A New Church Launch System

*Note: Photos were pre-Covid. If you want to know more about Lambda's safety measures, or how your next appointment will look like, click HERE!

One of the projects we have not had the chance to showcase this year is a church campus launch that we helped with at the beginning of 2020. One of the great opportunities we have as a business is to see the organizations we work with grow and expand. New Life church in Colorado Springs, wanted to launch a new campus on the east side of the Springs. Our role in the launch was designing the video system. 

There are many hurdles and challenges in launching a new campus: finding a building, audio equipment, video gear, seating, volunteers for setup and teardown, etc. Having a quick setup and teardown is especially crucial if you are unable to keep everything set from week to week. This was the case for New Life East.  
With this in mind, we wanted the system to hit these three main requirements:
1.    Efficient setup and teardown.
2.    Simple and intuitive use. 
3.  The ability for one person to run the video/graphics position. ​

The two main pieces of the system, that all of the other video gear and components build from, are Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter and Blackmagic Design’s ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K. ProPresenter takes care of running the sermon graphics and worship Lyrics. The ATEM switcher is the workhorse of the operation. It feeds the in room screens (two audience screens and a stage display), formats the worships lyrics for lower thirds, receives and controls the camera (A Blackmagic Ursa Mini Broadcast), allows cutting of the camera feed and graphics, and outputs a program feed that hits a Blackmagic HyperDeck for Program record. While all of that may sound a little bit complicated at first, in reality the ATEM switcher is able to take care of all these needs with ease and keeps the operations of the system as simple as possible. 

So, the ATEM switcher enables ease of use and the ability for one person to run the system box, but what about the setup and teardown time every Sunday morning? 

After a few months of setting up and tearing down, the tech team at New Life East was able to have the entire tech setup and running in 45 minutes. This includes not only the video system, but also the audio system. The teardown is even faster with the entire tech system wrapped and the building reset in under 30 minutes. Talk about checking a box. Though we would be remiss if we did not also use this as a point to showcase the effect that having well trained staff and fantastic volunteers. This is why we love to provide system training after an install! It’s so important to have your entire tech crew on the same page.

As we mentioned in the beginning, New Life East launched at the start of the year. And as we all also know, a few months later, Covid-19 appeared. The country went into lockdown to flatten the curve and as part of that New Life East temporarily shut down its physical location and went entirely online. 

Changes and problems arising are inevitable in life and in the AV world you need to stay flexible to adapt and overcome them. As the Covid restrictions began to ease up, we were able to work with New Life church to help them adapt and figure out a way to bring New Life East back to meeting in person. They could not meet at their initial launch location due to room size regulations with Covid, but were able to have the East congregation meet at the main campus building on Thursday evenings for East’s “Sunday” service.

It might seem a little strange to hold a Sunday Service on a Thursday evening, but remember adapt and overcome. This not only bought them time and allowed them to run logistics and setup up a plan to safely bring back New Life East to their original launch location when the State regulations would allow.  

On Sunday August 9th, New Life East was able to relaunch their physical campus. This brings us to the latest piece of equipment we provided as part of the New Life East’s video system. We added a Boxcast stream encoder to the video system to allow anyone, for whatever reason, to still be apart of the service via livestream. Boxcast fits right in with the rest of the system providing a streaming encoder with intuitive controls and worry-free reliability.

​The entire New Life East portable system has been so successful and adaptable to the changing social climate, that Lambda is preparing to build and install a second one for another church launch. The team at Lambda focuses on making sure each system we design completely fulfills the needs of our client. This one provided the perfect solution for a portable church launch so much so that we can now provide one for a second church launch.