I want to extend a BIG thank you to each of you for your work last weekend.
That was probably the most stressful set of weekend services I have experienced in a really long time.
Saturday night, the rehearsal of the special music was a train wreck (the video with backing track & click track was bad). So with less than 10 min to go the video was re-rendered. The revised special music video was loaded and tested with literally less than 2 minutes to start time. Bob, your work on CG saved us all from a total crash. I talked with Ron yesterday. He said as he played the songs of the worship set all he could think about was that video… would it work, would we totally crash, what will he do if it fails? He said he cannot remember a thing about the songs (not even sure what he sang). As he prayed before the special, all he could think was ‘please Lord carry us through this’. When that special started and ‘IT WAS RIGHT’ he couldn’t believe it. He played through that special and it came out great. – PRAISE THE LORD!!
Sunday, first service looked great and I thought we were going to coast through 2nd service. Then at 10:40 (3 min before start) I get a call from LS that the center projector will not work. I was like “WHAT? HOW CAN WE BROADCAST THE SERMON WITHOUT THE CENTER PROJECTOR” We were trouble shooting it for the next 5 minutes or so (OP was into service by now). Without any way to fix it on the fly, I decided they would have to broadcast to the side screens.
No biggie, right? Then I realized that there would be no sermon PPT slides if the video was on the side screens and I began to scramble to find a solution for the PPT. (remember at this point, OP is well into the first song). I began converting the PPT by removing the color background and shifting text to the lower-3rd of the graphic, so we can put the text across the bottom of the screen. I got about 8 slides done (OP was now ending the 2nd song) and realized there was no way I’d get all 30+ slides done in the next few minutes. Pausing to think & pray, I bounced the issues off Charles and decided we would have to run Picture-in-Picture and put the PPT slides in the top left corner. So now Charles feels the stress too and we’re working to configure the PIP.
By now OP is in the 4th song and I am jumping all over poor Doug on the switcher trying to configure the program bus for Picture-in-Picture. Got that done, then realized that we don’t want to send PIP to the OP campus. So I then reached around Doug to setup the ME1 bus for PIP and un-did the setting on PGM Bus. With this setup, Charles has a way to pull in/out the PPT slides on the broadcast and OP will not be affected. We were literally making changes right up to when the sermon began.
Side note here… Thank you to each of the camera guys, Steve, Kelly, Todd, and Gale for hanging in there during all this ciaos and keeping the cameras on focus. Doug, I don’t know how you kept focus, but thank you for blocking me out and doing your job with excellence, while I was reaching across and pressing buttons all around you (not to mention you could hardly see the preview screen).
So we go live with the sermon and we needed to figure out how to place the cameras to work with the PIP window. That took a few switches, and Doug decided to use CAM3 only with the PIP which worked out really well. Kelly (on CAM3) had the difficult task to keeping tight to Reggie and keeping him in a tight frame on the right side without being able to see the PIP window. Great job Kelly!! That was no easy task and you did it really, really well.
Thanks to all of you, we pulled this off under some really challenging circumstances. The live broadcast of the special looked and sounded great. The sermon worked out just fine. Looking back at all three services, although there was ciaos in the control room, everything worked out very well in the worship centers on all campuses.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone of you for a job well done! I am so blessed to work alongside such a great team of individuals.
