Projection systems for worship services

Thursday, April 14th, 2011in Media Best Practices, by verchern / 0 Comments

For many years, POLR used ChurchView. Â In fact, our projection team is still referred to as the ChurchView team by most of the people on the platform. Â We have tried a couple of other programs including Media Shout and others and we have decided to use EZWorship.

EZWorship for church projection systems

We do not have song books in our church so this tool becomes vital to the worship segment. Â We also have very dynamic services, where the schedule can change at any time. Â It is critical that the tool is easy to use and that we can change almost anything “on the fly”. Â We find that EZWorship is the easiest to train new, inexperienced staff and the most flexible.

The latest version has multi screen output for stage monitors or screen in rear of building. Â Download it for free and try it out. Â It also has many different translations of the Bible that you can choose to display.

We use two screens, one behind the stage for the audience to see and one behind the media booth for the people on stage to see. Â Our PC has a video input card where we feed our cameras and external DVD player should we choose to put this on the screen. Â We typically use this for baptisms and other camera shots.

The out put that goes to our front projector is also split allowing it to be switched to our recording or streaming.

Projectors:

There a couple of things to look at when looking for projectors.

- Probably the most important is brightness, especially if you cant get your auditorium to a blackout state. Â If you have natural light coming into the building or you don’t have ability to dim your house lights, you will need a very bright projector. Â Have someone come to your building and demo a couple of models for you.

- The next important thing is your throw distance. Â In our case, we are doing rear projection on a special “project through” screen. Â The space behind the screen is very limited and we needed a very “Short throw” lens. Â In fact, the space was so limited we had to order an additional wide angle lens to help with the problem. Â For very long throws, like from the back of the auditorium, you may need a special lens and brighter projector. Â I suggest getting the projector as close to the screen as possible for best quality and lighting.

- Resolution may or may not be as important depending on how you plan to connect to the projector. Â We connect using s-video baluns from svideo.com to connect all of our video equipment over cat 5 cable. Â All cameras, EZ-worship, DVD players are connected to a video switcher via baluns and the switcher is connected to the projector using baluns. Â This makes our setup very flexible and easy to feed anything into the system.