No, not hand crank cameras but cameras used in filming the movie Crank 2. I have discovered on a couple different websites that a big budget Hollywood film is being done on budget gear. Somewhat of a church budget MAYBE.

The cameras in discussion are Canon XH A1 “consumer” grade HD units. These things sell all over now for around $3000 plus accessories. I just thought it was nice to know that you can get high quality footage (good enough for charging a hefty admission even, haha) at a relatively affordable price. We have two very nice non-HD cameras at church that we paid more than that for in the past three years.

A buddy of mine, Mike, was using one to film some live performance footage of another buddy, David, last night. He digs the camera. Anyone else use one of these? These will have to get bumped to the top of my wish list for production gear… maybe next year.

Well, it has been a while since a worthwhile post came to these parts. I decided I am going to try to get back on the blog-bandwagon along with a couple of other potential web activities that you shall hear about soon enough.

I am posting a video that we will be using in church for the next few weeks as the sermon intro, between worship and the message. The series is “Just Breathe” and it is a 4 week study on the Holy Spirit.

I don’t know if it is good or bad to say that this video is the result of the better part of two days work, spread over a week. The graphic appearing at the end was designed by Chris for the series. I worked backwards from it to animate it and add motion along with all the text. Chris did the initial design in Photoshop I did all the animation in After Effects and created the “flourishes” that grow in the video in Illustrator. The text may change week to week, I am not sure yet.

The music behind it is “The Adventure” by Angels & Airwaves. (I tried posting on YouTube first but couldn’t get audio in there for some reason, so it’s hosted on my site and may take a bit longer to play.)

Enjoy
-Travis

[quicktime]http://www.travispaulding.com/Uploads/JB_Intro_2_small_h264.mov[/quicktime]

A big discussion arose today in the hall outside of my office with 6-7 coworkers today that lasted about 20 minutes. It was centered around whether we should have tryouts for a “team” that was reconfiguring as we head into our new facility. Do we do something as the Church like that, knowing that some people who try will probably not make the cut? Is it wrong for a church ministry to make people audition for something? I was (rather strongly) suggesting that we “pursue excellence” and that individual involvement should not supersede the quality of the service for 250 or so people in this instance. Let me say this now, I am NOT suggesting that I am right, I may be right or wrong, I am just telling you what I think. I am curious what the world thinks. (By world I mean “the seven people who read this blog.” Unfortunately, three of you were in this conversation.)

We toss around terms like pursuing excellence, usually not knowing what WE really mean when we say it. I have decided that pursuing excellence for me is: doing the best you can with the resources that you have. Excellence is relative to culture and resources especially. Think about the widow’s mite or the parable of the talents. Its not HOW much you have that matters, its how well you use WHATEVER you have that matters.

So I guess I should rephrase the question now. In a churches pursuit of excellence, where should it draw the line with involvement? Is it right for a representative of Christ to potentially really disappoint someone who is really excited about participating in something? Also, is the same thing true in all situations? Do you treat vocalists for your adult centered service with the same care that you might with volunteers in a different ministry in the church?

I was discussing this later with one of our AWESOME ministry directors, something that worries me is the potential that the church is being dishonest in the name of compassion & grace rather than being truthful to people. I think about at least three American Idol tryouts I saw where he/she told a story of their church being super positive, loving their voice and encouraging them to even pursue careers in singing. Now these people, who clearly couldn’t sing, stand in front of these judges thinking, “well, my church lied to me, these pros think I am horrid.” Isn’t it the role of the church to help people find their spiritual gifts and talents? That defineitly would look different from just letting people do what they most wanted to do.

Anyway, this could go on forever, each question leads to another question….

So, talk amongst yourselves, what do you think? What do you do?

-Travis

We moved the console for our new building into our current sanctuary for training purposes last week. We will use it here for the next few months so we are comfortable on it when we triple the inputs and double the monitor mixes in our new facility. Today was the first live service I have mixed on the Yamaha M7CL and boy is it nice! At rehearsal Thursday when we first cut it on and Fred sang and played on his keyboard we knew it was going to be a treat. One of our vocalists, who has been with the church praise team for over 7 years, said she had never hear her voice that clear before. We had guys in the crowd who didn’t know anything had even changed asking what we did differently because “it was just so clear today.” If it made that much of a difference on our current setup (3 Peavey mains and 2 BagEnd Dual 12 subs) I can only dream of what it will sound like in the new system (two 8 speaker Meyer M1D line arrays and two Dual 18 700HP subs).

Props to the Yamaha preamps and its easy operation. It sounded great right out of the box. On top of that, it is extremely user friendly, especially considering how powerful the board is. I spent the better part of last week learning the board and then resetting the wiring in our current sanctuary to connect to it. I was very comfortable sitting at the board this morning for our first service even though I had only had it for a week. It just really makes sense how it is run. Contrary to our other board, the incredibly UNintuitive Soundcraft 324 Live. Don’t get me wrong, that board has NEVER let us down and produced a good sound for 5 years now. We just really didn’t realize what we were missing on the console end of things until we switched them out.

One of the nicer features of the board is its offline editing software that is available free on their site. A file of about 70k in size contains all the data for the board. I sat at home last night watching college football and checking my console settings on my laptop. I found a few settings that I had missed and was able to make the changes at home, save them on my USB key and in under a minute, load them into the board this morning.¬† I have also been able to show this software to my awesome volunteers and they are able to ‘play’ with the console at home if they want. I can give them a copy of the setup we use and they can learn their way around it and even make improvements and bring them back to us.

Well, enough on the M7 for now, I am sure you will here more later as we integrate the full system.

Anyone else out there using one?

-Travis