- In this video I'm gonna walk you through a live streaming setup for churches that's quick to assemble and easy to use, even for small or portable churches. I'm gonna walk you through all
the gear you're gonna need, as well as some of my
favorite pieces of software for streaming to Facebook,
YouTube, or a private server. Watch to the end because
I think you'll discover that live streaming for your church doesn't have to be as expensive or complicated as it sounds. And with the right tools and
a little bit of guidance, you can reach your church community online in just a few easy steps. (upbeat music) My name is Jake Gosselin
with churchfront.com, an online resource for innovative and creative church leaders. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you'll receive all
of our latest content to help you grow yourself
and grow your church. Make sure you check out
the show notes below for links to all of the gear and software mentioned in this video that's gonna help you get up and running with your own live stream system. So, what I'm gonna do now
is show you step-by-step how to build a live streaming
system for your church, but please keep in mind that this system needs to be customized
to your church's need and your own preferences. So, the gear and software I use doesn't necessarily have to be
the gear and software you use but I think you'll still
benefit from this video because you'll just have a more
comprehensive understanding of how all this works and then you can go about customizing
it for your church. And before you dive into
purchasing any gear or software for live streaming at your church, I encourage you to get
together with the other leaders at your church and ask yourself
some of these questions. Why do we need to live stream our worship gatherings online? What's the return on
investment going to be? Because a lot of this costs money, so is it even gonna be
worthwhile for our church? Are we doing this merely to be cool or to be like Elevation
Church and we think that we're gonna have thousands of people tuning into our live stream every Sunday? Are there people in our church community who genuinely want to be a
part of what happens on Sunday but they can't make it because
maybe they're home-bound or maybe, and they're in the military and they just can't physically be with us. Will live streaming be a key part of our marketing strategy
in how we reach people beyond our church? If a potential visitor
sees our live stream for the first time, what
kind of first impression would it make? Are we gonna publish our live
streams publicly on YouTube or Facebook or are we gonna stream them to a private server where only
people who know where to go will have access to it? I don't wanna go into detail here about whether or not your
church should be live streaming, but honestly, I don't think
your church should be wasting any time or precious resources
on a system like this if strategically it's not
gonna accomplish much for you. My friend Brady Shearer has a
fantastic video on this topic. So, after you watch this video
make sure you check it out. He's gonna help you think
through this strategically. Assuming you are ready to move forward, and live streaming makes
strategic sense for your church, let's dive into the setup
and how it all works. Keep in mind, all the
hardware and software that I'm gonna show you here
is for my small church plan. Again, it has to be super quick to set up. It has to be easy to
use for my volunteers. Those were the main reasons
I made some decisions about the gear and
software that I have here. I'm not gonna be showing you an elaborate, multi-cam live stream system
that costs 10s of 1,000s or 100s of 1,000s of dollars. Everything you're about to see here cost just over $2,000 and I as walk you through
the specifics of my setup, I'm gonna be walking you
through the general overview of how live streaming
works, so you'll get it from a theoretical sense
as well as you'll be able to see the hardware and how
this all works together. So the first thing you're
gonna need is a computer that acts as your hub
for your live stream. You can use a Mac or a
PC and believe it or not, after doing a lot of research on this, it seems that having a PC is
better for live streaming, but you can still have
a great setup on a Mac and I'm gonna show you my
setup which runs on a Mac. Make sure your computer is going to have a solid internet connection,
and if you're really serious, have a standalone internet connection that's dedicated just to live streaming so you don't have any
glitches or lag in your feed. So here is my setup. I'm gonna be using my Macbook Pro. The next thing you're gonna
need is a video source. There's a large variety
of ways you can do this, but I'm gonna talk to you about two. The first way you can do this is by purchasing an inexpensive camcorder for a few $100 and I would recommend the Canon VIXIA HF R800. It's just over $200 and
it has an HDMI output which you'll need on any
camera you try to use with this setup. From the camera, you're
gonna send that video feed through the HDMI cable to an
HDMI video capture device, which on the other side of
that device has a USB cable that's gonna plug into your computer. So you're gonna have camera, you're gonna have HDMI
to USB capture device and then that's gonna
go into your computer. When it's all said and done, when you use a camcorder
and a video capture device, you're probably looking
at around $500 to $600. Alternatively, you could buy a camera that has the USB
functionality built into it, so you don't need a separate
HDMI capture device. And that's what I have here. This is the PTZ Optics
20 time zoom USB camera. I'm really grateful for PTZ
Optics for sending this to me so I can show you all what
a great tool this can be for churches when it
comes to live streaming. This camera runs around
$1,800, so it's not cheap. It's not as cheap as getting a
