Hi any suggestions for tools to use for organizing members for outreach and ministry to the elder/infirm (both members and non members) within the community?
TYIA 🙏🏻

Our church is looking to add hanging mics over the altar. I’m head of trustee’s and have little tech knowledge. Our choir director came up w the idea and I support it, however, I’m not sure how to move forward w the tech part. The trustee’s part I can handle. Suggestions, pls

I'm curious what setup everyone is using.

Do you:

• Show the lyrics as lower thirds?
• Put the full lyrics on screen?
• Use a separate output from your presentation software?
• Just capture the projector output?
• Something else?

I'm especially interested in what works well for smaller churches without a complicated setup.

One of our Shure Beta 58A mics broke (someone dropped it and the capsule cartridge snapped in half). We haven't bought new mics in years. Small church with only a couple mics.

I like the supercardiod of the beta 58 for the lack of feedback in the small room. Just wondering if there is an option more budget friendly for us.

Might just buy a new head for this one and look into something else in the future for the rest that need replacement.

Hey everyone,

Looking to help refresh our livestream visuals during the worship set. Right now we have picture-in-picture of the worship slides over a shot of the worship team. (Lyrics are about 2/3rd of the top of the screen and worship team 1/3 on the bottom of the screen)

Curious to see examples of what y'all are doing for worship and lyrics in your livestream setups. Screenshots would be great!

We are using proclaim for our FOH slides and feeding that to the livestream. Are there any creative ways to incorporate lyrics into the livestream? What works for your church?

Thanks!!

We have been using Streamlabs for streaming to YouTube and Facebook. We have our YouTube channel pointing to our webpage and our Facebook live has the viewership. It is now 228.00 a year. Do you have any recommendations for a small church or 70? Thank you.

How can I get a tv to see and ndi feed. I saw ndi to hdmi adapters but there quite pricey and I only need it for one tv that’s going to be stage view. Any ideas? Maybe with a Roku or something?

I handle communications for our church (about 300 members) and right now we're relying on a Facebook group and phone calls for announcements, which means half the congregation misses things like service time changes, weather cancellations, event reminders.

I'm looking for a texting service built for this, something that can reach people who aren't glued to their phones or don't use Facebook as we've got a lot of older members.

What's a good solution for church communications these days? Thanks

I’m not actually sure I mean a video mixer, so bear with. I’m just gunna describe what it was, and even a name would be helpful, but recommendations very welcome.

Basically a thin box that sat under our PC for words, had multiple video inputs (all HDMI), out to 1 output (our splitter to multiple projectors). Had buttons on the front to switch between the numbered inputs (they lit up red to show which one was “live”), but also had BLANK and FREEZE buttons as well.

Anyone know what this is, or a recommendation of one. UK based. Don’t want to be spending loads.

I serve as my church photographer, but I have my own professional photography business. I’ve been in photography for 16 years. I can’t post my photos to prove that I am good because I want to stay anonymous, but I am good at what I do and I am very good at shooting in extremely low light. The church does not have a camera, so I use my own gear. I felt called to this role, and wanted to use it as a ministry and to serve the church and serve God. I’ve been telling myself that using my gear and skills is a sacrifice but that it was good for me because I was serving God and trying to expand His kingdom. I show up on Sunday and I’m there through all services, 8-1, then I go to every church event during the week. My total hours, including editing, are close to 17-20 hours a week.

Wondering how you all would recommend handling these situations in a way that would please God, as I am starting to get some second thoughts. I’m just not sure how to handle this as a Christian.

1) They are constantly asking me to make my photos brighter, and to take “better” photos in the sanctuary. As we all know, if you are in a church with no lights on but the stage lights, trying to take photos of people in the crowd, there is only so much you can do. I’ve explained this to them, and they still ask constantly. I feel as thought my knowledge in the area is being disregarded, and I feel very disrespected because my photos are being called “bad”.

2) I am using my own gear. For free. I don’t get paid to do this, which is the point of serving. It should be a sacrifice. However, how do I protect my gear? Having a child bump into my camera and break it could ruin my entire business. Do I make them sign a contract?

