Saying Goodbye to Memorex…sort of….
Yesterday, it was finally announced from that stage that come January our message will be the same at each campus every week. I was relieved because now I can finally talk about one of the other big projects that’s been occupying my brain for the last few months.
First a bit of history. Our multi-campus model since Buckhead opened has been we capture the message one week at one campus and playback the following week at our other campuses. Most of the time capture has taken place at North Point, but over the last couple years we have also equipped Buckhead and Browns Bridge to handle this, and they’ve captured one or two series a year at their campuses. On January 4th, we will most likely move away from that model for most of the year and capture the message at one campus while delivering it the same day to our other campuses. Capture will probably rotate throughout our campuses throughout the series.
So as I said, the word live gets tossed around quite a bit, but we’re not exactly going to be live across our campuses. Since I’m just the audio guy, I don’t know the gear specifics for a lot of this outside of the audio side, but basically we have a TIVO-esque type setup at the campuses so that they can be on a tape-delay. We will have the ability to be as live as any latency in the signal path allows, but I think our initial mode of operating will have campuses delayed a couple minutes.
It has been very cool to be a part of the project coming together, and I’m very excited to talk about the audio side of things. However, our Christmas service is next Sunday so I’m going to try and get past that first.
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We are currently transmitting via satellite to one campus and delay the service by one hour in order to get the capture ready. Just a quick front and back end edit of the message. The campus is just to far away to safely try and deliver it via hard drive. In Feb, we will begin changing the service to match the main campus on Saturday night. This means that the message portion will be very close to live. I suspect there will be a couple minute delay but in general its live. A bit scary if you ask me but, I just help make it work.
Later in the year we will do the same thing at one of the other campuses, actually the one where I am the producer. Its pretty exciting to see all this happen. Never thought I would be a part of a team like this and am glad I am.
Dave,
Take a look at this link: http://www.streambox.com/products/hd/hd_9500_main.html . This (I believe) is the system we use down here for a few of our campus’ and there is no delay, we haven’t had any type of failures yet, 2 years.
They have a direct fiber line to all the other campus’. Just thought I would pass it along to you.
Hope all goes well this Christmas for ya.
will that be enough of a lag to fix anything if anything went wrong? just wondering.
Well, I guess it depends on what goes wrong, but we’re probably by the seat of our pants. I don’t know what contingency plans are, but I’m sure there will be some.
Hey Dave, my name is Matt and I’m the audio guy for a soon to be three site church in Ohio. I’ve enjoyed reading your posts. We use the streambox as well. Our other campus runs 5 minutes behind us to allow for differences in worship time, making sure that we have started the message by the time they’re ready for it. Has worked great so far!