Slides, sound, video, livestream, and the workflow behind it all. Everything here comes from what we actually run at our church on Sunday, built so volunteers who don't do this for a living can run it without you standing over their shoulder.
We used to run Companion on four separate machines. Now we run one host machine with Companion, and three others running Companion Satellite.
It's simpler to manage, and there's only one place to make changes. Here's how we did it and what broke along the way.
Start with Companion on whatever machine you're making the host. For us that's the iMac in the live stream room.
Setup is the same as any new instance of Companion. Pick the network interface that has all your connections on it and you're done.
Install Companion Satellite on your satellite machines and plug your Stream Decks into them.
In the configuration window, enter the IP address of your host Companion instance. Make sure the port matches the one the host is using, which is usually 8000. Save it, and the Stream Deck sh...
I made this for our volunteers.
New people on the audio team have usually never watched somebody mix a full service. They get handed a board and a service order and told to keep it balanced. So I recorded myself mixing a whole set, start to finish, so they could see what it actually looks like.
If you're training people on your own team, this is a format worth stealing.
I played back a recording of a Sunday service and mixed it live off that.
I used my in-ears so what you hear in the video is close to what I was hearing. Room mics are in there too, so it feels like an actual service rather than a set of isolated tracks.
Led by Vocal 3. First thing I'm doing is balancing vocal against instruments. Vocals clear, not buried, not sitting on top of everything.
Led by Vocal 1. I adjust the pad and set the tempo to match. Same goal, vocals blending without losing clarity.
Led by Vocal 3. Here I bring in keys and pads f...
Our live stream mix used to be a coin flip.
It sounded different week to week, and not because the gear changed. It came down to who was in the chair. We needed two people to run the stream, one watching it and one mixing audio in Logic Pro. When the right person was there it sounded great. When they weren't, it drifted.
Mixing in a DAW takes real skill to stay consistent at. EQ, compression, routing. That's a lot to ask of somebody on a Sunday morning.
So we stopped. Now the stream mix comes off a bus on the Behringer WING, and one person runs the whole thing.
It's the best mix we've ever had.
We use one of the WING's main mixes for the stream. The WING has four, and they work like bus mixes.
Using a main mix instead of a regular bus means you can see and control what's going to both the house and the stream from the same place. That visibility is most of the value.
Select any channel, go to the main mix sends tab, and you'll see the s...
This is the whole process I use for cutting sermon clips for social media in Premiere Pro.
I originally made it as a training video for our team. Enough other people asked for it that I put it up publicly.
Pull down everything you need first. Footage, the Premiere project file, renders, thumbnails. I open the existing project file so everything for that sermon stays in one place.
On Resolve, same idea. Make the project file live in the same folder as the footage.
Get your keyboard shortcuts set before you start. Mine are Q and W for ripple trims, S for ripple delete, X to add an edit. That handful does most of the work.
New sequence at 1080x1920 for vertical, drop the sermon footage in, cut it down to the section you're using.
Switch to the captions workspace. Generate a transcript for the in and out points of your clip, then create captions from it.
My settings: max 22 characters, single line. Montserrat Black, centered vertically.
Then re...
Three tips for organizing your church's media files, plus a couple of bonus ones at the end.
None of this depends on where your files live. Dropbox, Google Drive, a NAS, a stack of hard drives in a drawer. The structure is the same. Where to keep them is a separate question.
Year at the top level. Event type underneath.
We didn't do this at first, and our 2015 to 2018 folders are a mess I've never gone back and fixed. Once we started, it changed everything.
Our 2023 folder breaks into bumper videos, Christmas, Easter, events, ministries, miscellaneous b-roll, nights of worship, sermons, life groups, and Sunday service photos and videos.
When somebody asks for footage from last Easter, you know exactly where to click. No searching.
I went back and forth on this for a long time. I'm settled now.
Keep them together, organized by event, instead of splitting everything into a photos tree and a videos tree.
