Last month The Bridge celebrated our 2nd anniversary. We’ve been portable the whole time, with the hope that this summer we will be able to move into a brand new Sprung building on the land we have purchased.

The fun part of being portable, is trying to present a professional, high tech presentation that is possible to setup in a limited amount of time on Sunday morning and still have time to practice. At this time, we do 2 identical services, 9:00am and 10:45am, meeting in a wedding hall. We do band rehearsal from 7:30 to 8:30.  Last week we had around 600 which is pretty well the max in this building. On Easter we went to another building to house the 840 on that day.

Our setup includes stage, backdrop, lights, 1 10×7.5 rear projection screen, 4 lcd monitors, full band, computer, and TV camera. Band includes 3 guitars, bass, keys, drums with 5 vocalists. We run 5 monitor mixes, 3 of which are in-ear.

Our 1 TV camera shoots the whole service as smoothly as possible, we run a 100′ firewire cable from the camera to our laptop where it connects to a card with 2 firewire ports. The card acts as a hub, video goes into the computer, and another firewire cable goes from the card to a Philips hard drive recorder (walmart) to record the services. 

The computer runs EasyWorship, and we use EasyWorship to mix the video with the graphics, etc.. During the sermon we switch to live video closeups for IMAG. Video on the recorder is edited a little and burned to a DVD and duplicated. The recorder just records what the camera sees.

As we go along the next couple weeks, I will go into detail about how and why we are doing it the way we do.

Maybe you all will have questions or suggestions of what has worked for you.

rd