PCIe Card Expansion System for Worship Ministry | Sonnet Echo Express Setup and Review

if you are a worship leader or a tech team leader at a church chances are you have a computer in your tech booth that is dedicated to fulfilling a lot of tasks that could include running propresenter for all of your displays maybe it controls your lighting software and maybe you're even recording audio into that computer and here's a common challenge let's say your computer is running propresenter and you want to be able to send out multiple unique video displays to different destinations in our case we send a primary display for our congregation to see we have a stage display for our band and then we want to have lower thirds lyrics for our video switching software in this video I'm going to show you the professional solution to expanding that connectivity to your media computer in your worship ministry tech booth so if you're looking for this type of solution for your worship ministry keep watching this video I'm gonna walk you through how I set mine up and then I'll show you what the end product looks like for displaying you know multiple video displays through Pro presenter as well as sending video into our black magic switcher so I kind of have this love/hate relationship with dongles I'm talking the little devices that go from USBC or Thunderbolt 3 on your macbook pro to regular USB Ethernet HDMI you know these computers that we use to run propresenter like key any other programs in our worship ministry their functioning has like a production hub but unfortunately these computers are being made with less and less ports and connectivity so then when you try to do anything relatively advanced sending multiple streams of video or just data out of the computer it gets really complicated and then you're relying on these like $20 dongles off of Amazon and that's just a complete recipe for disaster we've dealt with this problem so many times of like an HDMI connection just dropping in our projection screen not working and lately as I've been trying to explore some more professional broadcast video solutions for our church I was like how in the world am I going to send you know three or four word video outputs from propresenter so that we can have lower thirds lyrics we can send our main feeds to our main display we have to send a feed to our stage display I was like where in the world am I gonna find a dongle like that it turns out I found one and the thing is this isn't really a dongle this setup is a PCIe expansion chassis welcome to Jake tech tips in this video we are gonna get really nerdy but this is the type of stuff I just get really excited about these days so the ultimate goal with these items here is instead of having a bunch of dongles on our computer with a bunch of different cables coming out of this MacBook Pro we're just gonna have one Thunderbolt 3 cable and that's gonna take care of all of our connectivity needs so I feel like I did my research well enough I ordered all this gear now I'm gonna take it out of the box and set it up we have the sonic echo Express se more specifically the se3 got a nice hefty power supply so that is the chassis for our PCIe cards so that guys like step number one next we have the cards that are gonna go inside the chassis so we have a sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 for poor card so for USB things for like our MIDI automation or the eye connectivity devices as well as our DMX to USB adapter that we use with light key and then we have two extra ports for whatever we want so this is the four port USB card next up we have a presto solo 10 Gigabit Ethernet port there it is a little Ethernet card we have the one of the real reasons why I wanted to get this expansion chassis the deck link duo by black magic it has four independent channels for SD and HD formats up to 1080p 60 so this thing can send video out of one of these four channels also it can receive video if I want to send video back to the computer and this case I mainly wanted to send video out of the computer one for our main display for our congregation one for our stage display and then I'm gonna send a lower thirds to our video switcher and then we just got we have an extra one that we can we can use for whatever we want there we go the deck link duo so pretty looking so there's four inputs and outputs of SDI but there's five ports so not really sure why I'll probably find out eventually so the next step is I'm gonna open up the expansion chassis is just a couple screws on the bottom should come apart and then I put the cards in and then fire it up should be ready to go so here's what it looks like on the inside you can see these are like the three slots that the cards go in and this is going to be the back of it the device where we're gonna be able to plug all of our devices into that so that's it I just took out the little front plates where you're gonna put the cards in this bottom plate this is where like you're gonna plug the Thunderbolt three cables in so it'll go into here and then the other one will go into my MacBook Pro and apparently you can plug like multiple things into here that's pretty cool feel like I should have a degree in computer science or something like that before I mess around with this stuff okay there we go so I think yep just kind of just kind of push it in there I think it's in there man you guys the IT guys are gonna just laughing at me probably for how much a noob I am with the stuff type of stuff just a minute Apple fanboy look at you PCIe expansion port thingy so don't have so many Dunkle's I'm such a computer genius alright alright then the next one is gonna be the the USB 3.0 Horde pub oh [Music] man feels so good okay thought of lots of screw yes okay guys I did it I think that makes me a professional qualified computer tech look at that so we got the three cards in there pretty straightforward here's what it looks like so now hopefully you guys are getting a better idea what this is gonna do so we've got our STI video outs we've got our Ethernet cable and then we've got our USB ports Lu crash and make sure we edit this you just want to cut out all the parts where I'm struggling so everybody still thinks that I'm a pro just be my new opener to YouTube videos hey my name is Jake Gosselin church-run I've no clue what I'm doing but I make videos about it anyway and a lot of people watch it and seem to like it so I do it anyways okay haha look at that guy's there we go there's the cards so now I'm in my studio and I've had the expansion chassis up and running for about a week learning how to use it testing it out and so far has been fantastic so now that I actually know what I'm doing with this thing because it always takes me multiple hours to like figure this stuff out when I'm setting it up for the first time I want to show you what it looks like when you actually plug everything in you get the Thunderbolt 3 cable connected to your computer and you start utilizing these expansion cards so this is a computer that we run propresenter on and I've got a few apps running out here of course propresenter is the obvious one but before you can just go and start configuring propresenter with your deck link duo card you have to get the black magic desktop video setup app and then when you plug in your expansion card and you're gonna it's going to detect the deck like duo so pretty much just works once you