The re...
This is the acoustic patch I run on my HX Stomp on a Sunday. Here's what's in it and why.
An LA-2A style compressor at the front of the chain, controlling dynamics before anything else touches the signal.
Acoustic guitar is spiky. You strum hard in a chorus and gentle in a verse, and without compression the sound engineer is chasing you all service. This smooths it out so what leaves the pedal is consistent.
Then a simple EQ to compensate for my pickups, which aren't great.
That's most acoustic-through-a-PA problems in one sentence. The pickup, not the guitar. A little EQ gets you most of the way to sounding like the instrument actually sounds.
Both on footswitches so I can bring them in without looking down.
The first is a quarter note delay set by tap tempo. It's subtle enough that I leave it on most of the time and nobody notices it as an effect. It just makes the guitar sit better.
The second is a dotted eighth, Phil Wickham ter...
We put in dedicated room mics for the live stream. Before that we were using a shotgun mic, and it wasn't doing what I needed.
Room mics are what make a stream sound like a room full of people instead of a dry recording of a band. But they're easy to get wrong.
Loud enough to matter. Not so loud it turns muddy.
That's the whole game, and you get there with EQ more than with the fader.
In the video I solo the room mic so you can hear it on its own, first with the EQ and then without.
Turn the low cut off and it goes muddy immediately. That low end is room rumble, HVAC, and stage noise that adds nothing and eats up space your vocals need.
If you take one thing from this: keep the low cut on.
With the EQ set right, you hear the room. People singing, the space having some life to it. And your main sources stay clear on top of it.
Wrong, and it just sounds like everything got a blanket thrown over it.
Three years after I made this, the Panasonic G7 is still our main live stream camera.
Still under $300. You can find them used on eBay all the time. The image still holds up.
It's on every angle in our room except two. Our drum camera is a Marshall CV503, because that shot needs something tiny. And we run one Panasonic G85 as our mobile camera, because the G85 has in-body stabilization and the G7 doesn't. Other than that, it's basically the same camera.
It came down to a few things. How many cameras we needed, what we could spend, and which features actually mattered for a live stream. We landed on the G7 because it's cheap and the image is good, even though it's missing stuff that sounds important on a spec sheet.
We had a decision to make. Spend heavy on one or two nice cameras, or buy several affordable ones and cover more angles.
We went with more angles. That kept us around $300 a camera.
It's the same logic I ...
Colby Griner is the production director at First Baptist Brunswick, and he walked me through their entire tech setup.
He's been there about two and a half years. Their services are multi-generational, traditional hymns alongside contemporary songs, and the setup has to handle both.
A Soundcraft SI Impact, about four years in. Colby's planning to move to an Allen & Heath Avantis for more processing.
The whole audio infrastructure runs on a Dante network, which ties stage audio, in-ears, and broadcast together.
A typical Sunday is acoustic, electric, bass, piano, Nord, drums, a full orchestra, and a choir.
Click and tracks run in Ableton off a MacBook Pro on the Dante network, controlled by the drummer. Having tracks on Dante instead of a stereo feed means the engineers get individual channels to work with.
Eight Shure ULXD handhelds, and an Avion system for in-ears covering around 30 people on stage.
Musicians build their own mixes,...
Every time the WING comes up in a church Facebook group, somebody says it's too much console for volunteers.
I don't think that's true. But my opinion doesn't count for much here, because I'm the one who set it up. So I asked the people who actually run it on Sundays.
Volunteers on our team who mix regularly. Most had a couple of years behind them, almost all of it on our old X32 before we switched.
These are capable people who don't do audio for a living. That's the whole point of the question.
Most of them came in skeptical and came out saying it was less intimidating than they'd assumed.
One volunteer with nine years on the X32 told me he felt more confident on the WING than the X32 after a few services. Another with much less experience said the same thing in different words. It looked harder than it turned out to be.
This came up from everybody. Being able to grab an EQ curve with a finge...
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