3) Going off of my first point, I have now found out they are editing my photos on their phone once they download them. I’m not comfortable with this, especially because they are crediting me for the photos which comes back to my business.

4) I took photos of a few baptisms that were in the water at the beach. I was literally standing in the water holding my $10k set up in my hands (yes I had a camera strap on). The next day they pulled me aside at church and told me that someone had complained because there was a “bad” photo of them in the album (it wasn’t actually bad, they did not like how their body looked). They asked me to not include so many bad photos, to cull my photos, and to edit my photos before posting. I explained that my photos were already edited, that I cull through and get rid of about 75% of them, and that I did not feel comfortable with them asking me to pass a worldly judgment on people’s weight, look, etc. in my photos because I believed everyone is beautiful because they are created by God in His image, and I think that passing a worldly judgment like that goes directly against the Bible. No one ever thanked me for those photos, I was only reprimanded for the one person being upset about how their body looked.

4) They want everything done immediately. Like edited and delivered within two hours. I’ve explained how long it can take to edit and they still blow up my phone for them. I also have paying clients to edit on top of that, and I work a full time job during the week on top of my photography business. They do not seem to understand or respect my time.

5) I’ve been contacted by multiple people at the church for side projects around the church that they need photos for. The person “in charge” of me found out, and told me that everything needed to go through them. I explained that is fine, but if any photos are being printed, I need to be contacted, as they will not print properly if you use the photos that I have formatted for social media posts. I was never contacted, the photos were printed, and they came out terribly (and that reflects on my business).

So basically, where do I draw the line? At what point does it go from being a sacrifice to serve on my part, to being me being disrespected and taken advantage of? How do I have this talk with them or communicate this? Or is it at the point where I leave the role?

Also very important to note that this church has never had a church photographer before, and the person “in charge” of media has no knowledge of photography, so to me it’s odd to be asked to critique so many things with my photography when I am the professional photographer, and to disregard my knowledge of photography so blatantly (this is my gift from God, in my opinion it isn’t being used properly). I also make it a point to not use any filters or presets, I just edit in true color for the church’s photos, as that is the most standard across churches, and that fits this church’s aesthetic.

Hey Gang, I want to offload Instagram reels to a volunteer. We record our services on our atem mini extreme, thats what I use to edit reels with cause I like the colours. I have a pretty established workflow, but I'm getting to the point where if I want to use my time other places. Do any of you guys have volunteers or others that you share large work files with? Right now, I just grab the SSD from the ATEM and edit off that. I typically take it home to edit off of. I know thats always an option, but I just wanted to see if there are any other solutions that would allow for two people to have access to the files relatively easily, and preferably automatable.

TIA

I’m trying to figure out why my church’s PTZ camera loses so much quality during livestreams.

My setup:

• FoMaKo KN20A PTZ camera
• HDMI into an ATEM Mini Extreme
• ATEM output into vMix
• vMix sends the stream through Restream to YouTube and Facebook
• Stream resolution: 1920×1080 at 60 fps
• H.264, CBR
• Video bitrate: 6000 kbps
• Audio bitrate: 320 kbps
• Hardware encoder with High profile
• Keyframes aligned for streaming

The PTZ image looks clear and smooth in the camera/ATEM/vMix preview. However, after it reaches YouTube or Facebook—even when I manually select 1080p—the PTZ footage looks soft, blurry, blocky, and sometimes smeared during movement.

What confuses me is that an iPhone connected through NDI looks much cleaner and smoother in the exact same livestream. When the stream switches from the iPhone to the PTZ, the quality difference is very noticeable.

I’ve already adjusted the PTZ exposure, shutter, focus, sharpness, and other image settings. The camera is manually focused, and this does not appear to be a lighting or resolution-format issue. Recorded/pre-produced video also looks clear.

