CSL 014 – How to Level up the Production Quality of your Church Live Stream

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:53):

Hello there, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for joining. I’m excited to be back this week for ChurchSpring Live. I was actually out last week on a South Dakota Lake vacation. And so Mike and Rohn took over and it looked like they did an amazing job. I learned a lot from the website reviews that they did. So if you did miss last week’s episode, zero 13, make sure to tune in by the way, because they dropped some really good nuggets of truth there. Hey, I would love to know who is attending our live event today. We have with us Rohn Gibson, co founder of ChurchSpring, if you haven’t met him yet in this online world and my name is Isabelle. So yeah, introduce yourself in the comments below if you haven’t yet. Let us know where you’re from your church name.

Isabelle Faletti (00:01:44):

You will need to give Stream Yard access so that we can show your name and your church on the screen here. So while you are introducing yourself in the comments below right there I do want to just take a few moments and welcome a few new members that we have to the ChurchSpring family. We have, ah, we’ve been so blessed. We are having just so many new churches come find ChurchSpring, and so we can help them increase their website presence so that they can reach their community. And we’re so honored that we have that opportunity. So welcome New Covenant Christian Fellowship from New Castle Denmark. We have Lakeview Baptist Church from Hollywood, Alabama. And then we have someone out of Florida as Anthem I’m sorry, Anthem church. And then we also have a Greater Works Worship Center from Indianapolis.

Isabelle Faletti (00:02:44):

Again, and that’s just a couple, but just wanted to say welcome to the ChurchSpring family. We are. Yeah. We’re just so excited to have you here. If you’re new to ChurchSpring we helped churches build intuitive, affordable frustration, free websites. If again, so if you’re new to ChurchSpring, this is a really good actual intro to ChurchSpring. Today we are going to talking about how you can increase your live stream production. So it may, it may be a little advanced, we’ll get more into the details of what we’ll be talking about in a couple of moments. But if you’ve always kind of wondered, how can I take my live stream production to the next professional level? This is the episode that will be going into all those details. So we’ll be talking about various specific resources, tools, cameras that you can use to, to get to that professional or more, more advanced level of live stream. So before we do that though, Rohn, I know you have a couple of announcements.

Rohn Gibson (00:03:49):

Yeah. It’s just a couple of quick things. So we do absolutely want to engage with you here today. So hopefully you’re not coming just to consume content, but you’re coming to engage with us. So if you do have any questions along the way, as Isabella’s mentioned, please put your questions in the comments, whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube, all of those will come in here at a stream yard for us, and we will answer as many of those as we can. I’m actually having issues right now, seeing comments. So Isabelle’s going to play air traffic controller for us today kind of filter through those, curate those comments for us. So that’ll be, that’d be awesome. Thanks.

Isabelle Faletti (00:04:30):

So welcome. We have Jean from Lighthouse Church. We’re excited to have you here. Douglas from First Press Presbyterian Church. Awesome. Welcome Douglas. We’re happy to have you here, Ron Gardner. Great as always to have you. We you’re you’re you’re, you’re so fun to have on our live streams and yes, we do have, like, we, we do know who comes each Thursday at 10:00 AM central to these live streams. And we love seeing the regulars is kind of like looking out on the first row of at church or at a speaking event. And we see our go to people. So

Rohn Gibson (00:05:08):

Yeah. Thanks Ron, let us

Isabelle Faletti (00:05:10):

There Al we have Al I know we see you often on ChurchSpring Live too. So welcome. All right. Looks like that’s all that we have for now.

Rohn Gibson (00:05:23):

Okay. Can you hear me okay. I can hear you. Okay. Can you hear? Okay, perfect. Let’s keep going. Yes. Yes.

Isabelle Faletti (00:05:30):

Verizon commercial. Can you hear me now? Or I dunno, whatever that commercial was back in the day.

Rohn Gibson (00:05:36):

All right. So everybody likes share. If you’ve got somebody that you think could really find value in this live stream, as we talk about, really this is our third episode in the series on live streaming. So we’re super excited to jump into the more advanced side of things today. So if you think there’s somebody at your church or a there at your ministry

Rohn Gibson (00:05:58):

That could really value from this, please like share it. Maybe even call him, text him, say, Hey, you got to join this, go check out the ChurchSpring Live for those that, as we get into this, and again, it’s going to be more advanced. There may be things that are kind of over your head, or maybe you’re right in it. Which will be really cool. That’s our goal on there will be a replay of this available on the ChurchSpringwebsite@churchspring.com forward slash C S L zero one four. And you can go check that out if there’s any things you’re like, man, I remember him talking about that. All you have to do is go back. The replay will be available there. So I don’t feel like you’ve got to take impeccable notes today. We’ve got you covered. The video will be there. All the show notes. We are going to talk about a ton of different resources and links today. Literally, I’m going to unpack the exact live streaming setup that we utilize at our church. So we’re going to give you links to all of it. So all of that will be available at churchspring.Com/C S L zero one four. Welcome Carol, Anchorage, Alaska in the house. That’s so awesome.

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:05):

How fun. Alaska is on my bucket list of places to go. So I’ll know who to reach out to. When that comes one day,

Rohn Gibson (00:07:13):

It’s early there in Anchorage. What is it? Probably 8:07, somewhere in there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:17):

That is dedication. Carol. Thanks for tuning in live for us. It looks like, I don’t know if I’m going to say this right. Brissy. Is that, is that how you say your name? I’m sorry if I’m not saying your name correctly. But that’s great. Thanks for sending this invite to your friends. Keep that up. I’m so excited that you’re, you’re sharing that with us. We do have, Oh, Carol says 7:00 AM. Wow. You are listening to us at 7:00 AM.

Rohn Gibson (00:07:50):

Wow! That is dedication, right there – that is awesome.

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:52):

That is – hope you have some coffee. We do have a question from Lighthouse Church Rohn. They’re asking they’re a small church in larger building released tips. Be really expensive. Probably something we can, I don’t know if we wanna address that now or maybe later on. But that may be a question that we have other listeners kind of wondering and asking.

Rohn Gibson (00:08:13):

Yeah. Yeah. So this will be more expensive. Expensive can be a relative term. What’s expensive to one church might not be to another. So we’ve given you again in the first episode we did so two episodes ago, it was basically how you can do it, you know, with just a phone with resources you already have. Then we kind of upped it a little bit on the second episode where multi-camera with phones using a switcher app. And then this one, we’ll kind of take it to the next level. So I’m, I’m actually part of a small church and this is literally the setup we use. So we’re not a thousand member church. We’re not even a 300 member church and this is what we utilize. And it actually based on our budget that we had set it actually came in substantially less than the budget that we had set.

Rohn Gibson (00:09:01):

So, you know, depending on kind of where you’re at budget wise, and even if this isn’t something you would do now, as your church grows, this will still be very relevant to you because now you’ll have the roadmap of, if it is a little more expensive than where you’re at now or then you can afford, now, this kind of tells you, okay, when we’re ready to take that next step, this is what we could look forward to walking into. So I think regardless of whether you’re there now Lord willing, you will be there eventually, and this will kind of give you a roadmap of where you’re going to go. So hopefully that, that helps a little bit. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:09:36):

Yeah. That’s good. And like Rohn mentioned, if you’re not there right now, then you will know that this is the resource to go back to when you are at that point, because it’ll, it’ll, it’ll make more sense to you and you’ll know the tools. So wherever you’re on the journey, this is a must I must attend. I just don’t want to say Ron Gardner. I do see your question that you have added here. We will make sure to address the different questions that you have. I know it looks like you have one, two, three, four questions in that. So I see that we’ll answer that later on in the show here. So don’t worry, I’m not ignoring you Mr. Gardner,

Rohn Gibson (00:10:14):

Ron, you gotta give us, let us know. I know your website was one that Mike and I reviewed last week. So let us know. Have you taken any action on that feedback? Not to put you on the hot seat? Well, maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit, just a little brotherly encouragement. How’s that going? As far as some of those recommendations, maybe leave us a comment or even shoot us an email. That’d be awesome.

Isabelle Faletti (00:10:35):

Yeah. I’d love to know that. Okay. Well, as Rohn mentioned so this is part three of a four part series that we were doing on how to live stream your services. So again, this is more of the advanced level of how you can increase your live stream production quality. We talked about, we had part one on an episode, zero 11. I’ll actually pop that up here. There we go. With part one, it was really focused on the beginner. So if you are completely new to live stream, you don’t really know the first step to take, go back and watch that replay churchspring.com / C S L zero 11 zero budget zero to kind of a very limited budget for beginning level. And then part two, we talked more from an intermediate level with more of a limited budget. So some, some, some extra bandwidth there for a budget of again, how to take it the next level.

