The Background

Located a few miles outside of our nation’s capital, Washington DC, Summit Church is a growing 700 member ministry with a 500 seat sanctuary requiring multiple weekend services. Everyone who attends a Weekend Experience will encounter friendly people in a warm atmosphere, passionate worship from the stage to the crowd, and a practical, relevant, and powerful message shared without compromise.

For a ministry of this size, Summit Church has an impressive amount of professional A/V equipment. With forward thinking to have a greater impact, the pastors wanted to record the Weekend Experiences to be streamed live, enhancing the worship experience for attendees by viewing the service on large screens and on demand to provide an online church experience connecting people for remote worship. Pastors Eddie and Stephanie Trayers are using technology and social media as a vehicle to reach out to the Washington DC metro community. They are dedicated to providing a powerful worship experience for everyone, anywhere, at anytime!

The Challenge

Summit Church’s distinct video workflow requires high quality footage that can be streamed live and recorded for distribution, but not take up huge amounts of data storage space. The biggest challenge was the amount of time it took to transfer footage when uploading to a computer and transcoding the edited clips to upload online. Video feed from HD tripod mount, handheld roaming, and fixed GoPro cameras are used for live editing during the service and then distributed to the Fairfax Public Access channel and streamed live over the internet. Current and archived services are also available to view via the Summit Church website.

Summit Church uses a Panasonic brand camera which records AVC-Intra clip (100Mbits) onto expensive P2 Cards for backup. The video feed from those cameras is edited live using a switcher. This edited video was previously recorded using the BlackMagic HyperDeck studio which records in ApplePro Res, ~200Mbit/s. The two 90 minute services resulted in 180GB of ProRes video! The file was then transferred, edited, transcoded to H.264 and then uploaded to summitchurchdc.com/series-archive for the D.C. community to view on demand. The complete process was long and painful.

The workflow could benefit from using an efficient codec for backup recording on cameras after the switcher. It would save storage space, as well as transfer and transcoding time. The target goal was to get the same quality of recording down to a smaller file size.

The Solution

Summit Church chose VITEC’s FS-H60 and FS-H70 because they addressed the need for a more efficient file size and workflow. FS-H70 is mounted directly onto the SDI Panasonic camera using the provided cradle for backup recording while FS-H60 is used after the video switcher for immediate distribution of the Weekend Experience.

With FS-H70 or FS-H60, two hours of video is only 7GB stored on an affordable SDHC card. Clips are readily available for editing or sharing over the web and are compatible with any viewing platforms without any transcoding (PC, Mac, tablets). VITEC’s solution saves a great deal of time with disk transfer, transcoding, and sharing because it saves storage space thanks to its high quality H.264 compression codec. The FS-H70/60 recorders are portable, light, battery (or DC) powered and meet the required criteria for ease of use, saving time and high quality video recording. Being autonomous, storage efficient and making service footage easily available made VITEC’s FS-H70 the ideal solution for Summit Church. Additionally, thanks to FS-H70/60’s codec efficiency, the Summit media team no longer needs to change discs while recording any of their live events, eliminating the problem of disrupting worship experience recording flow.

Summit Church can now enjoy an easier, more reliable and efficient workflow for archiving, so they don’t have to take the extra step to convert, saving time while maintaining exceptional quality video. Footage can be quickly and easily uploaded to local network stations in Fairfax, making it ideal for distribution through Fairfax Public Access for the DC community to enjoy.

"VITEC’s FS-H70 recording and video compression solution allowed us to compress the size of the video of the recorded services and use the recorded footage for editing, archiving and sharing. We love that it saves a great deal of time and storage space!" - Pastors Eddie & Stephanie Trayers, Summit Church DC