Streaming church video using Ustream Producer

In order to have more control and better quality of our free church video streaming on the internet with the Ustream service, I have been using the single camera version of their desktop encoding software Ustream producer.

As we already have a cheap non HD church video mixer, the fact that this video software only supports one live feed is not an issue.

The main benefits it brings while encoding and streaming our church services is the option to mix multiple sources of other multimedia like pre-recorded videos, pictures or graphic images and sound files with our live feed. I also have the facility to choose our stream encoding options so that bandwidth allowing, the quality of the stream can be made much better than allowed if I was streaming via the web client.



The way I currently use Ustream Producer to enhance our live video streaming broadcast is to have a static logo with music playing as the final service preparations are being made so that any early visitors to our web page don't see a blank screen and have to wait till the exact advertised servce time to refresh the page. It also means that if service start time is delayed for whatever reason (usually technical) I don't have to show things still being setup. Once we are ready and the worship team are in place, I smoothly fade to an intro clip also pre-recorded and then transistion to the live service.
This job doesn't require an extra hand, but is usually done by the video director.

The video below gives an overview of Ustream Producer desktop application which is available in both Mac and Windows versions.

Church Video Equipment problems

Unfortunately it is not uncommon for newly acquired church video equipment to develop faults or to have bugs, first it was our church apple mac laptop, now our recently bought tapeless digital video recorder, the Datavideo DN-200 which was such a life saver the first day we used it to record our church sunday service.



I've had to report what seems to be a software problem whereby the digital recorder stops capturing video to the inbuilt hard drive. I waiting for the Datavideo UK distributor to get back to me, so will keep you posted of any developments. In the meantime I have to make sure that we have tape backups of all church services.

More Reading
Connecting church cameras to video mixer.
Church video production

Digital church video recording Datavideo DN-200

I had mentioned in a previous post about digital video recorders and their use for a church media ministry especially helping to reduce the time it takes to complete your church video production. Well our church recently acquired a Datavideo DN-200 as a replacement to using a consumer hard drive DVD recorder for capturing our sunday services live.



The Datavideo DN-200 is a 300GB analague/digital video recorder/capture device that is firewire capable and can handle both SD or HD signals. The beauty of using this new piece of equipment is that our church video podcast production workflow time has now been halved because within a minute of pressing the stop button I now have a quicktime mov file ready to import into our apple macbook pro that doesn't require any rendering.

The DN-200 is no cheap piece of video hardware, and this is clearly evidenced in the high quality build of the product and might not be affordable for churches starting a new media ministry, but if you already have a video department and are seeking ways of improving your efficieny, then this is a device worth think of investing in.

The recording quality of our podcasts have also improved because we can now record DV25 files directly from our video cameras using firewire and in future when we upgrade to HDV we won't need to buy a new recorder as it also records M2T files.

Another bonus feature that the datavideo DN200 adds is the ability to stream live video on the internet while simultaneously recording to hard disk because once it is plugged into the mac, it appears as a DV device recognised by our UStream.TV software.

I'm looking forward to many years of tapeless video recording and production with our new Datavideo DN-200 equipment.

Additional Reading
Church DVD video recorder.
Single camera video recording in church