Isabelle Faletti (00:11:39):

So if you’ll see here, we have a pattern start from kind of ground zero and then slowly become 1% better and how to take it up one level up at a time. So today we are going to share so much are going to go on to share the recipe for success that you really need to take your live stream to the next level. So with cameras, with equipment encoders switchers, Oh, it’s, it’s a lot of amazing stuff. So I am very curious for all those who are attending live or if you’re watching in the replay. UI have a question for you. So listen up here. UI would love to know what is your live stream comfort level, so which live stream level best describes you, are you beginning, intermediate advanced or maybe even a pro? Uso let me know, type in the comments below, let me know which level live stream level you are.

Isabelle Faletti (00:12:40):

So beginning, intermediate advanced or a professional. So type that in the comments below, as, as it comes in, I’ll pop it on the screen here so that we can kind of see where our, where are you guys are at, because that will help us, even in this live stream it’ll help us communicate best to you and kind of know how best to, to give you a value. So it looks like we have a couple already Carol beginning. Totally fine. Again, make sure to go back, listen to episode 11. So that’s some just gonna pop it up churchspring.com/csl 11. Incredibly helpful. We have an, a beginning, another beginning, intermediate from Douglas, Ron Gardner beginning, intermediate. Yeah, Ron. I would say your intermediate personally for having to work with you and your questions that you have. I think you’re, you’re, you’re beyond that, the beginning.

Isabelle Faletti (00:13:36):

So you can give yourself some, some extra credit there. Yeah, Al, we have intermediate and Benjamin Nelson. Hey, welcome. We’re excited to have you here. I’m intermediate advanced. Yep. I would agree Benjamin from having worked with you on your website. I would agree with that self-assessment and then yeah, Lighthouse, we, we have questioned, there would love to stop doing a Facebook and actually have people come to our website. Is that possible? We actually talk about that and both part one and part two of our live stream series here. So if you haven’t, I know you’re going to be tired of hearing me say that, but if you haven’t yet watched part one and part two, go back and listen to that this week. We talk a lot about why you do want to stream it to Facebook why we recommend that over your website Facebook, it has more engagement options.

Isabelle Faletti (00:14:38):

It can go more viral, so people can tag and share. You don’t actually have to be a Facebook member to view your live stream on Facebook, as long as you set it to public. So there’s a lot of kind pros. Why we, why we recommend Facebook for that very reason versus you’re streaming it specifically to your website. Okay. No lighthouse. Don’t stop asking questions. These are great questions. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we exist to serve you’re here. Okay. So Ron, let’s just kind of dive in. I know that we have a lot to cover today, so for everybody listening again, keep, keep the questions coming again. This helps us equip you in the best way possible. That’s why we do these live streams so that we can equip you. So whether your question is a beginning question or an advanced question ask below, we’ll answer it in this live stream, or maybe instead we’ll respond to you after this live stream event. So thanks all. Alright, Rohn, my first question for you is kind of a big one and we’re just going to jump right in on today’s topic. So how can we increase my church live streaming production level?

Rohn Gibson (00:15:55):

Yeah. So first of all, we need to get the juices flowing a little bit here, cause we’re, we are diving in the deep end a little bit more here. And I’ve got a little bug in my throat, so everybody take a drink of water. Let’s get the juices flowing. I’ll probably be revisiting this here a little bit over the next 20 to 30 minutes or so. Let me do that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:16:16):

Yep. That’s okay. And it looks like care, Carolyn, we also from New Zealand, that’s where you’re joining. Wow, welcome. That is amazing.

Rohn Gibson (00:16:26):

Praise the Lord. All right. So how can I increase my church live stream production level? So the first thing, a couple of little caveats and then we’re going to really jump in are, so number one, I think it’s so important when we start talking about technology that we don’t forget why we’re doing this. It can be so easy to start worshiping technology. Like you gotta have the latest and greatest stuff and you’ve got you know, it’s all about the glitz and the glamour and the production value and all of those sorts of things. And granted, we do want to do our best as unto the Lord, but ultimately I think it’s just, we just have to be really careful that we don’t forget why we’re doing this and ultimately why we’re doing this. We want, we want to reach the world with the gospel, but the hope that we have within us.

Rohn Gibson (00:17:11):

So I just want to say this just because is maybe this isn’t where you’re at right now, or maybe it’s some of the things that we’re going to talk about are above your budget. That’s okay. Remember why. You can accomplish many of the same things with the resources that God has already given you. So I just want to say that we, this isn’t about worshiping technology or putting technology in a place that’s not meant to be. Technology is just a conduit for the gospel. Okay. So I want to say that first of all, and then secondly, this is going to be a bit more advanced. So there’s going to be things we talk about maybe terms that are brand new to you that you’ve never heard before. And don’t judge yourself. This is learning. Okay. So even though you may not be at an advanced level currently, what this will give you.

Rohn Gibson (00:18:01):

Like I mentioned earlier as a roadmap for when you do get there, cause you will, when you get there, you’re going to have the path of now, where do I go forward? Some of the worst things when you’re going through technology and figuring out how to do these things is yes. Knowing what to do now, but then thinking through, okay, as our church grows and we may be transitioned to a different building or maybe a more permanent building, maybe we’re a church plant and we’re going to be going into, you know, a more permanent facility that offers all these different resources. It can be very overwhelming to say, what does that look like then? Well, the value of today for some of you may be, I now know this is what that plan can look like for me. So I just want to throw that out there.

Rohn Gibson (00:18:44):

Don’t be overwhelmed. If you’re not at this level, just listen, you’re going to learn a lot today and you may not use it within the next 90 days, but you may use it within the next nine months, nine years, who knows based on where you’re at at your ministry level. So just when I, a couple of quick asterick qualifiers before we really jump in. So ultimately to increase the production level, what you start to do as you start to break out the components of a successful live stream, and you start putting in higher quality components as each of those. So what am I talking about? Well, let’s talk about the top five components of an advanced live stream set up. So number one is sources. Okay. So when I say sources, what I’m talking about are all the different components that will eventually plug into what we’re going to talk about next, which is the encoder.

Rohn Gibson (00:19:37):

So that could be your audio source. You know, that could be from your soundboard. It could be just directly from a mic, whatever that is, your audio source or sources. Another source could be a, your different cameras. Maybe you have one camera, maybe you have five cameras. Maybe you have 20 cameras, whatever that looks like, your video, your cameras, that’s another source. Graphics is an example of another source where we’ve talked about in previous episodes, those lower thirds, like the example of putting the pastor’s title, the name of the church graphics. So maybe during the giving time during your service, you can actually just put a graphic up that says, Hey, if you would like to give to the ministry of visit this website to participate in giving here at the church. So different graphics are other sources. Another source that people often don’t consider is a computer. So a lot of times during church services if you’re not at more, a traditional church that use hymnals, maybe you use a projector or even TV screens at your church. Typically those are coming from a computer, so you can actually turn your computer into source for your live stream of content. Okay? So that’s what we mean when we talk about, excuse me, sources

Rohn Gibson (00:20:56):

Next on our list, so number two is the encoder. The encoder is really kind of the hub where all the magic happens. It’s where you’re bringing in all these sources. It’s giving you access to all of these different sources that then you can play with to really make your final production. That’s going to be live stream. So the encoder is what that

Rohn Gibson (00:21:21):

It’s called. And again, that’s where all those sources come in and there’s multiple types Of encoder. So very basic lesson here on encoders is there’s two types. Number one is a software encoder. And the second one is a hardware encoder. So I’ll start with hardware. So the hardware encoder is actually a separate piece of hardware that you use that all of those sources plug into.

Rohn Gibson (00:21:47):

So the benefit of that is that now, instead of Using up all of your computer’s resources for live streaming, It actually processes that in a separate hardware component that then brings all of that together. And that’s also then where your live stream wording codes, the stream, and actually broadcast it to the internet. So that’s the hardware component encoder, personally, if you can afford it, I recommend a hardware encoder

Rohn Gibson (00:22:18):

Because the second one, one software and coders, when it kind of the downfalls of, of software and coders is they are really greedy and they use a ton of your computer’s resources. If you’re wanting to use your computer for other things during the service, it can literally just suck the, the resources from your computer and really slow it down. So if you can afford the hardware, computer,uand coder, I would highly recommend going that route. Uthere’s just so many features that are available.

