Covid-19 Broadcast Case Study

Hey guys! Trevor here, shop manager and lead install tech for Lambda, and overall Audio Genius (That last one is a bit of a self-given title… but I’m keeping it). Along with working for Lambda, I am also an Audio Engineer for at a local church in Colorado Springs. Last week with the beginning of shutdowns due to COVID-19, most of the live production world came screeching to a halt. This included auditoriums and houses of worship. So, we wanted to share how we took a 2500+ group of people meeting over a weekend to an online only platform in a matter of 36 hours. ​

On Thursday of that week we knew there was a chance that gatherings of 50 or more would be restricted so we began brainstorming what our best plan of action could be. Our normal weekend schedule includes a Saturday night service and 3 services Sunday morning. By Friday midday we were informed by our executive leadership team that the church would be moving all services to an online platform. Trying to respect the personal time of our worship and tech team volunteers, we decided that our Saturday night experience would be live streamed and recorded, and that the recording would be broadcast for the 3 service times on Sunday with a live chat room so people would still have the option of connecting with each other. ​

How did we pull this off from a production standpoint? Let me give you a quick rundown of our normal set up. At front of house we are running a Digico SD9 with an external computer running Waves Multi-track. We stream all of our services on a regular basis and have a broadcast console, a Digico SD11, that can either be used to mix the stream or, if we don’t have a broadcast engineer, we can send an Aux mix from the SD9 that is a post fader mix of what is going to the Mains. So, Friday we made the decision not to use the broadcast console and use the SD9 as our broadcast console for this week. Why did we make that decision? The driving reason was that we don’t have Waves on our broadcast console, and we would lose that piece out of our “toolbelt”.

But using the SD9 as our broadcast console presented its own challenge. The worship band would already be playing to an empty room, but they didn’t want to play to a quiet room. For a good broadcast mix I wanted to be able to mix to by headphone and not have the bleed coming from the mains in the room. How did we make both of those happen? We had enough length on both of our digital snakes to be able to move the console from the FOH position to the lobby of the building! We added in a few longer network cables to connect to the Waves server and extend the AES cables going to the Main Amplifiers and we were good to go!
We also repositioned an extra video camera and a lobby TV to give the audio console a locked off shot of the stage to be able to follow the band and “feel” where they were going with the song.

As I said earlier, we stream on a weekly basis, so from a video production standpoint we already had the infrastructure in place to have multiple camera angles and an intercom system in place for the video switcher to be able to communicate to the camera operators. We did move a few cameras into more direct shots since we had an empty room to work with! ​

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Overall, I was really pleased with the result we were able to achieve on such short notice of turning a live experience into an online only! What are the takeaways we can glean from this? Because I have spent a lot of time interacting and patching this particular system, I knew the ins and outs and already knew where we had extra cable and that we had enough cable on the digital snakes to be able to move out to the lobby. In-depth knowledge of the system or schematics can be an invaluable tool when you have to make unexpected changes to a system. When we design a system at Lambda, we try our very best to make Audio, Video and Lighting systems as versatile as possible. And did you know with all of our system installs we create a custom schematic of your system? So, if you ever need to troubleshoot you can see what and where everything is connected! ​

As most houses of worship are switching to online only experiences, we wanted to share this case study with you. With everything that has happened recently in our cities, you might just need another pair of eyes to see what your system is capable of and how to get the best results for online broadcasting. If you have any questions about broadcasting, we’re here for you!
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