Most churches run pads off a laptop or a phone, through an app, into the board. It works. It's also one more device, one more cable, and one more thing somebody has to remember.

The Atmosphere by Aerospace Audio puts the whole thing in a pedal.

What it is

It's a compact pedal that replaces the usual pad rig. Instead of a MIDI keyboard, software, and a couple pieces of hardware, you've got one box.

Plug it in with an instrument cable, run it into a direct box, and you're done.

Setup

Power it on, connect your instrument and your DI. That's the whole setup.

From there you use the up and down arrows to change keys and move between patches. Soft footswitches handle preset changes, so you're not reaching down mid-song.

How it sounds

The pads fill the room the way you want them to. My favorite is the Troposphere patch, which is warm without sitting on top of everything else.

It sits well under an acoustic guitar, whether that's one person leading or a full band.

Using it live

I've run it ...

Here's the whole setup, start to finish, so you can get streaming.

If you're still deciding whether this is the right box for you, I wrote up why we switched to a hardware encoder and how it's held up over five years.

Power on and connect your video

Power on the Web Presenter HD and run your video into the SDI In on the back.

Then get it on your network. Same network as your switcher and ATEM software control.

Why the network matters

Plug the Web Presenter and your Blackmagic switchers into a network switch. Any computer on that switch can then reach and control both of them.

That's worth doing. Controlling this from a computer screen beats clicking through menus on the front of the device, especially when somebody else is running Sunday.

Monitor Out

Run HDMI from Monitor Out to a display. You'll see everything the device is reporting and you can actually watch your stream instead of hoping.

Install the software

With your computer on the same network, grab the Web Presenter softwar...

Five years in, it's still running

I first reviewed this box in 2023. We're still using it.

Here are the numbers that actually matter. We've run the Blackmagic Web Presenter HD for about five years. In that time I've restarted it twice, maybe three times. It cost around $500. It's wired into Companion, so when the countdown starts, the stream starts with it.

Honestly, I forget it's there. That's the whole point.

Why a hardware encoder instead of OBS

I talk to a lot of churches about their streams, and most of them say the same thing. "We stream through OBS." Or straight out of ProPresenter. Two sentences later comes the real part. "We have constant issues with our stream."

It works fine one week and melts down the next. Sunday morning turns into a gamble nobody asked for.

Here's what's actually happening. Software has too many variables. An update. A driver. A weird setting. Something shifts and you'll never know why. The computer might be completely fine. The software just decides ...

Short answer: shoot 1080p.

Here's why, and then the two situations where I'd tell you the opposite.

Why 1080p for most church video

Nobody's seeing the difference

For most people watching, on most screens, the gap between 1080p and 4K isn't visible. A lot of screens don't even output 4K, so those extra pixels get thrown away before they reach anyone's eyes.

You're paying a real cost for something your congregation cannot see.

Storage

4K is roughly four times the pixels of 1080p, and the file sizes follow.

Four times the storage, forever, on every project. There's nothing fun about running out of space and buying drives you didn't plan for.

Your editing machine

Big files are harder on your computer. 4K playback stutters and drops frames unless you're on a strong machine.

That's not a small thing when the person editing is a volunteer working on whatever computer the church already owns. Shooting 1080p means the edit is smooth on hardware you actually have.

When to shoot 4K instead

Y...

Macros are the single biggest thing you can do to make ProPresenter runnable by someone who isn't you.

Here are three tips, plus how our whole macro setup works.

1. Organize macros around your service, not around features

Build your macros to match the shape of a Sunday.

We use four categories. Startup, pre-service, service, and post-service. They're color-coded and labeled by which part of the morning they belong to.

The reason this matters isn't tidiness. It's that a volunteer scanning the list can find the right macro without knowing what any of them technically do. They're looking for "where are we in the service," and the list answers that question.

2. Build every macro like you're starting from a blank slate

Your service has a usual order. Some weeks it won't follow it.

So when I build a macro, I ask what it would need if nothing before it had fired. Stage screen actions, Looks actions, lighting cues. All of it goes in every macro, even when it's redundant in the normal flow....

Here's how I built our countdown video. It works for the live stream and for the room, and I'll show you how I made one into the other at the end.

