I attend a suburban Baptist church in Sydney. We have three Sunday services with an average of 600 people worshipping with us.
Our building is just over two years old and is equipped with a good digital sound and lighting system. Even before we moved into our new building, we audio recorded every service and these are available as an mp3 download from our web site, generally within 30 mins of each service ending.
I'm one of the people who volunteer to run our AV systems each Sunday and professionally I have worked in the Radio, TV and Film industry since 1972.
We have just started discussing whether we should video record our services and make them available on our web site using a Vimeo or Youtube embedded file. We always have video on our web site - generally its promoting an upcoming event or its an interview with a recent featured speaker, such as Kate Bracks, but so far we have resisted the move to video-ing our services and putting them on-line every week.
Audio vs Video
Audio recording any church service these days is pretty straight forward - especially if you just want to record the sermon. You can take a split from the FOH sound system and record it digitally on a computer or digital recorder. At the end of the service, its usually just a matter of cleaning up the top and tail, maybe applying some compression and then converting it to the mp3 format. Uploading it to the web is again a fairly quick process.
Once loaded, it's accessible from anywhere in the world.
Video
Video however is another process all together. Unlike the audio process, we don't use video cameras as a normal part of our services. So we would have to bring one (or more) in and set it up somewhere fairly unobtrusive. Generally this means at the rear of the auditorium which means we are limited to a front on shot of the preacher, generally in mid-shot. At the end of the service, the process of getting the recorded video ready for upload to the web is nowhere near as quick and simple as it is for audio. (Unless of course you have some H.264 compression hardware, which doesn't come cheap)
Generally the video file has to be loaded into video editing software, minor corrections made to colour balance and maybe exposure with the finished 'edit' then exported into the H.264 format ready for upload to Vimeo or Youtube. Bear in mind this is footage from a single camera, shot in a continuous take. The upload can take a couple of hours for a 30 minute sermon at reasonable quality. This almost 20 times longer than it takes with an audio file.
The question I have been asking myself is; would the extra time and equipment involved in shooting our sermons with a single camera and uploading it to the web, add 20 times the value compared to someone just listening to the audio on a podcast?
Multicam?
The problem of course with shooting a service with a single camera is that visually, its boring. Using two, three or four cameras will obviously produce a far better finished product, but the additional equipment, operators and probable post-production time involved would blow that 20 times figure out to 200 times, if not more.
Sure, it would look great but again, would the extra time and dollars involved give a person watching it, 200 times more value than the podcast?
For our church and our services, I don't think it would.
Plus, when you're relying on volunteers to look after lighting, sound and AV every Sunday, finding another five to ten people every service to do a multi-cam video is a pretty big ask.
One of our problems of course is that we all watch quality television every night and therefore we have come to expect similar quality in web videos. Even on cable TV, any church services we watch (generally from the US) are all produced with top of the range equipment and crews which are not even remotely possible for our church in suburban Sydney.
Audience
The other question is how do we judge if it is worth it? I'm sure that if we did provide single camera coverage of our sermons every week we would get people to watch the videos. But how many viewers makes the process worth doing? And how do we measure what additional value the visual aspect brings to the viewer, compared to just an audio podcast? Unless there is some quantifiable real value in the work and time involved, is it worth it?
Others are doing it …
It's easy to fall into the trap of saying, "well, other churches of a similar size to us are doing, so why don't we?" But committing the necessary resources just to keep up with what other churches are doing is not really good strategy.
What do you think? How do you judge if it is worthwhile?