Rohn Gibson (00:22:55):

An example of a software and coder. I know in previous episodes, we’ve had a lot of questions. OBS, OBS would be an example of a software in coder. Um and again, I’ll just make it clear. My personal preference is hardware, which is part of the reason I’m not a massive a fan of, okay.

Rohn Gibson (00:23:17):

Yes. And just software and coders. Here’s a whole, I’m having a perfect example of that right now. Stream Yard is technically using a software type of an encoder, right? And because of that, it’s using a lot of my computer’s resources. It’s using a lot of Isabelle’s computer’s resources because she’s got her web cam and her audio source, and I’ve got my web cam my audio source. Then I’m going to be sharing my screen here momentarily.

Rohn Gibson (00:23:42):

And that’s using a ton of the computer’s resources. And because of that, now certain parts of even streaming aren’t working correctly, which is the first time I’ve ever had this happen. So it compliments the Stream Yard. This is the first time I’ve even had even the slightest glitch, but it’s because of those types of reasons. So number one, sources, number two, and coders, any questions so far based on either of those since I can’t see the chat, I just want to pause here.

Isabelle Faletti (00:24:10):

Another question related to that. Benjamin, he mentioned that they use VMX for encoding. Al, he mentioned that they use Boxcast hardware and coder. Yep. We w we have a lot of customers who use Boxcast actually. Yeah. Aaron, Aaron, Brian, you mentioned does ChurchSpring help in the graphics that Rohn was talking about. We don’t specifically, we don’t offer sermon graphics like that. However, in, I think it was part two, I believe you’re right. So 12, yes, we actually gave away a free live stream download resource that included sermon graphics that you can use for your live stream slides. So that is available at churchspring.com/C S L zero 12. I will also include that in the show notes for this episode. So after the show you can go to the replay and you, you you’ll, you will be able to access those downloads. Aaron.

Rohn Gibson (00:25:14):

Perfect. Yeah. All right. So number one, sources, number two, and coder number three. And that’s, I know captain obvious moment here, your internet connection. It’s yes.

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:27):

It’s so important though. Talking about this because that’s something that you can forget about.

Rohn Gibson (00:25:31):

Yes, internet connection is so, so important. And the, the magical question that everybody wants to answer to is what type of an internet speed do I need at my church? And the question or the answer to that question is one that I don’t like to get, nor do I like to give, but it depends a lot.

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:50):

Okay, Rohn, I want more than that.

Rohn Gibson (00:25:52):

Unpack that a little bit more. Here’s what I would tell you. The short answer is get the one, the highest speed that you can afford. So there’s the, there’s the, probably the answer you want get the one that you can afford, the highest one that you can afford. You have to remember when you’re live streaming, you’re uploading and downloading. I mean, there’s a ton of internet internet activity on your router. So get the highest option that you can look at. Now, a lot of this depends on if you give internet access, a lot of churches they’ll give internet access, like they’ll make public wifi access. Well, if you get a bunch of kids, you know, doing apps during church, or, you know, whatever, whatever people do during church on their phones, I’m sure they’re listening.

Isabelle Faletti (00:26:37):

But maybe, maybe they’re, they’re live streaming the live stream. Who knows.

Rohn Gibson (00:26:39):

There you go. There you go. They like the full surround experience. So it really depends on a lot of those different factors. So I would just encourage you to start with the highest plan that you can afford, and then you can start backing it down from there and really, you know, kind of go from there. So when we talk about internet connection, though, when you live stream, I recommend if at all possible trying to have a hardwired connection. Okay. So an actual cable connected to whatever device, whether it’s your computer, if you’re using a hardware and code or into the hardware encoder, that’s just going to give you the most reliable connection for a live stream. And you don’t want your live stream going down. That is one of the most stressful things, especially, you know, as you have more and more and more people joining joining your live stream, that just adds a little bit more stress to the equation, especially during those times of just only live stream services. So if at all possible try to hardwire it in. But definitely get the regardless. I would still recommend getting the highest plan that you’re able to afford there at your ministry. Fourth is

Isabelle Faletti (00:27:53):

Wait – I have a question from the audience of one of Isabelle over here. I’ve had a lot of internet issues as you know, Rohn. So I’m curious to know does the type of encoder, so a hardware or software encoder does that impact your internet connection? I, I may be saying that actually the wrong way. So if let’s say someone has a slower internet at their church, would you recommend a different encoder based on that?

Rohn Gibson (00:28:27):

So there’s a multiple factors in your live stream performance. Okay. So internet is an isolated your internet connection is an isolated, one of the parts of the puzzle, I’ll say and your connectivity. Another thing is the performance of your computer. Just like with your system, you have the exact same internet connection that you had two months ago, but your, this live stream is running better for you. Why? Because it’s one part, your computer, your hardware, actually being able to feed that information to to that the out the, the output source, right? So it’s able to crunch all that information, collect it, process it, broadcast it. And then you also have to have, again a fast internet connection. So both of those planned part, but we’re going to assume in this instance, you have either a a computer that has just a high performing computer that you’re running a software encoder on, or typically if you’re running a hardware encoder, especially one that’s been within the last even year or two, it’s going to have everything you need from a hardware perspective that, that more than likely isn’t going to be the issue.

Rohn Gibson (00:29:37):

It would be more of an internet connectivity issue there. Okay. Interesting. Thanks. Thanks. Yes. So fourth is the switcher and the switcher is the application or tool that you use. So again, all of the sources that we talked about come in and they connect to your encoder, and then a switcher is going to connect to the encoder and allow you to really produce your live stream content. So example, let’s say you have four different cameras, you got 30 different graphics, you have four different audio sources coming into your encoder, your switch, or makes all of those accessible to you in a way. So like, you can see all of the four cameras, you can see the angles they’re set at. You can bring that over into the previews, so you can look at it to see what it’s gonna look like, and then you can swipe it down.

Rohn Gibson (00:30:27):

And actually when I say swipe and all that stuff, I’m actually literally telling you what I do at our church, with a system that I’m about to show you, and then it goes to live. Okay. So it’s basically the tool that you use to produce, to determine what goes into the live feed, what graphics, what video, what audio goes and actually is fed to the live stream destination. So that’s the fifth thing– destinations. So I know we had a question about Facebook, YouTube. I want it on my site. I know we’ve had Zoom in the past. Uso at the end of the day,uwe recommend Facebook and Facebook is, has, especially over the last several months, have come out with some really cool features to reach all of the different,udemographics inside of your church, whether it’s a more seasoned population or whether it’s more of the middle-aged, younger, whatever that might be.

Rohn Gibson (00:31:23):

In, as well as their technology level, they’ve come out with some amazing new features. For example, you can call in. Now, let’s say it’s a more of the seasoned population and they don’t have the computer and internet connection where you can give them a phone number where they can call in and actually listen to the service on their phone. I mean, it’s just amazing the tools that they have, right. So what we recommend, and I would recommend going back to that, I think it was either two or three episodes ago where we break that down a little bit more. And I think maybe we should even do an episode on this, honestly, on, you know, what are the options available, why we recommend what we recommend, but ultimately your church website plays a role in your live stream. And then Facebook, if you do it kind of the way that we recommend Facebook would play a role in your live stream.

Rohn Gibson (00:32:13):

So go back to that episode, CSL zero one, two, we literally walk you through all of that, but your destinations just to get back on that topic is Facebook, YouTube. Again, it could be Zoom, it could be a custom RTMP service, not going to go into that. We’ll go into them more about that later. And then another thing, the thing that you should consider as far as a destination is a hard drive. So typically, and we we’ve run into, even in my own church, we run into this even at ChurchSpring, where we live stream, and then we’ll go on download whether it’s from Facebook or YouTube. But the reality is though those services they’re processing it on there, they’re in, and they’re downgrading the quality to make it easily accessible. Okay. So therefore you’re not getting the highest quality video when you go and you download from some of those resources.

