The following article will describe some techniques that can help churches conduct live broadcasts over the Internet, a trend that is growing more and more.
By Juan Tamayo*
Audio visual systems in religious projects are constantly growing. Churches of all kinds of spiritual beliefs are evolving, looking for ways to reach their followers in a better way, making them feel more comfortable.
Today a person who seeks God or spiritual peace can go to a religious center, tune into a channel, or do an internet search for a link where they can watch their church's broadcast. It is the duty of the designer and installer of audio visual systems to ensure that any way that the person seeks to reach this spiritual peace feels exactly the same, that there is no difference, but how to achieve it?
In the design approach we will have as an initial concept that the church or religious center will make a transmission of its signal for an internet channel, although some tips can be applied for TV.
A big difference between TV and internet streaming is bandwidth. And it becomes more noticeable when the streaming internet channels are free or low cost, because the upload channel is very limited, basically depending on the speed offered by the company that provides the internet service, so as a designer you should try to minimize bandwidth consumption. In television it is a little different, because a channel transmission right is acquired, in which the bandwidth is known and one pays for it, and it is already contemplated in the budget.
To optimize the bandwidth, basically the optimization of this generated by the video transmission is carried out. The bandwidth consumption of the audio is constant, because you have one or two channels at a constant rate.
Scenography: Although the visual aspect is aesthetic and each church wants your house to look well decorated and beautiful, having excess decoration on the stage, with multiple textures and many colors, makes the bandwidth consumption increase too much because each area of color and texture is processed and sent as independent information. The more information you need to send, the more bandwidth you will consume.
Preacher in motion: similar effect produces the preacher who moves constantly and very fast on stage. Each frame has a different information, each moment must be sending information from different frames, which causes the bandwidth to increase, and thus camera and lighting will have less work.
Lighting: of course lighting is important, a good stage for broadcasting must be very well lit so that shadows are not generated on stage, but for applications of this article we are not interested in the aesthetics of the lighting, but the effect of the shadow. The more shadows the scenario has, it is as if there is a different texture, therefore the increase in bandwidth usage will be higher. The type of lighting will be according to the stage design.
Knowledge of bandwidth: it is important to know how much bandwidth the transmission is consumed and analyze the variation of this, since knowing the data can acquire a dedicated channel of transmission in upload, preventing the system from being overloaded and ensuring that each person who is remote can enjoy the experience generated by the church. If the upload channel is paid, it will be much better.
Video signal scaling: Transmission channels can be purchased or used according to different video resolutions. They can be done in horizontal lines between which are 480, 720, 1080 pixels and above, but remember that increasing the number of lines will increase in proportion to the square the bandwidth, going from 480 pixels to 1080 pixels is to increase almost 5 times the bandwidth (I invite you to do the math). Choosing the scale of the signal will depend on how much bandwidth is available for transmission.
Sound: Although the consumption of sound compared to video is almost constant, good practices can be done to improve the experience. I think the most important is to have independent mixes. A big mistake is to consider that it is heard the same on location as remotely, and the acoustic components are different, so each mix must be independent. For those broadcasting on television (surround), I recommend using stereo microphones over the audience to generate the immersive experience.
I hope that these tips will be useful for the development of your project of transmission of audiovisual signals over the Internet. This information can also be used for any type of content, including some points are taken from video conference broadcasts.
Summary of key points:
- Scenarios with not very striking and constant decoration
- Preacher with limited travel space
- Very well lit stages
- Bandwidth knowledge.
- Properly select signal scaling
- Make audio signals independent
If you have any questions you can write to me at the [email protected] I will gladly solve any concerns.
*Juan Tamayo is a Sales Engineer for sound installations in Latin America from the company Audio Technica.