The clock

I built the timer in After Effects and did everything else in Premiere.

If you don't have After Effects or don't want to mess with it, there's a five-minute countdown clock you can grab and overlay on your own footage. It's on the free resources page.

Building it in After Effects

New composition. 1920x1080, 23.976fps, duration set to the length of your countdown. Mine was 10 minutes.

Add a text layer and type "00:00". Center it horizontally and vertically.

Then find the Slider Control effect in Effects and Presets and apply it to the text layer. Drive the source text off the slider with an expression and the clock counts itself down.

Exporting it

Send the comp to the render queue. The setting that matters is the alpha channel, so the timer exports with transparency instead of a black box.

Miss that and you'll be back in After E...

This is a behind the scenes look at filming a full week of VBS at our church, on purpose with cheap gear.

The whole setup, camera, kit lens, mic, and a second lens, came in under $1,000. That was the point. You don't need expensive gear to make something people want to watch.

What I'm making

Two videos out of the week.

A highlight video for Friday night that parents watch when they come back for the last day. And a longer edit covering the whole week for Sunday morning and social.

Two deliverables means I need more coverage than I think I do, and I need to be shooting for both edits the whole time.

The gear

Camera and lenses

A Sony a6300 with the 16-50mm kit lens, f/3.5 to f/5.6.

The kit lens is fine for general coverage. When the room gets dark, and VBS rooms always get dark, I switch to a 50mm f/1.8. It pulls in a lot more light and gets me tighter shots at the same time.

Microphone

A Rode VideoMicro on top of the camera. Small, cheap.

I might not use much of that audio in the fi...

This is where it started.

The checklist below was version 1 of what our church media system eventually became. It solved the first problem, which was that nobody knew what to do before a service. It didn't solve the bigger one, which is that every volunteer still came to me for anything the checklist didn't cover.

That took a few more years and a lot more rebuilding. If you want the current version, that's the Church Notion System. It's the same idea grown all the way up: one Notion hub with every role, every step, and every piece of context your volunteers need, built so they stop defaulting to you.

The original write-up is below. The free template still works if you want somewhere to start.

What we use at our church for a checklist and team resources

Our media team grew a lot in a short window, and suddenly every team member had a pile of tasks to get through before and during each service. Things were falling through the cracks. So we built a system to stay on top of every movin...

If you already own a 2012 Mac Mini and want to make it usable, this walkthrough still works. If you're shopping for an editing machine in 2026, this isn't the one I'd buy. Here's what I'd get instead.

Step-by-step video:

We're upgrading a used Mac Mini from 2012. RAM and SSD. Here's everything you need.

• Mac Mini (usually cheaper on eBay): https://amzn.to/3iTExWu
• SSD: https://amzn.to/34fBBPI
• RAM: https://amzn.to/328Udy6
• Install Kit (Lower Drive Bay): https://amzn.to/2YfBHTD

So that's the Mac Mini, the new drive, a couple sticks of RAM, and a small toolkit to unscrew things and get it open.

The one part that'll slow you down is seating the SSD. It's tucked away in the back and takes some maneuvering to get into position before everything goes back together. Everything else is easy, it just takes time.

Related reading

• Budget Video Editing Computers for Church Media (2026 Update)
• Social Media Sermon Clips: Premiere Pro Editing Walkthrough

What I'd actually buy now

This one's from 2021, and Apple Silicon changed the math on all of it. The 2012 Mac Mini build below isn't the recommendation anymore.

Here are the two machines I'd seriously consider today.

1. A used or refurbished M1 Mac Mini from 2020. Cheapest way in. It's still a capable editing machine and you can find them refurbished or used without much trouble.

2. The base model M4 Mac Mini. A little more money, a lot more headroom.

That's it. Those are the two.

The logic below hasn't changed though, and it's the part worth reading. Buy used. Don't buy the machine that impresses somebody. Buy the one that renders your sermon clips and gets out of the way.

The original 2021 build

I wanted to look at what I thought was the best budget-friendly editing computer available at the time.

A used 2012 Mac Mini.

Why that one? A couple of reasons. It was the oldest Mac Mini you could still upgrade all the way to Catalina. And being a Mac Mini, I could swap out internal comp...