Yesterday, we had three separate things go unexpectedly wrong during our services. Here are our explanations as to what happened, why it happened, and how we’re making sure it doesn’t happen again.
10.00 am Eucharist: No audio reinforcement in the church
What happened?
We didn’t switch on one of our equipment racks in the church before the start of the service, meaning that we had no radio microphones, in-church speakers or inductive hearing loop for the first few minutes.
Why did it happen?
We were distracted during our preflight checks by an unrelated problem with our video mixer, meaning we missed a check step for this equipment. Powering on this equipment rack is usually done by someone outside of the tech team, and we didn’t notice that it hadn’t happened.
How are we making sure it doesn’t happen again?
We’re moving the responsibility for this job to the technical team, and changing the wording in our pre-service checklist accordingly.
10.00 am Eucharist: No audio at the beginning of the video stream
What happened?
There was no audio on the live video stream at the start of the service.
Why did it happen?
We were distracted during our preflightchecks by an unrelated problem with our video mixer, meaning we didn’t properly switch on our audio mix at the start of the service.
How are we making sure it doesn’t happen again?
We’re moving towards always using a set of prerecorded, automated steps to begin a service, so we can’t forget to take this action again.
Choral Evensong: Low video quality at the beginning of the stream
What happened?
The beginning of our video stream for Choral Evensong was in lower quality than we usually stream.
Why did it happen?
As part of resolving the problem with our video mixer which led to issues in the morning service, we inadvertently reset some parts of our streaming configuration to their (low quality) default.
How are we making sure it doesn’t happen again?
We’re documenting this problem, so that anyone experiencing it in future has a single playbook they can use to fix it. This playbook includes making sure streaming settings are properly restored.
Bonus round: What went wrong with the video mixer?
We don’t know. But we did write about it publicly, and figured out how to fix it.