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johnb

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    Broadcast Engineer by trade, have worked with many of the major broadcasters and these days doing lots of fluffy stuff!
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    John B

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  1. Our church went through this back at the start of the pandemic when we realised we'd were going to be streaming for a while and invested in PTZ cameras feeding an Atem vision mixer and then the screens in the church and the stream. We were lucky enough to put 3 PTZ cameras in - one at the back, one on the side and one near the front. The one at the rear is mounted above the main doors at a height of about 3m and probably about 20m from the main place that people stand to speak. Usually the preacher/service leader stands on a single step at the front which helps raise them a little. At that angle the speaker is generally looking slightly down from the camera, but not actually too bad. What does make a difference is for the services which are streamed we usually have the chairs arranged with a centre isle. However our evening service which is not streamed has a different arrangement of chairs with a central block. On one occasion we were asked to stream an evening and this change became very obvious on camera where the view was nothing like as good. The advice of trying a phone camera or similar in the position is a very good one - one of our other camera positions at the front replaced an existing composite PTZ. The old camera produced a very downward looking shot which was not very pleasant to look at. By testing positions with a phone I was able to demonstrate than moving it down about a meter produced much more pleasant shots to watch and is where it is now. So tested and getting people to sit and stand in key locations to check sightlines is worth spending the time on. The other thing we've found invaluable is that we have a forth camera which is a fixed wide angle right next to the rear PTZ. This shows a view of the whole church and provides both a really good context shot for the viewer, but also a handy fall back for when something unexpected happens and the operator needs to reposition the PTZ's in some way. Everyone involved in the setup agrees that it was actually the best investment in the system. So if you can stretch to an additional camera, not necessarily anything fancy or expensive, then you'll probably fine it really useful. The PTZ on the side wall was an interesting one. Personally of all the cameras I like the angle and the shots it gets least of all, and I've wondered a few times whether we'd do better off mounting it at the back alongside the other cameras. However there are enough times when it's able to get a shot which the others can't which means we've left it where it is. Dropping it down would also probably help the angle but not really possible in the space. We manage as this is not really our main camera - the PTZ at the back is used for the majority of the close ups as it's head on where the side often does the context or alternative view. An example of how we use the system and the types of shots we achieve can be seen in the following video. You can also see the wide view and how it's a useful alternative to save having to move the PTZ's too much when on air which never looks nice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mamo_iQ_nqA Happy to answer other questions about our setup if it's useful John
  2. St Paul's Hammersmith I think has what you're describing as this photo from their wikipedia page shows. Do a google image search and you'll come up with various interior photos of the church and since there are vertical booms on almost every pillar then you'll see them in plenty of photos https://www.google.com/search?q=st+paul's+hammersmith&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwic0PvGmdn7AhUQSkEAHYKOA1AQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=3440&bih=1272&dpr=1#imgrc=MT0YuxChWNBg9M
  3. Thank you for the further information. It looks like there are good arguments for why the steppy dimming could be either the controller or the lights. So I think the only way we'll know for sure is further testing, which I'm hoping to do on Tuesday so will report back after that. My suspicion is it's the controller since the Varytecs appear to be a popular line on the Thomann website and I've not seen any similar comments in the reviews, so we'll see. @Edward- Z88 - the clarification on remote and monitor is useful and much clearer. I'm away with work this weekend, but once I'm back I'll dig into the videos. John
  4. Thank you everyone for the feedback, lots of useful comments there. On the lights, it looks like my thinking was confirmed about brightness of the Elumen8's and the Chauvet's being more than we need. It sounds like I need to do a bit more digging on to find out why the existing Varytec lights are not dimming smoothly. It makes me wonder if what I'm seeing is effectively quantisation noise on the encoding of the faders in the cheap desk that a tungsten lamp naturally smooths out. I think I probably need to get my DMX dongle out and see how they behave with a different controller. The controller feedback is really useful - it's an area I'm very out of touch on these days. The FLX S24 looks interesting - need to get my head around what's possible via a tablet as it's not clear the difference between the remote and monitor apps. Luckily it looks like the local hire company has one in their stock, so may need to see if I can have a play with it at it some point and how simple it would be for non technical operators to turn some lights up a bit and add some colour to the space. John