Rohn Gibson (00:33:03):

So that’s why we recommend, in addition to your live streaming destinations, you’re also recording locally there to your encoder on a hard drive that then you can go and get the best quality. Maybe if you go and you do social media snippets, you’ve got a way better quality, or maybe like at our church where we broadcast it. So there’s a recording, we kind of clip parts of it. We take that in and then that’s broadcast over the cable network here in our town. So now you’ve got a really high quality that’s going to look great on full-size television screens there as well. So again, just to summarize number one sources. So these are the, again, the five components of an advanced live stream set up. Number one, sources, number two, coder, number three, a strong internet connection, number four, a switcher, and number five, your destinations.

Rohn Gibson (00:33:56):

So remember on the other episodes we’ve talked about, we literally merged all of those things. I mean, it’s crazy to live in the world that we live in and we let it literally merged all of those five things into this one device. Okay. So you can do it on here. There are some limitations. And what we’re gonna talk about is really, you know, okay, now where do I go from here? So I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to increase that. What does that look like? And I’m literally going to tell you exactly what we use at my church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:34:28):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you’re listening right now and you’re still a little confused on what an encoder and a switcher is, then Rohn, again, he, like, he just said, he will show you exactly what that is. And I’m, I’m a visual person. So I need, I was that kid in class who needed everything just drawn out for me. And Rohn will pretty much do that here. So if you’re so confused, I mean, stay tuned. We’ll, we’ll explain it a bit more before we dive into that second part we do have some really good questions, Rohn. So thanks everybody for engaging for asking your questions. I know this can be kind of confusing if you’re, if you’re new to this level of live streaming. So I want to take a few moments real quick before we dive into the actual live stream questions, Daniel.

Isabelle Faletti (00:35:16):

I know that you’ve been asking it a couple of times how you can get started to create a website. So no, we weren’t ignoring you. So Daniel, we, yes, we can help you set up your new website for your church. You can actually go to churchspring.com/trial. So it’s, I’ll put it up as it’s right there on your screen. So go to churchspring.com/trial, follow the prompts. You get a free seven day trial for you to kind of test it out. You have full support, so we’ll help you with any questions that you have. So go ahead sign up there and reach out if you have any questions about that. Okay. So let’s start with Ron Gardner. He asks, Oh, this is a good question. So I wouldn’t need a switcher with just one camera, correct? I would say you do need a switcher. Rohn Gibson is the, is the live stream here, everybody, the, the expert.

Rohn Gibson (00:36:22):

So it depends is your answer. So a switcher can be used for multiple things beside cameras. So for example, if let’s say you have one camera, and then when you do giving you want to put a graphic over, well, you could use a switcher to do that. So switchers are used for more than just multiple camera switching. It’s also used for bringing an external video like prerecorded video sources it’s used for graphics, lower thirds. All those types of things are aware. A lot of that production happens is inside of a switcher. So if all you’re desiring to do is just broadcast a one, you know, one camera and on the pulpit, not really adjust a lot of things, not maybe show the lower thirds not have overlay graphics and some of those things yet you, you probably wouldn’t need a switcher. However, for more advanced, we would recommend you have a switcher. Cause now you have all the core components to really take things to that next level.

Isabelle Faletti (00:37:22):

Yep. Okay. That helps. So I know Ron had mentioned, or Ron Gardner had mentioned in a previous comment that he is now using Stream Yard actually for his stream. So Ron, you can still use stream yard for a lot of the components that we just mentioned. I mean, you can have that, that’s what we’re using right now. So

Rohn Gibson (00:37:41):

So Stream Yard in and of itself is your encoder. It determined, you know, you can connect your destinations there and it’s also a switcher. So in Stream Yard. So like, I’ll just give a quick example. There’s for those of you who aren’t familiar with Stream Yard, literally we have like this little console that we log into and then there’s these little preset scenes as what we’ll call them. And literally with one click, like with one click Isabelle is putting these comments up on the screen with one click. I’m going to share my screen right now and just show you how that works. So, boom, and we’re going to come back to this. So that’s a little preview of what’s to come with one click, you can do those preset scenes. So in and of itself, Stream Yard is a form of switcher. Now it’s a little bit more limited. But it is a switcher.

Isabelle Faletti (00:38:29):

Yeah. Okay. That’s great. We have a question. If switcher works with Zoom, does a switcher or work with Zoom?

Rohn Gibson (00:38:38):

I, I don’t know that zoom let’s, you know, I think it does actually. I don’t know. I’d have to, I’d have to, we’d have to do a little bit more research into that. Typically with Zoom it’s a, you have a webcam and you’re broadcasting through zoom. Zoom is made for more video conferencing type of scenarios with that said with enough technical know how you can make these things, do a lot of different things. I mean, you can connect external cameras to it and use that as your camera source and then plug in an external audio source. So you can do some of those things, but I would not recommend zoom for a setup of like what we’re talking about. It’s really zooms thing is more kind of telephone, video conferencing, types of setups, which works for a lot of churches, depending on what your setup is, but to go more of an advanced level, I would not recommend using zoom as your destination because really that’s what it is. Cause that’s what you’re broadcasting from now. I think that’s going to change. Zoom has made already a ton of updates, obviously over the last three to six months. And I don’t think that’s going to change. But as the, where it sets with my understanding right now, I wouldn’t recommend using that as more of this advanced level live streaming.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:04):

Yeah. Yeah. There is. There’s no, no reason to make it difficult for you to live stream at this point. Yeah. So Aaron Brown, Brian asks, do they make an encoder and switch or combo device?

Rohn Gibson (00:40:16):

Well, I’m about to show you what that is.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:20):

Stay tuned, Aaron!,

Rohn Gibson (00:40:22):

Yeah. We’re going to jump into it. Yep. Yep.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:25):

Let me scroll down. We have do do, do, which we had a question of which switcher you recommend. We will be covering that here in a couple of minutes. Let’s see. Do do, do do, we’ve had a couple. Okay. Aaron Brown. Another question from you. Oh, where did he go? Hold on. I lost you. Okay. Here you are at the embed codes for live stream and Facebook. I have to change the embed code of each different live stream.

Rohn Gibson (00:40:54):

If you want to keep people on your site. So you want to have you know, a live streaming page that you always use. The answer is yes. Currently you would have to do that. You would have to go and change it every time. If you do it the way that we recommend you doing it with Facebook, when people click to watch your live stream, they’re actually gonna go over to Facebook and watch it. So then they can interact and they can do all of those things. I think that’s one of the big just to maybe park here for a minute, we have to shift this idea that all we’re trying to do is recreate a television broadcast. If

Rohn Gibson (00:41:34):

We do that, we are not gaining the full capabilities and connection that you can you can make with somebody on the other end of a screen. Okay. So a lot of people, they just want the video on it. No, no, no. We want all of the components, the chat being able to share resources, the, Hey, message us, all of those calls to action, the engagement with each other in the chat. So just to kind of park there for a minute, that’s one of the reasons we recommend using Facebook. Cause then you can have call to action. Hey, if you’re watching this live stream on Facebook right now, go ahead and share this video, you know, help us share this message that the hope that, you know, share the hope of the gospel, whatever the topic is that you’re going to be talking about.

Rohn Gibson (00:42:20):

And then it makes it super easy for them to be able to do that right there inside, or Hey, if you’re joining us online, let us know. You’re there say good morning you know, whatever that might be, if you have a prayer request, message us through Facebook so you can really leverage it. So I would say there needs to be maybe a little bit, and I’m not saying Aaron that you’re thinking this, but I think in general, that’s what a lot of people think about. They just think of all I’m trying to do is just broadcast video.

Isabelle Faletti (00:42:46):

Yeah. Just, just push the content out there.

Rohn Gibson (00:42:48):

Exactly. And you’re not getting the full value of what these resources can really provide you and the other person on the other side of that screen. Yep.

Isabelle Faletti (00:42:59):

That’s great. I’m so glad that you, you made that, that point, Rohn. So we have quite a few questions of asking about specific switchers and coders. So let’s just go ahead and switch to that here. So I know, right? Oh, the jokes. I love it. So if you are attending and if I haven’t covered your question yet, hopefully we’ll cover it in this next segment. If not after we kind of give you the lowdown, the ultimate lowdown of all of these resources just pop it in the comments below and then we’ll get that at the end of this question here. Okay. So Rohn, what, what is an example of a live stream setup at this advanced level that we’re talking about?

Rohn Gibson (00:43:47):

Yeah. So let me first say this. Number one, there’s a ton of different options. So the option that I’m going to give you, isn’t this I’m like, this is the only way that you can do it. There’s been some resources, some encoders, some switchers that have been mentioned that may be a great fit for your ministry. So the purpose of me showing this isn’t to say, this is the only way to do it. So first of all, I want to make that clear. And secondly, but this is the exact set up literally that we use at my church. So I don’t like recommending things typically that I’ve never used. So I’m going to give you the things that literally we use at our church. I know there was a budget question asked earlier. We did all of

Rohn Gibson (00:44:32):

This at our church. It was, I believe it was under $4,000 if I’m not mistaken. And when you think of everything, I’m going to walk you through comparatively to what this could cost. That was less than half of actually what we thought, like what the initial budget was to do this. So we were actually able to do some other things which was really great. So let me share my screen and

Isabelle Faletti (00:44:55):

If people are like me, I’m a major researcher, but then because of that, I get lost in all of the different solutions to what I’m looking for. So this is a good place to just start and not become obsessed with researching the very best one.

Rohn Gibson (00:45:11):

Yes, yes, exactly. Cool. And again, all of these resources, literally every single thing that I’m going to show you right now, we’re going to link up in the show notes. So you don’t have to go try to find it. We’ll give you every single resource and then you can come back and watch this video. If you decide to go this route now or in the future someday. So on what we use at our church, it’s called Sling Studio. Sling Studio was actually made by dish network. Just network obviously is a big satellite television provider. Sling Studio, actually I think sling sling was kind of a separate thing. And then dish network bought them and then they kind of turned it into this console than it is right now. Don’t quote me on that. Cause I’m not a hundred percent certain how all that happened, but it is a dish network company, if I can say that.

Rohn Gibson (00:46:00):

So this is the 10,000 foot view here of basically what we just talked about. All right. So you can see here, you’ve got your sources. So that would be your cameras, all different kinds of cameras. So you can see, you know, more of a higher end cam quarter, then you’ve got, you know, more of your video enabled maybe a mirrorless camera then you’ve got your smartphone even, and then you maybe have an older type of a camcorder that would have an HTMI out. So those would be your sources. And then, and I’ll come back and explain this a little bit more here momentarily. Then you have your hubs. So this right here is your encoder and it’s the Sling Studio hub and all of your sources. So all of your cameras, even your audio sources, they’re going to plug in whether I’m hardwired or wirelessly connected to the Sling Studio hub, and then your switcher, which is going to run, you can run it on a a Mac or an iPad, and that then will connect wirelessly to your encoder and basically allow you to control all of these sources from the wonderful iPad, whether it’s an iPad pro and that’s what we use at our church.

Rohn Gibson (00:47:14):

And again, I’ll go more into those details, but it literally gives you a full production live streaming suite, right on your iPad. It is amazing whether you’re super technical or whether not one of the high school boys that our church actually is in part of our queue and actually runs the live stream and does a great job. So whether you’re super advanced or maybe even just a little bit technical, you’ll be able to run a multi-camera multi-source live stream there at your church. So this is the 10,000 foot view. I’ll call it. But I want to explain a couple of components here. So again, you have all of these different cameras and we, they use what’s called the Sling Studio camera link. So basically anything that has an HTMI out, you can connect one of these little boxes to it and then wirelessly connect to this camera, to the encoder, to the hub. That’s awesome. So just think about this,

Rohn Gibson (00:48:18):

You don’t have to run SDI or HTMI cables or any of that. You can literally just Mount this on top. It actually has a little hot shoe fix our little hot shoe connector there that you can just set it on, connect the HTMI out right here to this camera link, and then it connects to your hub. So you can do that again, even with, you know, maybe more traditional camera that has a video capabilities, you can do that there as well. On more traditional cameras, you do want to make sure that that your manufacturer gives you what’s called a clean HDMI,

Rohn Gibson (00:48:52):

Meaning that the, all the little cool settings that they give you, that, that actually won’t show up on the live stream. So like it’ll sometimes tell you like your aperture and like, it’ll give you a little brackets for framing things incorrectly. You want to make sure those things don’t show on the live stream , obviously. Canon. So I’m a, I’m a Canon fan

Rohn Gibson (00:49:12):

Canon actually just recently, and I haven’t tested this yet, but I’ve watched quite a few videos on it. They’ve actually come out with a new software application that you can download to give it really nice clean HTMI in a ton of other really cool features. So, but a camera like that, again, you can use your camera link connected to the HTMI port outport on your camera, connect that there. And then again, that wirelessly connects to the Sling Studio hub. Here’s a really cool thing. You can use a smartphone as well. So like literally you could use all of these different video sources and connect all four of those different types of video sources to your Sling Studio hub. So what you would do in that instance is download the Sling Studio capture app. And again, I’m going to talk more about this in depth here momentarily, but you would install that it’s a free app on your phone, and then you would connect your wireless network.

Rohn Gibson (00:50:07):

Cause this is actually a wireless network in and of itself. So you would connect that way. It acknowledges your phone and then you can go set multiple phones up in different places and bring them all in that way. And then again, maybe in more old school camera, a video camera that has an HTMI out. You can that as well. So yeah, it’s kind of like a Swiss army knife for live streaming. It’s kinda what I like to call it because whether you’ve got higher end production cameras, whether you have maybe more of the, kind of the DSLR type cameras or a phone, or even an old school camera, you can connect those to this device. Okay.

Isabelle Faletti (00:50:52):

So we, we have a couple of questions about this specific tool here. So Faith Alive Church is asking if it will run on a PC in the example here, it looks like they have a Mac. Do you know if it’s also available

Rohn Gibson (00:51:09):

On the Mac? So it will run on a Mac computer, it will not run on a windows device. So it’s either on a Mac computer, there’s actually a desktop app that you download and then you would control your you know, basically that’s your switcher through that app, or you can do it through an app on an iPad.

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:27):

So if they do not have a Mac really they would need a different

Rohn Gibson (00:51:32):

This one, not exactly. This would not be the set up for them.

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:35):

Yeah. But don’t worry Faith Alive Church, there are a lot of other options. This isn’t, again, this isn’t the only one out there. So this is just kind of to give you an example of what you want when you are doing a research. Yeah. And then we actually have Daniel asking is this a set up kit that we can, that, that they can purchase?

Rohn Gibson (00:51:57):

They can purchase it right now, not through us. So let me first say that we don’t sell hardware. However, I’m actually gonna give you all the different places we’re going to give you literally the links to all those places where you can go and purchase it. Right now it’s going to be a little challenging. Obviously with COVID being what it was. There was a blitz on live streaming hardware. So finding now that that’s changing, so that’s positive. But some of these things may be backordered just to kinda set correct expectations, but we will give you all the links that you can click on, literally in the show notes of this, on our site, where you can go and basically download exactly what I’m going to show you are, what we’ve showed you. And we’re going to walk you through more in detail here in just a couple of minutes.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:39):

Yeah. And I mean, you can even Google like Sling Studio options for a (and then insert your computer device). If, if that is, I mean, that, that can helpful for when you’re researching. We have one more question about this from Benjamin here. So the hardware and coder handles all the GPU heavy lift part of the feed is then processed on the computer.

Rohn Gibson (00:53:07):

There’s nothing processed on the computer. So the processing that’s, that’s really one of the values of a hardware encoder is that I don’t want to say nothing. So you still have the switcher. So the switcher is still taking some resources from whatever, like an iPad or device, but the majority of the is done on that hardware encoder, which is why I’m a big fan of it, because then you don’t have to worry about that, messing with your computer. If you’re trying to, if you have one computer and you’re trying to run lyrics for songs, and you’re trying to use that to do like do not do that. You’re just asking for a lot of pain in your live streaming journey. So I’ve just would not recommend that you, what I’d recommend is getting a totally separate computer. And at that point you might as well just get a go more of this route.

Rohn Gibson (00:53:56):

Again, lots of options here. Do what’s best for you and kind of your w the resources that you have available, but this is what we’d recommend.

Isabelle Faletti (00:54:05):

Yep. That’s great. Okay. All right. We’re all caught up on questions then.

Rohn Gibson (00:54:10):

All right. So this is the 10,000 foot view. Now we’re going to get very specific. Okay. so what specific hardware things do we use? So we is the PTZ optics live streaming camera. We love this camera. The zoom on it’s amazing. You actually control it wirelessly. So we actually have this mounted up above the, you know, kind of above the door of our the entry door in our sanctuary. And it, the view just is kind of down on the pulpit. I’m actually absolutely love this camera. Great camera. There’s tons of options as far as connectivity. So most people are going to do probably a standard HTMI out here, which is what we do.