small little Canon camcorder, but here's why I like this camera and why I think it's worth the price tag. First, it's super compact. Look at the size of it
compared to my hand here. So it's super small, it's gonna work great for our church context, because, again, we're a set up and tear down church. We can't have big bulky items. This camera can easily be
controlled via remote control, it can pan, it can tilt, and it can also zoom in and out. It can also be controlled by Ableton Live, which I'll be sure to make a
video about that in the future. The image quality on this
camera is also great. Actually, that's what
you're seeing right now. I'm looking into the PTZ Optics camera and I'm really happy with the
dynamic range of this camera and I actually have it
at this angle purposely so that you see that even though I have the bright windows right here and the shadows on my
face, you can still see decent details. Since we're a church that
meets in a large auditorium, I love having the ability
to have this 20 times optical zoom, which it's super
close to my face right now and looks ridiculous. Probably can't even focus, it's too close. But this is important when
you are trying to stream a worship gathering, because
you have a large room, you need to be able to
zoom in on people on stage or zoom back out wide to
capture the whole stage and you don't want digital zoom because that will look grainy and nasty. And finally, one of my favorite
things about this camera is that it plugs into our
streaming computer via USB so we don't need another
video capture device to go from HDMI to USB like
you would with a camcorder. So for us at our church,
the simpler the setup, the better. You simply plug it into
the computer and it works. So those are a couple
options for capturing the video portion of your live stream. And of course, you've got to think through how you're gonna mount
your camera or where you're gonna place it. At our church I'm just
gonna place it on top of a basic video tripod
at the back of the room by our sound console. At your church, you may have
a permanent worship space where you can mount
your camera permanently so you don't have to
worry about setting it up or tearing it down every week. Now let's talk about capturing
audio for our live stream. So like the video capture device, you're gonna have an audio capture device that's gonna be sending your audio feed from your sound console to your computer. I recommend having the
ability to create a unique mix for your live stream because often things need to be mixed a bit
differently for computer speakers or speakers on a mobile device versus what you're gonna be
hearing from your PA system. So we use a Midas M32R. There's plenty of mix bus
outs on that sound console. We could plug the USB
cable from the Midas M32R directly into the computer
and send audio that way, but I think there's a more
simple way of doing it and that is to use one
of those XLR outputs from the back of the Midas M32R, one of the mix bus outs, and route that into a basic
little audio interface like what I have here, the
Behringer UM2 interface. This is a $30 interface,
and this is an easy way to send a unique mix from
the board into an interface and into our computer for the live stream. And then our sound person can then put on his or her headphones
to kind of dial in what mix would sound
good for the live stream. And with this setup on
our live stream computer, we won't need to be running a DAW like Ableton or Pro Tools or Logic to mix the sound from the sound console. It will be coming into the computer through this one mono input all mixed, all ready to go. So that's the audio setup,
it's not quite as complicated but you still want to make
sure that you do a great job streaming high-quality
audio with your video. And that covers all of
the hardware we need for video capture and audio capture, so we have our video and audio
coming through our computer, but now we need a software
that's going to take that video and audio and put it together and then send it to the internet, to YouTube or Facebook
or to a private server. In my opinion, this is
the most difficult aspect of building your live stream system, because the software you
choose really depends on your context, whether
you're using a Mac or a PC, and just your
personal preferences. So here are a couple
popular and great solutions. The first software you can check out, but I don't necessarily recommend, is OBS Studio. It's a free software. It runs both on Mac and PC. Because it's free and open source, it means it's not quite as easy to use or plug-and-play as what I prefer. If you're gonna use OBS Studio, be prepared to go on YouTube, find a bunch of tutorial videos, and figure out how to
configure it for your context. At our church, we simply don't have time to troubleshoot audio syncing issues and to have these little glitches that I was finding with OBS, so that's why I'd rather go
find a affordable paid option for a software that's
just gonna work well. For those of you using a
Mac for your live stream, I recommend using Ecamm Live. It's $79, it's super easy to use. You simply plug the camera into it, whether you have a setup like me or if you have a HDMI capture
device with a camcorder, and it just works. With this offer, it'll
also just take seconds to log in to your YouTube
or Facebook accounts so you can send your live stream there. And Ecamm Live has a cool feature where you can monitor the
comments on your Facebook Live without needing to open your
browser window in Facebook to do that. You can do it all within Ecamm. If you are a PC user, then I
recommend checking out vMix. It's very comparable
in price to Ecamm Live. I honestly wish vMix was available for Mac because for live streaming
a worship gathering, it might even be a little
bit better than Ecamm Live. vMix does have a free version, but you have to pay $60 for the version that can stream in HD. So while these two pieces
of software are not free, I think it's totally worth
the price tag of $60 or $80 to save your team the
