Online Worshp for a Small Church (Week 1)

With the COVID19 situation, my church Northminster Presbyterian in Pearl River, LA is experimenting with providing worship online. The idea is to let us gather together if only in spirit, and hopefully be a voice of God's peace and grace to the world.

I'm going to document here what we did, in case it's of interest or use to other small churches. I'm quite the geek, so it's probable that this can be done more simply. I doubt it could be done cheaper, though...

The team was our pastor (Sue Loper), my wife and church pianist Christie Ruppel, my daughter Emily Ruppel, and I. The four of us worshiped together and recorded it.

Design

We were hoping to approximate our weekly worship as closely as we could. Normally, we have a slideshow with the parts of worship, the hymn numbers, the Scripture passages, and some of the responses, along with some graphics in support of the sermon. So, I wanted to display the slideshow on screen, and also Pastor Sue.

I considered having the video of Pastor Sue be the largest thing on the screen, but then thought it was important that the slides be as readable as possible, so the slideshow takes up most of the screen.

We kept most of the service as it would have been if we had met in person. We chose to skip most of the hymns, but not the extended Great Prayer of Thanksgiving during Communion. (People could skip through it in the video if they chose.)

We also normally have our children collect quarters for a mission project. They put the quarters in a tube that holds about $100. When the tube is full, we send the money to the mission and switch to another mission. The current tube will go to the Dos Amigos medical/dental mission where several people from our area (including our church member Jane Triola) travel to Belize, normally between Palm Sunday and Easter.

Since doing this collection would have been impossible, we chose just to add a mention of Dos Amigos to our announcements.

I'm the one who puts together the slideshow each week, and for Lent, I've been keeping almost all the slides (except those associated with Communion or the sermon) to be either in grayscale or mostly purple.  After thinking that the effect would have been confusing in the video, I restored them to color.

We considered streaming the service live on Sunday using YouTube Live, but we thought it best to record it just before our regular worship time and upload the entire video. That way, people wouldn't have to "tune in" exactly at 10:00 AM or wait for the stream to be available. Also, we'd be able to restart or whatever if we (likely I) screw anything up. Also also, keeping a stream alive seemed to be one more complication. This turned out to be a very good move.

Equipment

 

This is our set-up. (That's Christie at the piano, Emily seated, and the top of Pastor Sue's head.)

The tripod is a very-modestly-priced one that I got at Walmart years ago. (I think I first got it for recording youth-led worship services, but I've used it lately mostly for taking family pictures with a timer.)

Mounted on the tripod is a webcam. I believe it is a Logitech cam that was also very modestly priced. It's capable of 1080p video. There are no controls on the webcam for zooming in or out. It's connected to the laptop by USB. I got it years ago, I think to let the kids (well, they were kids then...) do video chat or something.

The microphone on the Communion Table is Emily's. It is also very affordable, around $20. It's designed for use in podcasting. We tried to mount it on our church's traditional mike stand, but it wasn't very secure there, so we decided to use the desktop stand that came with it and put it on the Table.

The projector is the church's and is quite nice. For this project, it's being used as a second monitor so that all of us (except Christie when she's at the piano) can see where we are in the service.  We could have just used a second LCD monitor, but I thought the projector would be easier to see, and it was the church's anyway.

The screen is also the church's. Normally, it's at the front of the church, but putting it where it is in the picture meant it was out of camera view, even when I pointed the camera at the piano.

The laptop  is mine. It's a Lenovo, but I forgot which model. It is middle of the range as far as specs go, since I like to play with programming and some gaming other geeky stuff. It's running the Kubuntu Linux distribution. 

Software

Saturday, I downloaded a free, open-source program called OBS Studio. It is pretty amazing. I fed the video from the webcam, the audio from the microphone, and the screen capture from the projector into the system. During our initial set-up and see-if-this-might-work meeting on Saturday, we tested the levels for the microphone.

OBS Studio is very powerful, but also easy to use. Here's a video that I watched that got me up and running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpDb1XDDfY 

I use LibreOffice Impress (free open-source) for the slideshow.

I also used Kdenlive (free open-source) to lightly edit the video before uploading. 

(Each of those programs are available for Windows and Mac as well as Linux.)

Recording and YouTube

We had one hitch while recording. Rather than restarting, we backed up a bit and started over from there.

We finished recording right about 10:00, when we usually start worship. I then fired up Kdenlive to put the two pieces together. Rendering the edited video took longer than I thought, about 20 minutes. (For the super-technical: OBS Studio saved the video in MKV format, but Kdenlive was set to save as MP4, so it had to transcode the almost hour-long video.)

Then came the big trouble: uploading to YouTube.

I had set up a new YouTube channel Saturday afternoon. After the recording was finished, I uploaded it to YouTube. That took something like 5-10 minutes. It then stayed at "0% Processing" for several minutes. We guessed that YouTube was swamped with uploads around that time or something.

About an hour later, it showed "99% Processing." It stayed there for about a half-hour more, before I started some Google research.

It turns out, in order to post a video longer than 15 minutes. The channel needs to be verified. Nothing about the screen I was on showed that, but if I had clicked over to the video manager, I would have seen it.

Verifying a YouTube channel is simple. Click this link: https://www.youtube.com/verify and have YouTube send you a verification code by text message.

Once verified, a YouTube channel can have any length video up to 12 hours. (We will try to keep worship under 12 hours...)

I then had to re-upload the video, which took about an hour or so and we were golden.

Next week, we're going to record on Saturday afternoon so that we have time to do whatever editing we need to and upload it. We'll schedule the release for Sunday at 10.

So, if you're trying to do this...

We managed this with a few hours effort and zero dollars. For a simpler set-up YouTube Live or Facebook Live can be done using only a cell phone. (I'd suggest a tripod and an adapter to mount a cell phone to it.)

If you set up a new YouTube channel for this, VERIFY THE ACCOUNT when you set it up. If you already have a YouTube channel, be sure it's verified.

 Here's the finished video: