Inside Our LiveStream

Church’s in today’s world are really starting to explore streaming weekend services. Over the past couple of months I have tried multiple service providers for streaming. Everything from Free to mid level and higher lever.

As always, keep in mind that the info below is what works best for our setup, situation, congregation, and workflow. It may or may not work for your situation. We have had our fare share of mistakes and issues but we have worked through those as quickly and smoothly as we could in order to provide the best experience to everyone that views our stream.

After we have had multiple issues and people watching coming to us stating issues they saw on their end it was time to look into a more serious solution. We had issues where our stream would drop out, Audio would skip through the the service, and lots of other issues. We decided we couldn’t have these issues any more as it was effecting our user experience for those that were unable to make it to our service. We knew we needed something simple and much more user-friendly to handle our streaming. After consulting multiple people and other church’s I looked into livestream.com, and we have had very little issues since switching over to them.

Here’s how we put it together:

Video Setup

• Service provider: Livestream
• Output settings: Standard “HD + Medium + Mobile” preset
• Computer: iMac 2.8 Ghz i5, 8gig ram, G-Force 6tb hard drive which auto sync’s to off site Synology NAS
• Software: Livestream Producer
• Input interface to iMac: Blackmagic Ultrastudio Mini Recorder
• Video output resolution for BM Mini Recorder: 720p60 SDI with embedded audio
• Video Signal/Routing Cameras/Computers -> BlackMagic 40×40 Router -> Blackmagic Atem 2 M/E  with BlackMagic 2 M/E Broadcast Panel-> 40×40 Router -> Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Recorder.
• Cameras: 2 Vaddio Roboshot 30’s, and 2 Marshall CV-502, and 1 Sony PXW-X70.

Click here to view a more in depth breakdown on our Production Room.

Audio Setup

For a long time we struggled with a similar issue that most churches struggle with. A bad mix for our recording/stream, Music is loud and speaking is soft ect.

We run a Yamaha M7CL at FOH. We have set up 2 mix busses that is for our recording.

• The first one is a Music buss, where anything that is music related is routed to. (All instruments, vocals, computers/videos ect.)
• Then the 2nd is a Speech mix. (Announcement mic, Pastors mic ect.)
• Then a separate line of room mics. (These are not routed through the FOH board)

The faders are locked on the 2 output mixes at unity, this way it keeps the recording the same and not able to be messed with, if the signal is in the mix/room then its in the recording.

Those get routed to a Symnet Auto mixer, the Symnet is hooked up to the network where we are able to set the audio settings, add compressors, limiters ect. Out of the Symnet to an audio DA where the signal is sent all over the campus, recordings, and our live stream.

Since switching to this (About 6 years ago) it has been trouble free and works great. We are able to get a really decent mix without having another volunteer and studio running a broadcast mix.

Click the following link to see our streams. Vimeo