Changes

I don't do this very often on this blog, but I'm going to go ahead and "talk shop" a little bit today. This past Sunday was a busy week at Centerpoint from a technical standpoint. Having worshiped outside for the last 4 weeks, it was a little bit of an adjustment to moving back into our regular facility. Beyond that, though, we're implementing a couple of changes right now (seemed smart to time them with moving back in, for consistency's sake). The biggest is that we've switched presentation softwares. Up to this point, we've used Sunday Plus, but we've felt for some time now that it just wasn't getting the job done. It's got some Vista issues, and we've had trouble getting video content to play back smoothly (which is major for us, because we use a lot of video in our services). The problem of course is that we're a little church with a very tight budget (primarily because of the facility we're currently occupying). So what did we do?

Enter openlp. With the recent explosion of high-quality, open source software (like Audacity and OpenOffice), I suppose it should have occured to me that there might be an open source worship presentation software sooner, but it didn't. In any case, I found it, and we used it for the first time this past Sunday. openlp is completely free and open source and includes the vast majority of the features found in Sunday Plus, MediaShout and others. The only major thing it's missing right now is text over video support, but the developers have suggested that it's coming in the next version. Exciting. I think this is a great example of folks in the church using their gifts and talents to help out others. I pulled a screenshot of the main operating window off of the openlp website:


The other change we made this week was significantly smaller, but still exciting. One of the first things that I got really excited about when we were designing our current worship space (really just a big warehouse we've converted) was the idea to have a completely modular stage made up of 4x4 foot panels. That way, we're able to change the shape, height, etc. of the stage quickly and easily. Since we moved into this room in October we've been using a stage for the band that was 32 feet across by 8 feet deep. In front of that was an additional 16x8 foot section for the pastor/interpreter/special musical stuff/etc. The drums were up on a short riser, but that was it. The band ended up basically in a straight line across the stage, and everything felt very spread out (especially after we went to in-ears and got rid of our stage wedges). Beyond that, we had trouble getting good coverage of the entire area with our (rather limited - four Source Fours with wide lenses) lighting system. So last week, Pastor Dave and I went to work on it. What we ended up was a new "base stage" that looks like this:


That took care of the lighting issues. Then we took the "extra" panels that we had just removed and started making platforms at different levels for the band members. It ended up looking pretty cool:



I'm really happy with what we came up with, and I definitely noticed the difference on Sunday. Everything just felt a little tighter with the band. It was good.