install this app and you can go into this app and you can configure these different settings for the video inputs and outputs on the different video devices so remember the deck link duo it's like for video capture devices in one we have do a one duo to do a three and duo for 4 duo 1 and 4 duo - I just have those at 1080p at 30 frames a second and that is for my main display and my stage display confidence monitor and then deck link duo 3 I have that attending me 24 frames per second that's going to be for our broadcast feed and this is just sending lower thirds lyrics to the Blackmagic 8m switcher and then for 4 I have pretty much empty we're not using it for anything right now so once I had that configured then I can go into pro presenter and I go to preferences and I go to screens and then screen configuration and then here you're gonna see that we've got our main audience screen and for my output its deck length 2 L 1 and that's working just fine I have it going out of the deck link SDI to a Blackmagic micro converted to HDMI into the flat screen TV that we're using behind us as we lead worship and then for our confidence monitor various similar setup Dec link duo to 1080p 30 frames a second output that's going to our stage just blame monitor so then for our broadcast feed we wanted to send in lower thirds lyrics so we could overlay that on the final broadcast video so I have that on deck link 203 and then I have that on 24 frames per second as you see right here and that's all I have to configure here in the screen settings but then pro presenter has this cool looks settings feature and what I did is for our stream display I made it so we only display the content on the slide so like the lyric text content and then I also applied a theme to this look so that we have the text automatically put down at the bottom of the screen so when you go back and look at what we got going here on our outputs from Pro presenter here's our main display I actually have no lyrics on it at all here is our confidence monitor you can see the lyrics and then here is our stream our lower thirds lyrics that we have coming out on the bottom of the display so pro presenter is talking to the deck link duo and then that is sending the video signals to the proper destination and it's working really well the other thing I want to show you if I go to my network preferences you'll see here that this Thunderbolt Ethernet device shows up and that is indeed the Ethernet card that we have plugged into the sana echo Express so that's working fine and then I was also able to get up and running our ATM software I can open my FM software control app I put in the right IP address and now I can control my switcher then I want to test to make sure that our USB 3.0 for port card is working just fine and I did that by plugging in this little shore audio interface via USB into that card and then I can just go to my sound preferences here and here we can see the shore MDI shows up just fine so all the connectivity on my experience and chassis is working great and all I have plugged into this computer is a charger and then I have a Thunderbolt 3 cable going into the expansion chassis I thought the expansion chassis was going to be able to charge the computer and it looks like it charges like this little icon up here changes to the lightning bolt but it says not charging so unfortunately it doesn't appears that it doesn't charge we do have to have the standard macro charger plug into the computer as well and then the other downside I discovered is that the ethernet card that I put in the expansion chassis does not work with Dante and when I say it doesn't work it kind of doesn't work well it's pretty critical it doesn't work because it just doesn't work sending audio like I plugged it in and it will detect the Dante Network I can go into the controller app and it you know it shows that it can make a connection to other devices but then no audio actually goes through it so then I switched to a regular ethernet dongle to USB see on this computer and then that connected to that Network and it worked just fine and the audio went through it so I'm pretty sure there is an issue and I even went to this compatibility chart that sonnet technology has and I looked at the Dante sound cards here and look how there's like a little little note here at the bottom of the document so note number 5 Dante PCIe sound cards have software anomalies in thunderbolt expansion chassis so sana is working with aadmi to resolve the issue so that's a bummer it looks like it just doesn't work even if I were to go and purchase like a actual aden 8 sound card for my experience with chassis I don't think that what's good to that would work reliably for me either so hopefully they come out with a fix for that soon because if I could also send Dante through that port that would be amazing in the meantime we will just have you know use up one of our freed up USB C ports to anythin another that cable to connect it to our Dante network so that is my setup with the sonnet echo Express expansion chassis with some great expansion cards for a worship tech ministry context I'm going to list this exact set up below in the description so you can find the chassis you can find the right expansion cards I actually made the mistake when the first Ethernet expansion card you guys saw me install at the unboxing it was like some sort of optical fiber Ethernet so I had to read I have to return it still but I ordered another one from Amazon got it in a few days and I had to get that fixed but I'll make sure you guys have the right links so that you can order the exact right setup that I showed you right here where you can get it up and running with propresenter with your deck link duo and get your Ethernet Gigabit por set up and then you also can get the 4 port USB set up for any other ports you need and like I said we're gonna use those USB ports for us for our DMX our USB to DMX adapter for a lighting system and then also a USB port for our eye connectivity MIDI devices that's what we use for automation and then we'll just have two more ports left over so I'm gonna list all that gear below in the description but understand you can customize this to your liking I'm gonna include sonnets compatibility chart as well so you guys can see all of the different options available for the different expansion cards you can put in your chassis if you would like help from my team and have us come alongside you to build out some strong tech infrastructure for your worship ministry then check out worship leader school comm we've got online courses and we have coaching that happens every single weekday where we can give you real-time help and guidance as you continue to grow yourself and grow your worship ministry so click the link below to learn more thanks so much for watching this video smash that thumbs up button if you found it helpful and don't forget to subscribe and share this video with your friends so it can help them out as well and they can eliminate all of those frustrating dongles [Music]

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 66,748

Keywords: propresenter, sonnet echo express, pcie card expansion, worship tech, churchfront, jake gosselin, propresenter accesory, blackmagic decklink duo 2, blackmagic decklink duo 2 setup, blackmagic decklink worship ministry

Id: ud72xaOlngY

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020