  5. Hi All, I'm looking for some pointers on changes we are looking to make in the lighting within our church. Currently as have a set of 4 minuette fresnels and 2 prelude profiles which are used to do a face wash on the front area. Two years ago to add more coverage for streaming we added a pair of Thomann Varytec LED fresnels. At this point we're looking at all the lighting in the space to LED including the main wash. While we have 2 profiles in the current setup, I they are all actually doing the same throw, so might be more sense to standardise on fresnels. I've looked back through some of the recent threads and talking with a few people I have had the following options: 1) Go with more of the Thomann Varytec fresnels. At 100W the existing ones are brighter than the 500W minuettes, so happy with the amount of light they put out. They came with barn doors and was able to get some shaping with them, but not perfect as I don't think the light source is quite as much of point source as the conventional lamp. My main concern with them is that they are 8 bit dimming and you can see the steps when controlled with our basic 12 channel controller. 2) Recommended in previous posts seem to be the Elumen8 MP60 from CPC. These look interesting, however taking the Varytec 100W as a benchmark I'm concerned whether the 60W light output will be too low. That said, for the price we could probably afford to put more in, but would probably then need to go through the faculty to get them approved. I'm not looking at the MP 75 RGBW for the main faces wash, however am quite interested in them as an option to add some colour. 3) I've had recommended the Chauvet range which would probably be the Ovation F-145WW which is a 70W light source that they claim is comparable to a 650W light and 16 bit dimming. However the cost of these seems huge when compared to the previous two options, part of which I guess is driven by the fact that it has motorised zoom which is unnecessary in our scenario. So I would appreciate any feedback from people on these three options and any real life experiences of them. Also if there is another option I should be considering then it would be good to get further recommendations. The other challenge we have is around control. As mentioned earlier we're running on a basic 12 channel per fader desk which has worked for us so far. We are starting to do more with RGB style fixtures to add colour to the space, so it is probably a good opportunity to look at what we use going forward. The key thing is simple operation by non-technical users - both for the simple fading up of lights (so some faders is probably important) as well as controlling a couple of different colour washes. We're also finding tablet control for the technology systems is becoming more and more important, so would like something with an app ideally available for both Android and Apple devices. The most interesting option I've seen that covers all of this is the LightShark (LS-1 or LS Core plus Wing). It has both the physical faders, as well as web server and app control. However I've no practical experience of it in operation. I've seen suggestions in the past of using Chamsys for simple option, however that appears to require a PC and not sure if there is app control. So again, thoughts and suggestions for options which meet the requirements would be useful. John
  6. In our church we have a similar setup with looms for each member of the band which contain the Cat6 for the personal monitoring solution, as well as the appropriate number of audio lines. These are then all held together using the expandable sleeving. We find this works very well for keeping everything need together while being very quick to run out. The downsides we've seen are really the same with any loom around not being as easy to coil and slightly more tricky to hide the surplus. For standardisation we have two types of looms - the standard instrumentalist with Cat6 for personal monitoring and 1 XLR for the instrument, and then the leader loom which has two additional XLR cables for vocal and also MD feed (same mic fed by local shotbox switch).
  7. To update everyone with the outcome of today's work to resolve this and with particular thanks to James for his assistance. It appears the lastest version of the software v2.23 does not contain the drivers for the Enttec Open USB dongle. Installing an earlier version (v2.21) worked fine first time. When I have more time I want to try upgrading that install up to the lastest and see if it keeps working, but I have a carol service to do before and the older version will do fine for now and works!
  8. Hi Don That's what I thought I should be seeing, however it's not available in the list: As Lightfactory starts up it's complaining that it can't detect any hardware, but I'm not sure if that's a generic message since nothing is configured or more specific that it's actually scanning for anything available. All the instructions I can find say to install the FDTI driver for the dongle and nothing else. That's installed, and as I mentioned it's appearing as a COM port in Windows Device Manager. However it feels like I've missed a step or not installed something I should have.
