in place for about 3 years now. We had a couple of goals for the project:
-Improve communication by giving better directional information (where to go for different ministries) and promotional (what’s going on)
-We also wanted to update the look of the church common areas
We have 3 digital signage systems.
-An 8 channel Enseo video server that feeds 12 LCD screens varying from 32″ to 42″ inches. It’s SD content unfortunately but I’ve found few regular people that can recognize it’s SD from 10 feet away. The system allows for a mix of video,text and graphics but we just use full screen video that was created in After Effects. It also allows us to schedule what videos are played back when
-We also have a Sony media player that feeds a projector that shoots onto a Reversa screen in our foyer. The media player does not playback scheduled videos, just a common playlist.
-We have 3 shuttles for remote parking that have screens in them. We feed the content to those with iPod Nanos because the iPods are self powered. We had problems we DVDs spinning down when the shuttles were idle.
March 15th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
We’ve been looking at two systems. AxisTV (Visix) and X2O. They are both a full software/hardware networked solution that has integrated video, rss feed capability and scheduling capabilities.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
We homebrewed a system for our signage. We’ve got five panels throughout the building. We’re using an Avatrix (http://www.audioauthority.com/product_list/AVAtrix) to route HD component video to the panels over cat5. We have a computer system with three video cards feeding three inputs, the video feed from the sanctuary, and the computer feed from the main slide system. The sign content is served by a custom Flash app that displays a window on each of the three displays with SlideShowPro. It’s been up and running for about 9 months now with great success. We also added a Crestron eControl for scheduling and web based control.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Matt…This sounds similar to what we want do in Mexia. What are the drawbacks of going this route versus using a switcher/scaler?
March 19th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
The big drawback is that everything has to be a 720p component signal. We’ve got 1 input/output signal converters or scalers for every source depending on what the source is. The other issue is that you have to develop your own content management/delivery system.
March 20th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Currently we are not broadcasting in HD. Is this really necessary? It seems to be an expensive upgrade from what we have. We broadcast live on Sundays and on several other occasions throughout the year over our local cable company. What are your thoughts?