Broadcasting Sacrament w/o Ordinance-CoVid-19

[RobertWaldron]

Under the authority and direction of both our Stake President and regional representatives, we have been actively involved working with the Salt Lake Church Webcast department upgrading and beta testing the authorized and supported church webcast system. I have to report the system is much more robust than ever before. If you tried this system in the past and found issues, I would suggest giving it a second chance.
During the past several months California has been a “hotspot” for quarantine restrictions. As most of you are aware, state and local COVID-19 restrictions can change with the wind! With that said, we found it necessary to get important facts out to our stake members on just what specific activities we could and could not have. Along with these informational broadcasts, we have also been able to visualize many of the normal church activities such as, weekly ward broadcasts from our bishops consisting of several speakers, musical numbers and prayers, either live or prerecorded. We have also had Youth Conference and Primary Programs using the same technique using the webcast broadcast tool and, in some instances, interfacing a Zoom interface within the webcast broadcast. Our stake president has re-emphasized these weekly broadcasts are only supplemental and are not intended to take the place of any family activities or to include video of any sacred ordinances.
We only have one broadcast system located in our stake center. This is used by each individual ward on a weekly rotation. The stake presidency reserves the 5th Sunday in the monthly rotation. Relatively speaking our system is cheap! As an alternative, if we didn’t already have an existing A/V system, I would be completely satisfied using the OBS broadcast software with a good quality PTZ camera and i7 laptop. So far, as mentioned previously, there is no charge for the software.
Currently we use the church supplied Extron A/V system, upgraded a few years ago, with a 20x PTZ 1080p camera, Teradek Encoder and a Roland V-02HD (purchased used) for titling and hymns.
Bottom line, this doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated! Our members love it and feel they are still active members and have not been abandon.
Bob Waldron, Anaheim, California Stake, STS, Asst Stake Clerk

[dbaresrc]

My earlier post was deleted because it was a duplicate. you might be interested in it however: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=37353&start=10#p213628

Sorry about that

[dbaresrc]

Okay, let me try one more time and see if I get this right so the full cross-reference shows up in the post. I posted about our stake's webcast experience in another forum. That information may be of interest to you since we've been doing it for a very long time. To see the post go to viewtopic.php?f=146&t=37353&p=213628#p213628

[richmanll]

Here are the latest instructions about broadcasting sacrament meeting: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/let ... nline=true

[rickhellewell]

Note that there are some excellent threads here on how to do this. And you don't need to have the fancy 'box' - the open source software mentioned in this forum works extremely well with the Church webcasting system.

For sound, many newer buildings have an audio out jack - maybe at the clerk's desk, or at the podium. But if you don't have one, get one of the 'listening devices' (normally used by hearing disabled - a little box with a ear piece). Us a 3.5mm M/M cable to input into your laptop running the open source software. Audio should be clear using that device.

[hicksticks2001]

Tony Howell, for what it's worth, during 2 separate stake conference I have had 1 area authority and 1 general authority personally tell me that we had authorization, as long as our stake president also approved, to stream sacrament meeting to our shut ins to a list of people the Bishop approved. Long before Covid-19 hit, I was broadcasting Sacrament meeting using Zoom every Sunday to a brother in our ward who was dying from cancer. It was my privilege to be able to share with him about 6 months worth of worship services before he passed away. I would always turn off the camera and audio feed during the ordinance portion of the meeting from my phone. I had it setup that I was able to change the PTZ camera angel, audio levels, and start/stop the broadcast from my phone while sitting in the congregation.