headache when it comes to getting this all up and running. So finally, the last thing
you need within this system is your Facebook account
or YouTube account, so hopefully your church
hasn't been living under a rock for the past 10 years and you
already have those set up. They're free, they're easy to use, and no matter what software you go with, it's very easy to send your
live stream to your account. Simply follow the support
videos or instructions that come with those pieces of software. So that covers all of
the hardware and software you're gonna need for a live
stream system at your church. To recap, you have a video capture device and a audio capture
device that's gonna send those signals to your computer where then it's gonna go into a software like Ecamm Live or OBS or vMix and then from those pieces of software, whichever one you choose,
you can then broadcast to YouTube, Facebook or
a private RTMP server. Now I want to show you
exactly what this looks like for our church's live stream system using the PTZ Optics camera,
this Behringer interface, the Mac, and Ecamm Live. So both this camera and the interface are just plugged into
this Macbook Pro via USB and we're gonna pretend that this mic here is the mix coming from our sound console for our live stream, because this mic is going
into this audio interface into Channel 1. So everything's plugged in ready to go. I'm gonna open up Ecamm Live. And by default, Ecamm Live
is using my Facetime camera on my computer and it is
using my computer's built-in microphone. And then it's really easy
to select the right input, so I want to go to
camera, I'm gonna select PTZ Optics camera, it
automatically detects it. So that's what you're seeing
here and I'll just pan that up a little bit, zoom out
so we're not super close. So that's good to go with the video feed and then under microphone,
I'm gonna select USB audio codec. That is the Behringer UM2
interface that I have right here. And then under Window I can
bring up my sound levels just to make sure that the sound is good so I can monitor, if I turn it way up it's gonna clip, I can turn it down on the interface to have a good healthy
feed coming in there. So my video and audio are
ready to go in Ecamm Live so now I need to select the destination. So I could have record
only or I can send it to YouTube or Facebook. For this example, I want
to send it to YouTube. And it's important to keep in mind that you can actually have it record all broadcasts up here, so
it'll send the broadcast to the internet, but it'll
also record it locally on the computer. So I have YouTube set as a destination and then I'm gonna press Login and I'll select the right channel and I'll allow it to manage my account and then I will go ahead
and make sure right now, I'm just gonna test out this live stream so I'll keep things on private, because I don't really
need all of you guys to see this random live stream. And I highly recommend you do the same when you test out your live streams. Always do it first in a private mode. And then I'll hit Get Started here and I'm ready to go live on YouTube. So I'll go ahead and do that, I'll press Go Live. And we can see here I'm live and I can be operating my camera and then Ecamm Live can
do a lot of fancy stuff with overlays and stuff like that, so if I wanted to have
a countdown in there I could do that. I could add images and titles. Lots of fancy stuff in Ecamm Live. It makes it really,
really easy to do that, so that's why I recommend the
software if you have a Mac. So let's pretend that I'm all wrapped up. I'll just press Finish. So then I can view the post
on YouTube and I will do that. And we can see here I'm live and I can be operating my, to have
a countdown in there, I could do that. I could add images and titles, lots of fancy stuff in Ecamm Live. It makes it really, really
easy to do that, so, so the live stream worked. It's super, super simple. Right now it's a private video on YouTube. Again, I could set this
to public if I wanted to. I'll just go ahead and delete this video, but that's how it works. It's really that easy. Again, using the PTZ Optics camera, the Behringer interface
and then Ecamm Live, again, if you're running on a Mac. It only takes a couple seconds to get this stuff up and running. Now you know how to set
up a live stream system at your church. In the near future, I'll be recording some of the services at our
church at Mission Lakewood. We can't live stream from
the school we meet at because we do not have a reliable
internet connection there. There's only this really
cruddy public wifi that's available at the school and it just would not
be reliable to stream, but a cool trick you can do
is you can record locally to your computer, because
software like Ecamm can do that automatically and then you can actually play that video file back later within Ecamm and live
stream just at a later time and this could be a cool way to be able to have yourself or someone
on your pastoral team engage with people during the live stream because you're not preaching a sermon or leading worship, but
you could just be at home on the coach. So keep an eye on my channel as I'll be releasing
more videos on this topic in the future. I'm really excited to show
you how you can automate the PTZ Optics camera with Ableton Live. If you are a worship tech nerd and you want an organized
list of all the gear we use at my church plant,
including all this live stream gear, then you should download
my worship ministry toolkit linked below this video. Click the link, complete the from, I'll send you instant access. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you found it helpful, please
hit that thumbs-up button and share it with your
friends in ministry. You can check out some
related videos right over here and don't forget to subscribe to the Churchfront channel so
you can continue to receive all of our latest content
to help you grow yourself and grow your church.
