During the spring of 2020, while everyone was social distancing, our church pre-recorded the worship part of the service and live streamed the rest. We recorded the band at Thursday night practice, edited that into one video, played the pre-recorded worship on the stream Sunday morning, and then went live to our pastor or whoever was speaking.
So it was half pre-recorded, half live. One video file covered everything from the countdown up to the live message.
We recorded during the band's Thursday night practice.
At the soundboard, I plugged my MacBook Pro into our Behringer X32. The audio came out of the card on the back of the X32 (the USB audio interface card) and into Logic Pro on the MacBook.
I recorded every channel individually. That way I could go back later and mix it however I wanted for the recording.
We recorded the audio completely separate from the video.
We kept the camera side simple. We had two cameras up on tripods:
After practice, I took all of the footage back to my computer to edit in Premiere Pro.
Back at my desk, I opened the Logic session with all the stems from the X32. We did two songs, and I mixed the stems properly for each one.
I also added our multitracks into Logic and synced them up with the songs. Because the band played with a click, I could drop the multitracks right in and they lined up. I didn't use much from them, and everything I did use was mixed pretty low. It was mostly there for some extra keys or pads if I needed them.
Once the mix was done, I bounced it out of Logic as one audio file and imported that into Premiere Pro.
In Premiere, I laid the bounced track from Logic on the timeline and put the footage from both cameras, the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and the A6300, on top of it.
I added the lyrics in the edit so they were done ahead of time and nobody had to run them live on Sunday.
The easiest way to do it is with the Type tool in Premiere. Click on the screen and type whatever text you want. I found a font and size that looked good on screen, then copied that text box and changed the words for each new lyric as the song went along.
If you want to copy what I used, it was Montserrat Medium at 75 point.
A tip for duplicating those lyric boxes: instead of Command C, Command V, click the one you want to copy, hold down the Option key, and drag it away. That makes a new copy you can move and edit. It's a lot quicker than copy and paste when you're making a lot of them.
The start of the timeline has a lot going on, because I made a countdown specifically for the livestream. The full video starts with a 15-minute countdown.
The week before, I built a lot of the countdown in Adobe After Effects. The next week I moved most of it into Premiere for simplicity. The old After Effects comp was still linked in the timeline, but it wasn't being used.
The countdown was built in layers:
When the countdown hits zero, it fades to black, and that's the transition into the worship set.
After the worship set, the pastor comes back up for a closing exhortation and prayer, and that's part of the edit too.
After that, the video fades into a graphic encouraging people in the comments to engage with each other: say hey, reach out to each other. That graphic runs for about 60 seconds and then transitions into the bumper video.
I put the bumper video straight into the same edit so everything was one cohesive piece. Once I hit play on that one video, I didn't have to play anything else until the pastor or whoever was speaking went live.
So the order of the single video file was:
Then we went live to the message.
We connected a MacBook Pro to the card on the back of our Behringer X32 and recorded every channel individually into Logic Pro. That let me mix the songs later, separate from the video.
I used Montserrat Medium at 75 point, added with Premiere's Type tool. Hold Option and drag a text clip to duplicate it faster than copy and paste.
Yes. We played one pre-recorded video with the countdown, worship, closing prayer, a comments graphic and a bumper, then went live to the pastor or speaker for the message.
I layered free backgrounds from Visual Media Church, a numbers countdown made in After Effects and exported as a video, and text from a Peter McKinnon motion graphics pack. At zero it fades to black into worship.
Want the full camera and video workflow we use? Church Video Made Simple walks through it step by step.
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