Church Live Streaming Video Rack MAKEOVER feat. Summit Integrated Systems

a few months ago i posted a video showing you the portable live streaming setup we've been using at my church i went in depth with the gear used in the rack in my previous video so if you haven't watched it yet i'll link it below i'm glad to report that this portable streaming setup has worked phenomenally for the past few months our church can produce a high quality multi-camera live stream and it only takes a few minutes to set up every sunday but a few weeks into using this video rack i discovered an issue that was slowing us down and starting to drive me crazy the downside of putting so much powerful gear into one rack is you'll quickly run into a cable management nightmare here's the front of the old rack which you've probably seen before now take a moment to consider the cabling required to connect these devices and other external hardware like cameras displays audio and lighting equipment now you're probably picturing a cluster of cables packed tightly in the back of the rack in such a way that would cause an organized person to just pass out and you're correct with that assumption here's what the back of the video rack looked like for the first few months of use i know i know what a mess i'm the type of guy who wants to just get things done get things working i'm not a perfectionist so that's why i was able to live with this setup for a few months a few weeks ago i visited summit integrated systems they're the team who designed and installed the avl solutions at churches you've heard of like life church and red rocks church and many other innovative worship tech ministries that we all admire chipper and i got a behind the scenes look at how they build custom systems at their warehouse in colorado they take avl to a level i've never seen before and their racks are a work of art that sound kind of weird you know what i mean so when i was hanging out with their team and after i toured the place i came up with the idea for this youtube video how about i bring them my powerful but disorganized live streaming rig and let them work their magic then i can document the process so you guys can develop an appreciation for the craft of building avl racks the summit way and that's exactly what we did coming into this project we had an existing rack of 12 rack units or 12 ru and the challenge here was packing that into an 8 ru rack our goal was to make this rack smaller on one of the reasons why we wanted to go smaller was the fact that this rack had wheels on the back where you could take it like a suitcase and roll it around this rack in particular gets used at jake's church in and out every week so the portability of it makes it uh very important when ben first told me about the idea of condensing this rig into an 8u rack i asked him dude are you sure about this like i thought i was already trying to pack too much stuff in a 12 view rack how are we going to make this possible in a smaller 8u rack he pointed out that some of the gear in the rack like the rey encoder did not need to be immediately accessible also at the top portion of the video rack behind the scope in the video hub there was a ton of space since most of the hardware only extended a few inches into the case and i absolutely love the idea of finding a small enough case that had wheels on it because moving the old rack case around was my least favorite part on sunday mornings once my old video rack arrived at summit ben and carter removed all the gear and began designing the new rig first they made a diagram of all the connections that needed to happen within the rack summit meticulously labels both ends of every wire i've never encountered this much attention to detail carter got to work with mounting the gear and then he began running cabling another essential piece of the design process was the back plate of the rack the back plate allows me to plug in all of my cameras and other devices into the video rack i was not even aware of this problem until our team installed the old video rack the first sunday we used it a few months ago it was difficult plugging in an hdmi cable from our camera into the back of the a10 video switcher because you had to reach into the back of the rack squeeze your hand between the other cables and hope that you were plugging the camera into the right input it was not ideal sure we were able to function with this setup for a while but it was really inefficient when i found out that summit can design and manufacture rack mountable plates in-house i knew this was the exact solution we needed adam designed the plate in cad software he ensured everything was perfectly aligned and properly labeled we spent quite a while discussing the connectors i wanted on the plate to accommodate current and future needs on the top left i have six ports dedicated to the video switcher four hdmi inputs for cameras and two hdmi outputs for multi-view and program next there are three rj45 connectors one for dante one for our cellular hotspot and an additional network connection to the gigabit switch in the rack next we have power con connectors to supply power to the rack and we can even daisy chain power over another power con connector or an edison plug next to the power we have an xlr connector for dmx control from the computer using a dmx king usb interface which is then controlled by light key at the top right of the plate we have four sdi inputs and four sdi outputs coming from the smart video hub right now we are only using two of these sdi connectors but we created enough connectors in order to accommodate future growth if i'm going to add new cameras to my system or if i want to have additional destinations for our program feed so right now we're just using two sdi outputs one runs to the large tv on stage that our congregation can see the pro presenter presentation on and then another sdi cable runs to the smaller tv which is the confidence monitor for our band underneath the sdi connectors we have usb connections for the cal digit dock and my eye connectivity midi interface next i have two xlr connectors to send our broadcast mix audio from the m32 into the a10 video switcher they even made me a custom stereo xlr cable underneath the back plate is a grille on a hinge that gives me easy access to the back of the sonnet expansion chassis and it allows for additional air ventilation once adam finalized the plate it was time for cutting and engraving he sent the final cad project to a cnc machine that cuts holes in any other shape they need into the aluminum plate after cutting the plate they place it in the laser engraver to create the custom labels in a matter of minutes after engraving the labels it was time to attach the connectors for hdmi sdi xlr usb etc they have all the parts to make any connection under the sun now that you understand the back plates design it's time to see how it all comes together yeah so there's a couple different signal types going on they have like purple this is sti this is all your video cabling we have some network we have yellow is for dante there's a couple dante lines black is just regular cat5 for network a bunch of hdmi is a bunch of usbs and then all this power so there's a lot going on back here so that definitely makes it difficult when we shrunk from a 12-space to an eight-space rack just compacting