Rohn Gibson (00:54:53):

And then we run that to the Sling Studio hub from there, but you can also do SDI out. You can also plug in external, but again, I’m just going to talk about how we specifically use it in our use case. So for us, we control it wirelessly, and I’ll tell you what app we use to do that with. But we connect to HTMI. So we connect the PTZ optics camera directly to our Sling Studio hub through HTMI. So that’s what we do there. And again, we’re going to link all of this up. This is actually from a components perspective, this is going to be the most expensive part of it. So depending on whether you do, you know, two or three of these, obviously just take $1,700, basically times, however many you do. We use one of these currently and it’s our straight on camera, but because we can wirelessly control it, we get a lot of different angles with it.

Rohn Gibson (00:55:52):

So that’s what we’d recommend as far as the camera, what we use. This is a little thing, depending on your specific setup, we mounted ours on the wall. So they make a specific wall Mount for it. If you have an industrious person at your church you could easily make one of these yourself. But for us, we just want this route it’s made for it. It was great, super easy to hang up and get configured. So that is the wall Mount that we use. And then this the app it’s called pan tilt zoom. And this is incredible. You can literally control the camera wirelessly, so you don’t have to have somebody standing by the camera to like, change the angles and do all those sorts of things. You literally control your camera through an iPad device, so they will, you will need, and, and I’ll just say the way we do it, we have two iPads.

Rohn Gibson (00:56:47):

We have one and iPad pro that we use to run the switcher. And I’ll tell you more about that in a second. And then we have a second iPad that we use, and technically you can run it from your phone as well as you can see here on the screen, but we have a second iPad that I use to run the camera font from. It just makes it easier. So that’s what we do. So what you can do here is you can see it here on the screen. You’ve got all these little one through 12, and what you can do is actually set presets. So like number one could be your pulpit. And then if you go back, I think it was episodes 13 or maybe 12 that we talked about, the presets that we recommend, the different camera angles that we recommend. Man, we really like charged through that episode. We covered so much, I was exhausted after that episode,

Isabelle Faletti (00:57:34):

We needed a nap after

Rohn Gibson (00:57:36):

We did. So you can set all your presets and, or actually you can title them. So like this could be pulpit. This could be pulpit mid zone. This could be piano. This could be stage center, stage left stage, right? Floor center, you know, all of those kinds of standard typical angles that you would use at your church. You can use those. You can also control multiple PTZ optics cameras from this one interface, which is amazing. So instead of having like, you know, two or three different iPads to control two or three different cameras, you can literally control all of them. So you can click camera one, go to that angle. Okay, I’ve got that locked in. That’s live. Now, I’m going to go to camera two. I’m going to go to this angle. It’s amazing. What you can do with is, I mean, literally high end, really video production, software, and hardware, all integrated together to make it super easy to produce services. So this is again, the application that we use pan tilt, zoom to control our camera. So now let’s get into really the guts and feel free to interrupt me, Isabelle. Again, if there’s any questions,

Isabelle Faletti (00:58:45):

No questions yet. So is that your switcher? No, that’s not your switcher. Okay.

Rohn Gibson (00:58:51):

Nope. This is just the camera. What we use to control the camera.

Isabelle Faletti (00:58:54):

Yep. Okay. Perfect.

Rohn Gibson (00:58:57):

All right. Actually, I’m going to take a quick sip. So why don’t you see if we’re missing any questions while I do that

Isabelle Faletti (00:59:02):

Sounds good. It looks like Carol, you said that you had around, but we’ll check the recordings. Thanks for the inspiration. She says, thank you, Carol. Benjamin. Oh yeah. We will address your question after looks like here’s a question about the processor he’s over running his processor on every broadcast.Um, so we can come back around to that, Benjamin.

Rohn Gibson (00:59:23):

Okay. Perfect. All right. Let’s keep trucking here then. So we’re really going to get into the Sling Studio side of things now. So this is the hub. This is the Sling Studio hub. This device is amazing. I mean, it’s, it is hardware. It does a lot of the processing, the majority of the processing. It’s also the main hub. So like we use an SD card and I’ll actually tell you the specific one that we use. So we just plugged the SD card directly in here. So we’re literally recording to the SD card as well as live streaming all at the same time. And there’s tons of configuration. Like if you have four cameras, you can literally record all four camera angles and then you can do a big production at the end, if you want to.

Rohn Gibson (01:00:08):

I mean, it’s, it’s incredible which you can do through this the back of it. And I know you probably can’t see that. So again, we’ll share all the links. There’s a U S a USBC port. There’s the HTMI in port. Let’s see. I can’t even see a very good on mine, DMI out, obviously power. So it’s got everything you need, but the majority so you also plug in your audio in, so we have our soundboard, I’m not sharing the sound board set up. That’s a whole other, like we could get into a whole nother conversation that’s with the sound and your church, but we just take directly out of our soundboard into our Sling Studio. So then we know the quality, the audio quality is very, very good. So yeah, that’s what we use. This is our hardware encoder an amazing tool for the money and just an incredible tool.

Rohn Gibson (01:01:03):

So that’s the Sling Studio next are the camera links. So just going back here to this overview, so this is what we’re talking about. So these devices that maybe you’re using this one camera, that’s what you’re hard wiring in. Cause it only has one HTMI N so you’re using that to hardwire in. So these other sources, these two specifically, then you would use a camera link and then connect them wirelessly to the hub. Okay. So what we’re talking about with this device is that link. This is the link between your other HTMI video sources into your Sling Studio hub. So that’s what that does. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s amazing. You can literally turn any video source that has an eight. And I say nearly because I’m sure there’s exceptions. I haven’t found them yet, but they’re, I’m sure there’s exceptions where you can take any video that has an HTMI out, plugging into that and then broadcast that to, or connect that to your sling video hub, and then have that as an option, as far as videos that your output so incredible.

Rohn Gibson (01:02:12):

This is another tool we use. So we actually plug this in, this allows us to directly connect our internet to the Sling Studio hub. Okay. So you can see here on the back and that’s your ether net cable connection. So you can do that. And then it also gives you USB connection. So if let’s say you wanted to connect another, their hard drive or hard drives or some other sources, you could do that here as well through this USB-C what do they call this adapter? There you go. Expander better word expander. Alright. So someone asked earlier about, is there a package? Can I just go, here’s the page that I’d recommend you check out. If you go to my Sling Studio.com, it’s going to take you here. You can click on products and then really you can select for your use case, what you need.

Rohn Gibson (01:03:05):

There’s things that we don’t use at our church. However, if you are in the context of maybe a church plant, or maybe you needed to be more mobile church, you might want to buy the battery pack. So then you can literally run. You’re not, you know, it’s not dependent on having a an outlet close to you. You could go battery powered for three hours up to three hours. Some of these other things we’ve talked about specific backpacks, everything just fits in there a lot nicer. I am not, I’m not going to talk about cables because cables are really dependent on what devices you’re using. Okay. But they do have a ton of different cables here that are available. So you can go check those out here as well.

Isabelle Faletti (01:03:53):

I have a question from Benjamin Nelson as the camera link act as the capture card.

Rohn Gibson (01:04:05):

Hmm.

Rohn Gibson (01:04:09):

I’m trying to think that through like, from a, from a capture kind of – yes and no. So it does, from the perspective of what a capture card typically does, and I’m not a capture card expert. So let me just say that right out of the gate. But it does, from the perspective as it, it makes the video source available to you and your in co and your switcher. So it makes the, the video source available to the encoder, which then gives that as an option for you in your switcher. Okay. So that may be a little confusing. So I would say it’s similar. I don’t know if it’s a direct, direct one-to-one comparison as far as the capture card, but I think it would be it has a similar role. It’s probably the best way to put it

Isabelle Faletti (01:04:54):

That makes sense.

Rohn Gibson (01:04:56):

Cool. Any other questions? Otherwise we’ll just move it. Okay. Alright. So again, for those that are looking for packages, this is the place that I would recommend you come, and then you select what would be the best fit for your specific application. Alright. So this is, I mean, literally we said, I’m going to give you all the little nitty gritty details, and now we’re getting into that. This is the SD card that we use. It’s wonderful because as I mentioned earlier, we record and live stream all at the same time. So we record to a hard drive, which is this SD card, and then we’re live streaming. So what happens is, and I mentioned that we broadcast, so we make a version available through the cable network. So what happens is after church someone on the staff of the church, they go up, they don’t need me to do anything.