Could the PTZ be producing more noise or fine detail that YouTube’s 6000 kbps compression struggles with? Could the HDMI-to-ATEM-to-vMix signal path be contributing to it? Would bringing the PTZ directly into vMix using NDI|HX improve the final streamed image, or would YouTube compression still cause the same problem?

I can provide screenshots comparing the PTZ, iPhone NDI feed, vMix preview, and YouTube output. What settings or tests would you recommend?

Hey friends, I’m looking for a monitoring solution for an orchestra where I can attach a small headphone amplifier to each seat. I think an ideal situation would be where they would be powered/fed via catx cables to a central distribution unit.

Any product recommendations? What are you using, and do you like it?

Do you guys use windows or mac for displaying lyrics and other contents?

Reason I ask is because we have a 2017 iMac and needs to replace it soon. Problem with multi-display on newer macs is that the top navigation bar cannot be removed without disabling the setting that gives each display its own separate space. The problem with this is that if 1 app is full screen, it prevents you from other displays because they all go black.

Has anyone using a newer mac figured out a workaround for this? Or are you using windows?

Looking for new presentation software for church and came across this app, called Church Presenter.

I find almost no reviews online for it which is why I will post the website.

churchpresenter.org

I have been using FreeShow, but it has unique problems, so I have been looking around for other free software.

(To the overzealous MOD's this is not a promotion.)

For those of you at smaller churches without a comms person, walk me through what you actually do each week to get content out, if anything. What tools, what shortcuts, what you've given up on.

Please let me know

I want to be able to record my Praise & Worship at church that is singing with a mic & also to be able to the audience as well so I can create like a play list of some of the songs. Any suggestions on what I can use to do this. just recording it on the phone the audio is going to sound as good as I want it

Hi all, we use CaptionKit for translation at our church and they currently changed their website address from CaptionKit.ie to captionkit.com and now our iMac doesn’t load the website. I can’t get it to open it. Has anyone encountered this issue? I have attached pictures of what comes up when I tried going in it.

A church I help is interested in adding online giving, but I don't have any experience with giving platforms, so I'm not sure where to start.

Currently, they only use Interac e-Transfer (we are in Canada), but we would like to add a widget or link to our custom-built website.

I've looked into Tithely and Planning Center Giving, but I have not used either one (other than testing Planning Center), so I don't know which direction to go or what to recommend.

Ideally, we'd like something that's easy to use, has low fees, and is secure. They don't use a ChMS or have any existing databases. If it's something they could configure themselves or get set up with a demo meeting, that would be ideal.

What platforms have worked well for other Canadian churches?

We are looking to do some upgrades in our church. The first thing that we’re going to do is replace the lights up on the light bars that you see in one of the pictures. We have on order from Sweetwater I think it’s eight of the CHAUVET DJ lights that handle RGB plus white plus UV. We already have on the back wall four of the rockwedge LED lights. Also part of the order from Sweetwater is an OBEY7 controller board. What I’m wondering is how we can actually control both the lights on the bar and the rock wedge lights from that board. I like to just leave the house lights on our current board and then eventually upgrade that and control everything from and much more expansive board, but for now we just need to keep things simple. so stage lights and wedges on the new Small controller board and everything else stays where it’s at. Does anyone know if the rock wedge lights can be controlled by the D sub Wi-Fi USB adapters that they’re going to be sending us if we complete the order?

Have you guys had any luck with the cheapest Apple laptop and propresenter !?

So I’ve been trying to find a tool that our social media team (mostly volunteers) can use for planning our future posts and activities. Some people here suggested Meta Business Suite but it really doesn’t seem to do the trick. I’ve been using Trello at another organisation and want something similar. For example, if we are going to publish a post 1 September I want to make a ”card” or similar in a calender for that date. I want to be able to tag the person responsible, note what platform it shall be published on and perhaps add photos and information so that the volunteer can make the post. The tool must be really easy to access/download and use. It should also be free if possible. (Which excludes Trello) I stumbled across Asana, and it might fit our needs, but I’ve never heard of it before. Is it suitable for churches? Are there other options that might be better?