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.
Your church photographer probably shoots in burst mode already. This turns those frames into a looping video for social instead of picking one shot and throwing the rest away.
You need a run of frames from the same moment. That's the whole raw material.
Import the burst. Edit the first photo how you want it, then copy those settings to the rest of the sequence.
Do this even if the edit is small. If the frames don't match, the loop flickers.
Export the whole edited set.
New project, import the photos.
Make a vertical sequence to match wherever it's going.
Select all, drag them in, set frame size to match your sequence.
This is the setting that matters. Each photo wants to be 3 to 5 frames.
Select all, right click, Speed/Duration. Longer than that and it reads as a slideshow instead of a boomerang.
Copy the whole run of photo...
I wrote this back in 2023. A few years on, here's what I'd add.
Not many churches are running an FR7 yet. That doesn't surprise me. Church tech moves slow, and a $10,000 body was never going to show up in small church rooms in year one or year three.
But the thing that made this camera interesting is still true, and nobody else has touched it.
The FR7 is still the only PTZ I know of with a cinema camera body and interchangeable lenses. Every other PTZ on the market locks you into whatever lens is built into it. That's the compromise of the whole category, and it's why PTZ footage usually looks like PTZ footage.
Sony's the only one who's broken that. Three years later, nobody's followed.
That's the part I'm watching. Not whether churches buy this specific camera. Whether the idea works its way down to a price a church can actually hit. When it does, that's the shift.
In the meantime, the camera we run every week is a Panasonic G7, and it's under $300.
I wrote this in 2023, and back then Dropbox Business was our answer for unlimited storage. That's changed.
The church is off Dropbox. We moved our media storage to a NAS.
I've left the cost comparison below exactly as it was, because it still holds up if you're weighing cloud options against each other. Just know the recommendation at the bottom isn't what we run today.
If you're making this call right now, here's the honest trade. Cloud is faster to set up and easier for a volunteer team to reach from anywhere. A NAS trades the monthly bill for a bigger cost up front and more of your own time keeping it running.
If you're like me and started taking photos and videos for your church, you probably bought a hard drive to store your files. When that filled up, you bought another. And another. Now you've got a stack of drives in a drawer and no idea what's on any of them.
That's a problem in a church specifically, because more t...
This question comes up constantly in the church Facebook groups I'm in. Same questions, same frustrations, over and over.
Here are five things that have actually worked for us.
Your volunteers need tutorials, checklists, and step-by-step instructions written for the specific job they're doing. Not a general overview of the whole media ministry. The thing in front of them, right now.
This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it. Most volunteers are handed a role and a few minutes of verbal explanation, then expected to remember it two weeks later when they serve again.
When something changes, whether it's how you run sound or how you export a video, write it down and send it to the people it affects.
The version of this that saved me the most time was recording a short video of the change instead of explaining it five separate times. One recording, everyone watches it when they can.
I put together a free Notion template if ...
This is version 2 of the Notion template we built for our media team. Version 1 was here.
At the bottom of this post I asked whether there'd be interest in real Notion training for churches. There was. That answer turned into the Church Notion System, and it's a long way past this template now.
The original write-up is below, and the template still works.
A little over a year before this, I shared how we use Notion to build checklists and resources for our media team positions, and gave away the template. This is the update. If you haven't seen the first one, start there for the full picture of the original setup.
The updated template works as a central hub for everything worship and media. Here's what's in it.
We rebuilt this section and organized it by role, so nobody's reading past three other people's jobs to find their own.
I wrote this after about six months with the Behringer Wing. It's 2026 now and nothing below has changed.
It's still our sound board. We use it every single week. I still love it.
And I still don't love the physical layout. That's the one thing. Years of running it didn't change my mind, which is probably more useful to you than anything I could've said at six months.
Everything below is the original review.
There are plenty of professional reviews of this board out there. This one's from someone who's usually on stage playing guitar rather than behind the console. If that's closer to your situation, this'll be more useful.
Setting it up was surprisingly intuitive. I didn't read any manuals or watch setup videos and I still found my way through the menus to configure sources, channels, and outputs. That separation of sources (inputs), channels (signal paths), and outputs (...
Getting chords onto a stage screen used to mean typing them in by hand, taking screenshots, or importing PDFs. All of it annoying, all of it something you redo every time a key changes.
ProPresenter's MultiTracks integration does it automatically. It's good. It also costs real money.
You need three MultiTracks subscriptions. When I set ours up:
Roughly $730 a year without discounts. Check current pricing before you budget, since subscription costs move.
That's a lot if you're starting from zero. It's a much easier call if you're already in the MultiTracks ecosystem, because you're only adding the piece you don't have.
We had Cloud Pro Plus and had recently picked up Chart Pro, so we only needed the ProPresenter add-on. That made it an easy yes.
Worth saying these subscriptions aren't only for chord charts. You get playback apps, chart builders, and other things yo...
Our lead pastor came to us wanting bumper videos for an "awkward family Christmas" sermon series.
Awkward family dynamics pointed straight at mockumentary. The Office, Parks and Rec, Modern Family. Chris Yarber and I talked it through and decided to go for it.
The people in the videos were our own church members, and the congregation knew every one of them.
That's most of why it landed. The same script performed by strangers would've gotten polite laughs. Seeing someone you sit near every Sunday being deadpan on camera is a completely different experience.
If you take one thing from this, it's that. Cast people your church already knows.
Me, Chris, and our friend Lane.
Chris handled script supervision. Lane and I ran lighting and camera. I was DP.
Three people is enough for something like this, as long as everybody knows which job is theirs before you start.
We shot on a Sony a6400. Not the ideal camera for this, and...
ProPresenter doesn't have a button for this, and the information is hard to find online. I looked for a while before I worked it out.
The trick is that you move stage screens through themes. There's no direct stage screen export. You copy the elements into a theme, export that, and unpack it on the other end.
Go to File, then Import, and select the theme. Mine's called "Stage Screen Template." Once it's in, it shows up in your theme list.
Now get it out of the theme and into the stage editor:
That's it. Everything comes across.
Same process in reverse. Useful when you're moving to a new machine, setting up a second o...
Get your wide shot first. Then get a closer shot of whoever's leading or preaching. Those two angles carry a stream.
Once you've got them, the next camera I'd add is a drum cam. And the Marshall CV503 is what I'd buy.
About $400.
That matters because a DSLR or mirrorless body alone costs more than that before you've bought a lens. For a fixed angle pointed at one thing forever, you're paying for capability you'll never use.
Roughly GoPro sized, so you can tuck it into the kit instead of parking a full camera body on a tripod behind the drummer.
Unlike a GoPro, it's got a standard thread built in. No mounting accessories to buy. It goes on a tripod or a clamp straight out of the box.
This is the real reason to pick it over a cheaper camera.
It puts out SDI, which runs directly to your switcher. No converter, no adapter, no HDMI cable that only works when it's sitting at the right angle. One long cable across the r...
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