Rohn Gibson (01:05:45):

They literally just click on the little SD card. They take it, they go and do what they need to do, and then they bring it back and they plug it right back in. So there’s no like long production or anything like that. It’s super easy. She can come and get it, import that into her computer clip off and edit whatever she wants to edit. And then she’s ready to broadcast over the local TV network. So it’s a wonderful thing. So 256 gig I always like to have more, cause you just never know if somebody forgets to delete something or whatever that you’re not going to run out of space. Definitely do not want to have that to happen. It will tell you when you go to record how many hours you have so the application that I’m going to I’ll show you here in a minute it’s just incredible.

Rohn Gibson (01:06:38):

The features that they give you. So next, we also use a four terabyte hard drive that we connect through that USBC expander that I shared earlier. And this just gives you easier access. If you want to add graphics or things like that, then I can take the hard drive, go bring it home, do the graphics, put them on this hard drive, bring it back connected in, and then I can import that into Sling Studio. Yeah. So it’s just a great tool as well as that for backup. Again, we use the iPad pro that is what we control the switcher through. And I’ll talk more about the switcher. You don’t need an iPad pro so let me just say this. You can use it on a smaller iPad, probably one you even have. So don’t feel like it absolutely has to be an iPad pro, but again, this is what we use.

Rohn Gibson (01:07:28):

And then we use more of just a standard, more low end iPad to control the camera. So that’s what we, we could use there, but again, you can use your phone in those instances and then there’s two apps that you can use one for sure you want to use. And the other depends on your setup. So the first one is what’s called the console app, and this is your switcher. Okay. So you would install this on your iPad or your, your Mac book, and then you would use that as the switch or so you can see here go ahead and let’s make a full screen. Yeah. Try and make it as big as possible. So you can see over here is your four different video input sources. And then there’s a preview window here. And then there is a year live.

Rohn Gibson (01:08:13):

So this is actually what is live is what’s down here. And then you can get everything configured. You can, you can do picture and picture. You can basically create your lower third graphics. You can put your little bug here, like we’ve talked about in the past, preview it, make sure it looks like it looks good and it’s what you want to broadcast. And then you click that little button in the middle and that’s what goes to the live stream. Wow. That’s easy, easy sounding, super easy. Literally you just swipe it around. Super easy to use. Yes. So then there’s also a graphics. You can barely, you can’t see that here, but there is a graphics button here. So that’s where you can import your graphics. So like you’re giving graphic, your welcome graphic, your thank you for joining us graphic. All those sorts of things you can import.

Rohn Gibson (01:09:00):

And then you just drag those into preview and go live with those as well. So just, that’s literally just the tip of the iceberg of what this system can do. I mean, like for sports, you can do instant replay, you can do all kinds of stuff. That’d be kind of interesting doing instant replays at church. Did you catch it anyway? That’d be kind of funny, but you can do it. So yes. So there you go. That is the console app. So I’m just gonna, I’ll actually, I’ll, I’ll go to those next. So the next one is if you want to use your phone. So we do this sometimes I actually just did this, this past Sunday. Our pastor likes to throw us curve balls every now and then, you know, maybe like 15 minutes before the service, Hey, we’ve got this handout, that’s in the bulletin.

Rohn Gibson (01:09:50):

We really like to be able to show this to the people in the live stream. Okay. so what we do with that is, again, being a Swiss army knife, we’ve got a tool for that. So we use the phone and we use the capture app on our iPhone. And literally what I did was I had my phone kind of hanging off the end of this table. And there was a chair that I put the the handout on, and then you can adjust the brightness and all that kind of stuff to make it look good. And that was one of my video sources in. So when he talked about that handout, as he was walking them through, I just went to my phone. Or when do my phone, what are my video sources go back up here? So my iPhone was showing up as a video source here of that handout, and I just put that on the preview and then went live with that when he was talking about it and then went back to our other camera.

Rohn Gibson (01:10:37):

That’s awesome. So, wow. It’s good to have lots of resources like that, and to be able to adjust on the fly and have a solution for that. And that was a great solution. So again, you can find these available in the app store. And if you look on the Mac app store, if you’re on the Mac, you can download it there as well. So this is free through the app store and this is the console app. So this would be the switcher, the app that you’re using to control your switch or on your iPad. And this would be the Sling Studio capture app. Again, that’s free that you can on your iPhone to yeah. To make any iPhone into a video source for your live stream. So super powerful. Lastly, here again, this was the overview. So what we just talked through in detail is basically this at a very high level.

Rohn Gibson (01:11:34):

So again, just to reiterate, to take it up a notch, you’re going to have your sources. You’re going to have your encoder. You want to make sure that you have an amazing internet connection. You want to make sure that you select what output sources or destinations are we going to broadcast to. And then obviously the switcher you want to make sure that you have that device that you can utilize to really produce a great looking live stream. So that’s a really, again, we could get so granular with this and we’re not going to in this episode, but hopefully that gives you, so for those that maybe are at this level, maybe gives you some other options to think about. And for those that aren’t out at this level, and at least gives you a roadmap of where you could go when you decide to live stream at more of that advanced to pro well, we’ll say as advanced a pro level. So yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (01:12:37):

Wow. Well, first off, I’ll just give you a, a clap because that was a lot of amazing, helpful information Rohn. I know we get a lot of questions on the support side from current members from those who are interested in ChurchSpring to use for their website, asking about encoders and switchers and live streaming at this level. So I hope for all of you who are listening, that this was incredibly helpful. Hopefully we’ve answered most of your questions. I know I’ve, I’ve been keeping an eye on, on them as they’ve come in. So if you do have any last questions, just pop them in real quick and we can see if we can get to them. So while we wait for any last questions to come in, Rohn, what do we do now? We always like to leave these or wrap up these shows with an action item. So what is the next step that we can take?

Rohn Gibson (01:13:30):

Yeah. So as far as action, I would say evaluate your current live streaming setup. So if you’re doing some of this now you know, just look at it, are there areas here that you could take that 1% better next step improvement? So that’s what I would encourage you to do. If maybe you’re not at this level, maybe even just take some time to evaluate, okay, this could be a goal that we could set for a year out where we would like to be at our church, we didn’t just, you know, wiggle our nose and boom, we had this set up. It will take some time to really evaluate and make sure that you get a setup that fits your context. So that’s what I’d really encourage you to do. I know we had someone also asked about how do I get started even with a so a couple of different options.

Rohn Gibson (01:14:13):

We mentioned the trial, but also if anybody’s watching this and you just like to see an overview of ChurchSpring and what all can it do for your ministry? We’d encourage you to attend a demo where myself and my co-founder, Mike, who joined us last week, we’ll walk you through basically how to launch a church website in 90 seconds. We’ll walk you through all the major components of ChurchSpring and how you can have an up-to-date church website that you’re proud of that you can live stream from and do a lot of the things that you need to do to reach your community online. So join us churchspring.Com/Demo. And then as Isabelle mentioned earlier and has been on the screen throughout this go sign up for our seven day free trial, absolutely free costs. You nothing, you can go sign up, kick the tires, as I like to say, look under the hood. Okay. Is this really legit? Is it really what they say? It can do? Go check it out. We’ve got tons of testimonials, even comments maybe even in this live stream and in previous ones just of actual users saying it does what it says it will do. So there we go.

Isabelle Faletti (01:15:22):

Yes. I love this comment from, from Faith. Daniel was asking more about it and Faith Alive Church. I just, I love what you said. Don’t do the trial. If you don’t want to spend the money because you will be hooked so easy for, at first, I saw it down to the trial. What that I finished that, so thanks. Thanks Faith Alive for, for just sharing about your own experience. Yeah. And then Benjamin Nelson also had some really encouraging things to say, so thank you, Benjamin. You said can’t recommend church website enough. It takes the headache away. Yes. A church website does take the headache away. Oh, thanks. And you offered for those who are not yet using ChurchSpring to visit your own website, to see what a website looks like. So thank you, Benjamin. We do have some good news from faith alive church. She, he, I’m not sure who you are over at faith life church. But they mentioned that they did some research on playing studio and it looks like the console option for windows so way to go. That’s really exciting.

