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Schweitzer Community Outreach Center

This past weekend we gathered people together to do the first project in the newly named Schweitzer Community Outreach Center. The building just to the west of the church that used to house luxury cars is already being used to make an impact in the community. Over the course of a couple of hours we packaged 400 hygiene kits for the homeless in Springfield, 150 health kits to be sent to Haiti, as well as hundreds of meals of beans and rice.

As we start a new stewardship emphasis over the next month, one aspect of Growing God's Church is expanded use of this facility for community outreach - housing disaster relief, food pantry, special projects like this and new offices for the staff. The project also includes expanded children's and youth space focusing on security and eliminating the church's debt. 

The video above was shot with our new Canon 7D and a 50mm 1.4 prime lens. The event footage was captured from 10-12 and the video was first shown in our Saturday night worship at 5pm. I'm very impressed with the workflow from the camera into Final Cut and prepped for final display. I'd guess that it took Zak almost three hours less time to produce this piece than similar shoots from our Focus FS-4. I've been having a lot of fun shooting both stills and videos with this camera/lens combo. Next step is a set of rails and a follow-focus. We may even add a matte box to the kit.

Haiti Click Track Video

We made a spur of the moment decision to put together a video to tie in the devastation in Haiti with worship this weekend. You can watch the video from youtube below (SUMC folks saw it tonight at 5 and will see it tomorrow at 9:45 and 11, sorry 8:20 - you'll get live musicians and no click).

This is by no means a high quality piece - it was put together in about 8 hours (including render time). The start and end are established to disguise the start of the video (it looks like a standard worship slide to open). It may not work well in your setting. Also there is one point where the video departs from the official lyrics - matching our band. There are three measures of the click prior to the start of the song - also the click tones are crazy annoying.

Obligatory Disclaimer: This piece comprised of footage and photos from the AP and some other photos from National Geographic and the LA Times. From a copyright perspective it's sketchy, but I think it probably falls under fair use given the purpose of the video. The scratch track is our band doing God of This City and is licensed for web streaming. View the Youtube video to hear it with the song.

Download the mp4 - MONO click track @ 80bpm - NO MUSIC

Compositing

John Nack made a post about this video and I thought I'd pass it on. I know that a lot of compositing goes into almost everything we see on TV or film, but it's really interesting to see both sides of the shot. Some of the shots are clearly put together, but others could just as easily have been shot traditionally. Green/blue screens provide a lot better control both of the shot and the budget though. We've got everything we need to do more compositing, but don't really take advantage of the creative possibilities. I'm thinking we might try to build an entire green room for something this year.

Christmas Worship Projection Sample

Saturday night I took a little bit of footage with the Flip cam during worship. Here's a sample from a few songs. The audio quality is really bad, the microphone on the flip really picks up the drums above everything else. It's also a bit shaky from being handheld. Next time we do this we'll need to setup a real camera with a feed from the board.

Nearly a day of content every minute on YouTube

I just read this interesting article over at TechCrunch about the amount of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. In January it was 15 hours/minute, now it's 20 hours/minute. It will soon cross the one day mark. At 20 hours of video it's nearly 50 days of content uploaded every hour and 3.2 years of content every day. If you ever wondered if video on the web was feasible here's the answer. It would take you 23 years to watch all of the content uploaded to YouTube in a single week.

I'm amazed at the amount of manpower that goes into getting this much video uploaded. Even if you discount the content that is never edited or is illegally posted, it's still a lot of work. The bandwidth, storage, and processing power to make the content available online is also staggering.

At Schweitzer we're going to be launching a media player this summer and we've decided to leverage the YouTube platform rather than build our own. We'll put together a wrapper that does search, categories, and a variety of features to make it user friendly, but the playback is all going to be handled by YouTube. It's hands down the largest video distribution platform available.