Covideo Services

Covideos

I'm loving all the hard work and innovation that is going in to making videos to help churches to worship.  The most amazing thing is all of us ministers are learning as we go and coming up with some great ideas :) 

I'm still settling on a method and having fun figuring it out.
And I probably won't settle on a method for a while.

But some ideas / observations so far...

I think I'll do a separate one about music making :)

Day 1 - Live via Cell Phone

This is probably the easiest way to do things if you have enough data.  You can do this via your Church Facebook page - or even your personal Facebook profile (set to public).  It'll take a bit of data but it is probably the most straightforward.  I think about an hour of video will use less than 1 Gig of data - I have an uncapped Rain sim card for R250pm so I don't worry about that.


I put the cell phone on a tripod and used a large screen for slides.  This worked well - but for those watching there was the occasional 'lag' so to avoid the lag maybe its a good idea to offer two time slots for the service...  Live (when you go live from facebook) and 90 minutes later when the 'Live' video has been uploaded to facebook already and you can encourage people to watch together.

You can find the address for your video by clicking on your video and copying that address to share with your congregation.  They won't have to sign in to facebook although facebook will keep inviting them to sign up :)

Day 2 

Under lock down I couldn't go to church so I went online from home:


I find that the microphone on my cell phone is much better than the one on my mac.  And worked alright for voice, singing and speech.  The only problem with going 'live' from home is that I have small kids and it's quite hard to get everything to stay civilised for more than 30 minutes.

Day 3

Attempt at Sunday Service - Live via OBS...


This didn't work because of a data failure.  None of my devices wanted to work very well - possible because of the cement garage!!!  OBS lets you mix up your 'live' broadcast with pre-recorded elements that you can include via VLC player.

You can download OBS here.

You have to be a bit tech savvy to use OBS and most of the things you want to do you will have to Google.  With OBS you can set things up so that you have your head in one part of the screen and slides in the other.

Day 4 (Good Friday)




One nice thing about OBS is you can record your service while you VJ it (Video Jockey) :).   That way you don't have to wait for your video software to process everything which seems to take hours.

Then you can just upload the finished product and share it.

Once you get the hang of OBS you can also use it to share screens from other applications - in the picture above it is displaying my Bible Software while I read and highlight.  

You can set up short cut keys to switch views and things so you can have various app windows set up to show people slides / bible software / drawing software and all that.   Quite a nice way to do Bible Study and teaching sessions.

Day 5 (Easter Sunday)



For Easter Sunday I completed the final service using iMovie on my Mac - I'm not sure what is available on PC.  But one handy feature I found was 'spilt screen' in iMovie...  It's not the most obvious feature but it works well. 

So once you've made your video - making sure that you are in the center of your shot
...you can drag your slides into iMovie above the main video line.

The text of your slides should be in the middle half of your 16:9 slide show (ie 1/4 of the page margin on each side)
By default this will make your slide play over your video. 
You can stretch your slide longer (time ways) to cover the section it is meant to show.

But to get your slide to play next to your face... 



During lockdown I think it is important to keep the church members connected.  It means a lot to see each other's faces.  I've been amazed at how many of my church members managed to send a Whatsapp Video of themselves.  The easiest way to incorporate these is to set up Whatasapp on your PC.  That way you can download the videos you receive and simply drag them into your video editor.

In iMovie you can crop the videos to suit yourself whether they're in portrait or landscape.  You can also invite church members to lead readings and prayers etc. by sending a whatsapp audio or video message.  Whatsapp Audio comes as an Ogg file and you can use VLC to convert it into a useable file for your video if your video software doesn't like Ogg files.  

In VLC -  Look under FILE for 'Convert' and work from there.

Concluding Thoughts

We have to think about our aim with these videos...

My goal:

To encourage the congregation during a difficult time.
To foster a feeling of connectedness and unity.
To help each other connect with God.
Authenticity.

Different methods achieve different outcomes...

'Live' is great for a sense of connection - it is nice to know that what you are watching is what somebody else is doing / experiencing / sharing.  And as the person doing the sharing connecting - authenticity will shine through you.

The cool kids are making fancy 'produced' videos with all the latest equipment and thats nice - but ministry is not about fancy production it is about authentic connection.  I have chosen to use homemade music - and tried to get members of the worship team to record some singing etc. because I believe that worship music is 'folk music' - music of the people.  There is connection in it and I'm working on that.

Facebook Premiere

If you pre-record your videos and publish them when you upload to Youtube or Facebook they can be set to 'premiere' at a certain time.  Then they publish like 'live' videos and reactions / comments can happen in realtime.  

That way you can upload your video and chat in the comments during the live stream.  Foster connection.  I also suggest that you keep everything a little to a lot shorter than usual :)