Rohn Gibson (01:16:29):

Awesome. Good. Yeah. And I appreciate that. That is, yeah. That is so encouraging to see people coming, not just to consume, but they hear that. I’m like, okay, let’s just, let’s go look at this real quick and being helpful to the community, man. I love that. So thank you. I wish that Faith Alive was that who did that or was that okay? Oh man. I wish we had a name to put with that, but thank you. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for that. Awesome. Okay.

Isabelle Faletti (01:16:56):

Okay. So it looks like, Oh, Ron Gardner, he said, Bravo, great content today. Thank you. Appreciate it. We, we, we love just this community that we’ve built and we are constantly updating ChurchSpring. We are constantly releasing new features. And so we actually have a new design that our co-founder and designer Mike, whom if you tuned in last week, on episode 13, you met. So he heads up a lot of our design. And so he put together a gorgeous, stunning new website design that Rohn actually will show you here. Get ready because I say this every design and I will continue to say it. This is

Rohn Gibson (01:17:45):

Oh, that’s awesome. All right. So without further ado, we are excited. This is available now in your website settings area Chronicles. Whew. So beautiful new design. Mike did as always an incredible job on this and the team. So super excited to launch this today. And again, it’s available right now in your settings area. You can go check that out and start using it literally right now. So just to kind of have a quick walk through, we’ll just kind of scroll through it. So one of the things you’ll see it just kind of like just really nice, just clean lines. So there’s actually lines, but it’s also more minimalistic and just, yeah, it’s beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful. So I’ll just kind of scroll through here, love the color palette for this one, love the new events, kind of a little bit of a treatment, different treatment for that you can see when you hover over, it kind of gives a little drop shot at just really clean look.

Rohn Gibson (01:18:39):

And we were actually talking before we jumped on here, just how this is really a diverse design. You can be more of a traditional church and this would be a great fit for you. And you may be more of a, we’ll say contemporary church, and this could also be a really good fit for you. So I think it’s going to be a really versatile one. And honestly, I think it’s going to be one of our, our popular designs. Again, just really love how clean it is. Just super clean all throughout the design. Again, all the major components you don’t need to ask yourself, what components do I need to put on my church website design. We have already done it for you. You don’t even have to think about it. We’ve got it locked and loaded and ready for you to go. Now you can customize it. So I probably shouldn’t say locks cause you can’t customize it, but we have all the major components there for you. So just a couple of quick pages, I’ll show you sermons again. What that looks like. Just love this, just the lines and how it’s, how it’s all throughout the sites.

Isabelle Faletti (01:19:35):

Work of art. That’s how, that’s how every new design or every design is. But this one I just picked her. I don’t know, going into a museum and just admiring it.

Rohn Gibson (01:19:45):

There you go. Awesome. So we’ll bounce over to events here. Yeah. Again, just beautiful clean you’ll hover over those gives you a little drop shadow, just an, a beautiful new design. So again, one of the really cool things about your ChurchSpring membership is you don’t have to pay any extra for this. This is an Oh, and if you pay us an extra, you get access to this design. As a member of ChurchSpring, you get access to every single design that we offer. Every new feature that comes out, depending on the plan that you’re on. If you’re on our flourish plan, which I encourage you to be, just because we didn’t build it to try to charge more, we built it to try to build the most effective communication platform for the church. And the flourish plan allows you to do that. So if you’re on the flourish plan, you literally get every single feature that we roll out.

Rohn Gibson (01:20:36):

No, no extra fees, nothing like that. When it comes to new features, you’re getting access to those. Literally as we’re rolling them out. So, and we have got some big things coming. I mean, big, like I get goosebumps even thinking about it. Harrison, on our development team and Mike and the entire team has been working on some massive, massive updates. And I can’t wait, but this is a great one. So go check out Chronicles. If you haven’t already again, it’s in your settings area or you can go to chronicles.churchspring.org and check that out to kind of give a quick run through. And again, if you’re not a user of ChurchSpring currently, I just want to invite you. Our team has worked very hard to build a tool that we feel honestly that God’s called us to build, and we want it to be a blessing and to get it in the hands of as many churches as possible. Literally no setup fee does that. None. You can go launch your church website, try it for seven days. I just encourage you. Can’t encourage you enough if you’re not currently using ChurchSpring, we would love to partner with your ministry to reach your community with the gospel. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (01:21:45):

Hmm. That’s great. We found out for Faith Alive Church who, who that is DJ. So welcome. Glad to put a name to the name. He’s also asking what are we getting the prayer tab? We know we want the prayer tab also.

Rohn Gibson (01:22:05):

Yeah. So one, one quick thing I would say on that, remember when I said huge updates coming, stay tuned. We don’t, we don’t give when features are going to be done or what features when, but just stay tuned. Man, it’s going to be awesome. But in the interim, what I would recommend that you do is you can create a prayer, basically a prayer request form using the contact page templates. I know a lot of our churches do that. They’ll go create a new prayer, call it prayer request and then use that template to be submitted. So I would encourage you to do that if you haven’t done it yet. But man, we, ah, I so badly just want to talk about, but anyway, we’ve got some great new features coming and again, Chronicles, great new edition, excited about that and more to come. So stay tuned.

Isabelle Faletti (01:22:53):

And if you ever have questions of how to create how to use a contact form for a prayer form, reach out to our team, we love to help you that that’s why we’re here. We want to make sure that you’re using your church website to the fullest ability that it possibly can. So reach out DJ, if you’re a bit confused on what that actually looks like to use the contact form as a prayer form, send in a, a support ticket in your ChurchSpring website settings, and we will help you out. Jen and I, we we’re we’re we’re, we’re waiting. So reach out with any questions. Okay. Rohn, any last questions or comments or wrap up that we have here before I tell everybody of what to expect next week.

Rohn Gibson (01:23:40):

Yeah. I’m going to, I’m going to kind of start to transition into what you’re going to say. Cause I’m really excited. So this is a first, first time for us last week was the first time for us. We did website reviews. We’re going to do more of that. So again, if you’re interested in having your website reviewed in a future episode, we’re going to do that. We probably won’t do five in one episode. Again, that was, that was quite the marathon. But we will be doing more of those. So if you would like that it’s churchspring.Com/Review. I believe what it is

Isabelle Faletti (01:24:10):

I believe so. Mike, we have so many URLs now.

Rohn Gibson (01:24:15):

So anyway, you can go check that out. There’s an application process for that. If you’d like us to consider a reviewing your site in the future, but next week we are inviting somebody on this will be the final episode kind of in the series on live streaming. And next week is about really the professional level of live streaming. And we’re actually bringing somebody on, I would not consider myself whatsoever at a professional level when it comes to live streaming. But next week we’re bringing a guy on, who’s a good friend of mine and this is what he does. So we’re going to do we’re. It’s like the church spring and friends episode next week. Why don’t you tell them more about that?

Isabelle Faletti (01:24:56):

I love that church spring and friends. Yup. So like Ron mentioned, we are going to unpack how you can set up a professional live stream for your church, with our, our friends. So if you help manage communications at a larger church and you really want to know how you can invest in a professional life during production, you do not want to miss next week’s ChurchSpring Live. So we are going to have our special guest and friend joining us. He’s a, an actual life stream expert, Zach Novak, he’s the owner of Media Net AAV. And his team actually manages video production for Alistair Begg’s radio ministry, Truth For Life and their live stream for the church Parkside Church. So Zach, we are going to have a great conversation with him. And he’s going to just really share how to live stream at that professional level.

Isabelle Faletti (01:25:55):

So you can live stream your church, your, your church services at the level up above this advanced level that we talked about today. We’ll have some great Q and a time. We’re actually meeting with him later this afternoon to talk about specifics. So if you have any questions about how you, how you want to live stream your services at that professional level, let us know. And we’ll make sure to include that when we’re chatting with him later this afternoon. So that’s next week, Thursday,uSeptember 3rd. So yes, it’s September soon. Everybody pay attention. I can’t believe it’s September already at 10:00 AM, Thursday, September 3rd, episode zero 15, we will be talking about how to set up a pre professional live stream for your church. So thank you for everybody for joining today. UI know we, we unpacked a lot. I see a couple of questions coming just about live streaming in general, that are coming in as comments. After we’re done with the live stream here, I’ll actually go back and respond to each of those comments, sending you some help articles that we do have. Uso be looking out for my response there. So thank you again for attending. God bless, and we will see you all next week.

Rohn Gibson (01:27:10):

Have a great rest of your week, everyone. Bye.