all that cabling um so i think the real trick was separation so i separated out the network switch up top here we mounted that upside down and then we can keep all the network up top and then run it down to combine with the plate and combine with the gear and then video i tried to space them out and kind of fan them out their separate directions so you can see each label pretty clearly and see what cable it is and you can always reach in and unplug things whenever you need to yeah so the process really once i got all the gear loaded um we like to start with power first because you want to get that out of the way before you start doing other signal types because it's the biggest thickest kind of cable so i ran all my power from the pieces of gear we have the power bus which we were talking about earlier where it's 12 volt power coming off of this just little distributed bus so i got some of those ran from their pieces of gear and then i started working on these iec's so like the the video hub and the adam and the hyperdeck all have iec cabling just power cabling and so i had to run those in and then because they're really long and i wanted them to be long enough to reach to the plate to get to the firm in here i had to run them back in here and then tuck all the slack down underneath the sonnet which was pretty difficult but i think it turned out really well i think it actually cleaned up a lot better than i was even expecting it to another thing i think really helps the just the aesthetic look of it is i added this tech flex wrapping here um to kind of conceal and protect all the cabling that goes up to this plate a lot of the time we'll just do zip ties and then it can kind of fray out a little bit when you're shoving the rack or shoving the plate back in to the rack it can kind of flex out too much yeah so a lot of this cabling the sti and the network is install cable that we use in the field and so it's actually just cable that i terminated to bnc or tcat5 rj45 connectors and so those are really easy because i could just run the cable and then cut it to length and terminate it but a lot of this is really difficult like hdmi i'm i'm never going to try to terminate hdmi that sounds like a pain so we always use just pre-made so i have some three footers and some six footers that i ran into here into my loom and then the real trick is hiding slack because you want it to look clean at its location but if they're all the same length and they're all going different places they're going to be different slack lengths and so that's where um it's really practical to have empty pocket space like i have in here and here where i can tuck the loop that i have left over in down underneath the gear and zip tie it tightly so that it's nice and clean and out of the way and it's never going to get caught on anything and then it really cleans up the look of the rack with this plate there was a difficulty in if you if you just ran your cabling out and just connected it straight to the plate you wouldn't really be able to remove it and service the plate but what i did instead of just terminating to the plate is i left a little balloon a little c-shaped loom so i ran it's all anchored inside the rack right here and then you can see it's a loom here if you come on this side you can see that there's just a c-shaped loom living behind this so that i can pull it in and out without um having a big mess of cables to try to like shove in i don't know if you've ever like had a big mess of cables and you have to kind of combine it all and cram it in and there's stuff sticking out the side so this keeps it really nice and clean so that we can you know easily push in the plate to where it belongs and keep it all really contained yeah oftentimes we'll run into situations where we're strapped for space this is a great example of that so we need to be as creative as possible to make up uh space where we can that's where we actually found the solution of mounting this furman to our custom plate that we built in house here and then in addition to that we wanted to have a place for the resi ray and have it be accessible so we were able to mount that to the top of this ferment we made this custom plate plate to match uh the shape of the furman and then also extend out to take a full advantage of this space right here um and then on the front side we left a little opening for the power button in case we ever need to power cycle the rezzy um we also like to uh kind of be pragmatic about how we separate all of our signal types and and oftentimes even the gear so we went ahead and batched these out or grouped these by the switcher we got control power and dmx is down here we went ahead and grouped that with the factory outlet that came with the furmin and then over here we've got our router inputs and outputs and then this is where we kind of you know just grouped by what made sense as far as pc power midi and dock and then we've got our audio last and then here's the factory switch for the furman that we punched through our plate um you know we we like to make our stuff look good but most most importantly have it be functional um so you know we're we like aesthetics and we went ahead and added this led light behind there with a 3d printed case behind it all in house cut out that slit in house and then we lasered everything on this plate and house as well so we actually use this acrylic that is black but allows led light to pass through and it also gets rid of any hot spots which was something that we care deeply about obviously being an avl company we we really focus on our lighting and make sure that it looks good in in any um application that we have so hot spots were a big deal for us so we've got material that actually diffuses those hot spots so we don't see them once the video rack was complete we tested all of our connections then i rode off into the sunset with my video rack like a spoiled brat worship leader seriously i cannot thank the guys at summit enough for this upgrade to my video system when i tried it out at church the following sunday everything worked flawlessly now we can wheel our video rig to and from our church we no longer have the spaghetti mess of cables we don't have to hunt for the right connections this upgrade has increased our team's efficiency and our sanity previously i did not have adequate appreciation for this sort of craftsmanship but when you spend hours with a team at summit and you see the final product it gives you a fresh and accurate perspective on why this work is so important i'll link their website below so you can connect with them about any upcoming projects at your church as mentioned they design the systems for large ministries like life church but they also have service offerings and products available that will benefit even smaller churches thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe to the churchfront channel so you don't miss out on our in-depth tour of the entire summit warehouse we hope to publish it within the next few weeks [Music] you

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 99,661

Keywords: 11-22-20, card 1, broll, 20.10.11 - mission lakewood wo, september 6, 2020, card 3, rack studio footage, sunday footage, footage from sunday august 16, c300, october 24 footage

Id: 9-w6Oc5NsAE

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020