Now we’re back in the church building we’ve had to make some tweaks to how we stream services, so here’s what happened last week!
Some new audio tweaks
We added two new bits of cabling to our audio setup – one which lets us bring audio from our new PC into the church’s sound system, and one which lets us bring a second output from our mixer into our video stream.
This second output gives us the ability to more cleanly separate the vocal microphones in the church – such as the lectern and altar microphone – from the organ microphone which picks up the music. By doing this we can reduce the amount of chatter which is picked up from the returning congregation at the end of the service, whilst still feeding our organ voluntaries out into the world.
New choir microphones
Over the past few months we’ve been limited to a single chorister, but as of this week we’re returning to three singers (all maintaining distancing, of course). This has meant a new arrangement for microphones was needed, to better capture a group as opposed to an individual. We’ve also moved them around to be less visually intrusive.
Moving the ‘whole church’ camera
We’ve moved our ‘whole church’ camera from its spot in the choir stalls (so it doesn’t get in the way of seeing our singers) and up into the organ loft.
A bit of cable tidying
We have a lot of cables – audio cables, video cables, power cables, network cables, running in a complex web to keep everything connected that needs to be. We also have some cables running around the building and up and down the tower.
We spent some time improving how we anchor cables in place, prevent trips and falls over them, labelling and bundling. By making sure things are better organised now, we make our own lives easier in the future when we need to add, remove or change things.
Must go faster!
Our website is a more important part than ever of what we do, which is why we’ve made a whole bunch of optimisations to improve its speed. We’ve also identified some places we can spend time taking this even further, so with a bit more work things should be flying along.