  9. Hi. I'm hoping the collective Blue Room wisdom will be able to point out what I've missed...... I'm running Lightfactory as a fresh install and trying to get it to see my Enttec Open DMX USB dongle. I've installed the FTDI drivers and windows is happily seeing an additional serial port (COM5) however I'm struggling to get Lightfactory to see it. In the DMX output screen the Open DMX is not listed as an available device/protocol, and while I've tried some of the other Enttec models listed none of them are detected to be able to set the COM port. I'm sure I had this working last year (annual carol service on Sunday night!), but at the moment can't seem to see what I've missed. So any thoughts on things to try would be appreciated. John
  10. Thank you very much to everyone, there's a lot of information here and been trying to take it all in. There are a couple of suggestions around signage software and it's interesting to see what people are using. It looks like many of the digital signage come with some built in platform, however that ties you into their back end and subscriptions and most of them seem to be in the region of $10 per screen per month which is not going to work for the church. It's interesting to see a couple of suggestions for Xibo as that had come up in previous threads and looked interesting and probably at a price point which might be more acceptable. Unfortunately the don't support the Raspberry Pi any more, but their own packaged Android box is about £80 so is a pretty good price. For a single screen the player license and cloud CMS comes in about £25 per year which I think I could get through on the basis of remote working, scheduling and not messing around with memory cards etc. Knowing how fast things change I wasn't sure if there was something better come along more recently. On the screens themselves I was struggling with the justification for going with the proper digital signage screens rather than just going for standard TV's. This was particularly the case with the above when looking at the built in CMS as too expensive. So key things like scheduling the screens directly and more control over them waking up in the right state I think is probably useful. The last thing I want is the screens to come on every day and not show anything. A few years ago I put in some LG TV's but there I got lucky as when powered up they reliably came back to the same state (on and same input) as when de-powered, however not all TV's do that so it becomes a little bit of pot luck. The Extron panels that pstewart mentioned are also interesting for a user to be able to turn them on manually (if not already scheduled), but might possibly be a little overkill. For the distribution and switching I like the suggestion from ninjadingle around an auto HDMI switch. It made me realise I have something similar to thissitting in the lounge switching inputs to my TV. Also looking at priority switches is interesting, however with at least 3 inputs it needs some thinking about how it will react in the different circumstances. I'm thinking it's time to have a play with the one in the lounge in different scenarios! I think the next thing is to probably sign up for the Xibo demo and have a play with it and see if it looks like doing what we need. In the mean time any other thoughts or comments are gratefully recieved. John
  11. I'm hoping to tap into the Blue Room wisdom for some suggestions which are slightly out of my knowledge area, but feel like they should be solvable..... At my church we're looking to put 1 or 2 screens in the entrance way to serve a couple of different purposes. We want to be able to use them for local presentations in the entrance space, a relay from the main church but also for digital signage at other times. I'm currently pondering the best way to combine all three uses of the screens in a sensible setup that is both simple and straight-forward to use (I'll avoid the phrase idiot proof for now) but achieves all the aims. I've done some searching back through previous Blue Room posts, but it does look like the last digital signage threads are a while ago, and I had a few different questions as well. So key things I'm looking for advice on are: 1 - Suggestions for a low cost digital signage solution for stills and possibly video clips to run in a loop. The ability to manage content and schedule when things are showing remotely would be a bonus at the moment, so that probably would mean including a basic level of cloud hosting. We're not adverse to spending a some money on this, however since this is early days and for a church then keeping the running costs down would be useful. We can see possibilities for at least two more locations for screens in the future so ensuring that costs don't get out of hand as the screen count goes up does matter. 2 - I'm thinking that a device separate to the actual screen would be useful - if we go down more than one screen in the space I'm inclined to run a single device and then use the same distribution to the screen as we use for the other purposes (4 in 1 out switch into DA style setup). 3 - How to schedule when the screens come on and off with a minimum of a 7 day timer window and multiple slots per day. This really needs to be be able to be done without having to visit each screen, so I started looking at the smart switches and smart fused spur items as an option, but wondering if there is a better way to achieve this. 4 - With multiple possible inputs we need a way to ensure that when the screens come on they default to the digital signage setup, but then provide a simple way for a user to override and select other inputs. Even better would be a way of scheduling the input as we know every Sunday morning it should be on the relay feed, however I think this would break the simple video routing setup as well as adding a lot more cost/complexity somewhere along the line! As I said, this all feels possible, however I'm interested in how other people cope with this style of challenge and ideally for proven solutions rather than having to experiment here. Cheers John
  12. At our church we're having an issue that the band rehearsal for the Sunday morning is on a Tuesday night as that's when people/space is available, however that is proving far from ideal due to the gap to the service. Unfortunately there is another service beforehand on the Sunday morning only giving at the most a 40 minute window to get in, setup (pretty much everything from the stagebox onwards), sound check and a brief rehearsal. What is being considered is whether to try and rehearse in the hall space during the earlier service and then transfer into the church for the final sound check. From a kit point of view we're currently in the process of considering the move to a digital desk in the main church - current thinking being one of the X32 family, possibly with stage box at the front. The hall setup is far from ideal as the kit a powered mixer/amp combo tucked in a cupboard which is an appalling place to operate from for the weekly all-age service, however simple local control is required for other events similar to the current setup. Kit is currently in a 12U rack, so not space for another whole console. What would be interesting to see is if there is a sensible workflow that would allow us to rehearse in the hall initially and then transfer some of the channel settings - line up, foldback mix etc from the hall into the church to make more use of the time in the hall and streamline the move into the church. If there was a way to improve the setup for the other service at the same time this would be a bonus. Setup needs to be relatively straight-forward to achieve the move, and whatever happens should not interfere with the service that will be going on at the same time. This feels like it should be possible somewhere (multiple stage boxes, transferring scenes between systems.....) to come up with a better process, so I'm hoping the collective wisdom of the Blue Room might be able to suggest some options please. Cheers John
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