show time. Streaming has a built-in stress
factor that I’m still not ‘over’, and pre-show
stream tests do a lot to reduce that stress.
By having that hour of margin, I’m purposely
leaving myself a healthy window to address any
issues with connectivity.
For me, that connectivity includes cameras and
audio feeds, Ecamm Live, Restream, as well as
Facebook and YouTube. At this point, I’ve had
meltdowns at pretty much every ‘connectivity
node’, and that includes YouTube’s infamous
“Live streaming is not available at this time”
error message appearing even once the
actual stream green lights and goes live. The
technology is not perfect, so giving yourself
a buffer is key. The aforementioned actually
happened during my “Music + Technology”
episode, and I actually screen-shared my walk
through the experience. People got a chance to
observe that I didn’t have an online meltdown,
and that I finally had to resort to leaving a
message and link for people to jump over from
YouTube to Facebook – and they did. It was
actually a huge help to be able to share this
experience with people, but at the same time it
should come as a stark reminder that even with
pre-show stream tests, YouTube can go upside
down on you, ditto for Facebook. The moral of
the story is to test, but don’t trust!
CONFIDENCE MONITOR
Honestly, stress is a constant factor in this
process, so anything I can do to reduce the
stress level is key. I recently picked up a fiveinch
confidence monitor so I’m absolutely
positive about what is actually streaming out
to Facebook and YouTube. Akin to the audio
engineer being able to solo the broadcast mix
in headphones, this gives me one place I can
always turn to for a clean image of what the
stream is seeing. There’s a reason they call it a
confidence monitor!
SCENES
Regardless of how many cameras you are
using, scenes can and will make a world of
difference in the production value of your
stream. While your experience may be different
(and I celebrate that), between camera freezing
and other challenges, I moved from OBS to
Ecamm Live and have been loving pretty much
everything about the experience. The built-in
camera switcher, camera effects (color, zoom,
pan) and green screen make for a ton of great
options that you can easily map to scenes.
I’ve spent a lot of time editing video in post,
so I tend to use any streaming application or
switcher as a vehicle to avoid staying on a
static shot too long. If you’re shooting with one
camera, its super easy to use Ecamm’s zoom
feature to create wide and medium shots,
which you can save to ‘lockable’ scenes. With
a little practice this makes it easy to develop a
nice production workflow that’s there with the
click of a mouse!
GREEN SCREEN
If you’ve spent any time on Zoom.us, you’ve
probably seen enough green screen for a lifetime
– I feel you. But… the green screen functionality
in Ecamm is really, really good, and the ability to
easily load my own custom backgrounds gives
me a huge amount of freedom to craft my own
look and feel, the antithesis of the Zoom green
screen experience. With the right background
photo or video, many pastors and worship
teams could benefit from this functionality.
Announcements are a great example of how
this could work well. Since handing off a mic
is a no go right now, you could easily shoot
announcements remotely and use green screen
to fly in a photo of the background where the
main message is being shot.
That said, doing green screen because you
can, does not always mean that you should.
Technology when used judiciously adds to the
production, when used poorly, it gets in the
way, which gets us to our next point.
AVOID DISTRACIONS
As you my might imagine, I’ve been spending
a lot of time watching how churches of various
sizes approach what they’re doing online. As
I was watching the pastor of a well-known
church movement speak, the amount of audible
compression artifacts on his voice become so
distracting that I had to stop watching.
TURN OFF ADS
While I’m sure it was not intentional, another
well-known church movement’s re-broadcast
jumped to a Mailchimp ad right in the middle of
the first song. Not the worship experience they
or I had in mind.
STREAMING YOUR WORSHIP
Like the previous points, the phrase, “Just
because you can, doesn’t mean you should…”
comes to mind. On another rebroadcast, the
vocals were so painfully out of tune it reminded
me that streaming is not the only problem that
needs fixing. If the team can’t sing in tune, you
should really consider not streaming them until
they can, or until your tech team has mastered
the use of auto-tune. And by the way, many
churches use auto-tune, so it doesn’t carry
the stigma it once did. Ditto for running more
tracks than team members, in this era at least,
as it can do a lot to lift the streaming worship
experience.
MAP A COURSE
One of the most important things that God
put on my heart about all of this is the analogy
of ‘travel tacks’ on a world map. We’re on a
journey, and it is vital that we realize that most
of the time we’re not at our destination yet,
which means we need to keep our head up
and our eyes open in these busy times. Don’t
let something as important as your live streams
become matter of fact – they matter too much
to the people who are tuning in, seeking a
much-needed connection to God.
Set course on a destination with some specific
production goals in mind, and stay mindful of
reaching that destination each week. In turn,
when you reach that destination you’ll know
it and be prepared to set your eyes on what
comes next for you and your teams.
REVIEW, REVIEW, REVIEW
Even on challenging weeks I try to review the
July 2020
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