How to Make Your Livestream Video and Audio Look and Sound Great w/ Jake Gosselin

Alex Enfiedjian 00:00 This episode is sponsored by 1230 Media 1230 media is a one stop shop for all your churches media needs. They can help you with graphic design videography, video editing, motion graphics, hosted video announcements, training, and so much more. I used them recently on a personal project for worship ministry training, and they crushed it. They far exceeded my expectations, amazing video production. Go use 1230 media for all your media needs. You can go to 1230 dot media to get your project started today.

Alex Enfiedjian 00:39 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the worship ministry training podcast a monthly podcast for worship leaders. Listen, worship ministry training exists to give overwhelmed and stuck worship leaders the practical training they need to be confident, excellent and successful. That’s why we exist. We’ve been doing it for six years. If you’re new to the podcast, I would encourage you to hit subscribe, whether you’re watching it on YouTube or listening. That way you will get updated of new episodes when they drop. And we always try to aim to have every single episode be as helpful, practical and in depth as possible to give you real tangible tools to use. And so go dig through the episode list. If you haven’t yet, go find the topics that you need help with right now. And listen to them and apply them to your ministry today. Today I’m talking with Jake Gosselin from church front. Now, this month is kind of dedicated for us to do online church. Well, last episode was all about the content of our online church services, and then how to kind of do the hybrid online slash live thing, because that’s going to be our reality for the next few months. But this episode with Jake is all about the technical side of how to create a great looking and sounding live stream. So you’re going to get really helpful tips really helpful tools and a lot of information from Jake so get your pencil and pen ready. And let’s dive into today’s episode. Alright, see you guys on the back end. Hey everybody, I am here with the one and only Jake Gosselin the creator of church front, Jake, we talked on the phone, I don’t know last week or a few days ago. So I always get to see your beautiful face but you’ve never seen my ugly mug but here we are video call. How you doing bro?

Jake Gosselin 02:14 Dude, you are you are tall, dark and handsome. So don’t give me any of that. self deprecating, ugly ugly mug. Everybody go go check out Alex’s YouTube channel. Dude. Do you have videos of yourself on your YouTube channel? Yes. where people can actually see you, man.

Alex Enfiedjian 02:30 Maybe like two or three. Okay, like, how can I in the podcast microphone, but well working on

Jake Gosselin 02:35 it. Great to be here, man. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Alex Enfiedjian 02:39 Yeah. And if you guys don’t know, Jake is like all over YouTube. He’s like YouTube famous. He is incredibly helpful, and just always putting out practical content for worship leaders far exceeding and superseding the worship ministry training podcast. So go check out Jake, go check out church Brent, go check out all his resources. Jake, you recently put out a course related to live streaming. And so today, I wanted to pick your brain so that you could just share like, how do we live stream? Well, because, you know, so many churches jumped online during the COVID crisis, and started streaming, which is great. But not all of them are doing it well. And you’ve created a course and some resources to help them do it well. So I wanted to talk about that. But before we talk about like the techie, geeky stuff, like I just wanted to ask you the why question like now that restrictions are lightening up and in person services are starting to happen throughout the country and around the world? Like, why should churches continue to stream their services online? And why should they invest resources into doing it? Well?

Jake Gosselin 03:43 Yeah, and that’s a great question. I think it makes us think about our ecclesiology and the role of live in person worship gatherings for our churches, and how important that is, I know, over the past couple months, man, I just miss it. I’m in I’m in Colorado, it’s late. May they still I think in a couple days, we’ll hear from the governor, the situation of exactly what the next steps should be, or can be for churches start gathering together. I know a couple days ago, the president just announced like, hey, worship gatherings are essential services. So states you can’t, you know, keep them from from getting together. And it’s like, it is it is alarming. You know, like I don’t like to get this isn’t a political channel. And I don’t like to get too caught up in this stuff. But at the same time, it’s important stuff like in terms of like men, or, you know, when you think about our government, preventing us from gathering assembling for our religious purposes, right, like this is like, pretty fundamental, at least for those of us in the States. Maybe there’s folks listening those other countries, that doesn’t really make a difference. But it’s just been a weird time to navigate this as a worship leader, as a Christian, as the United States citizen who values our principles and the constitution that we founded on, you know, we want to be careful not overlapping those things too much. At the same time, I think some people are a little too idealistic about, like, completely separating those things. You know, that’s just kind of the nature of life. So there’s those factors that come into play. And I think over the next couple months, very few churches are just going to be able to go back to normal like it was before COVID, where you can just have your rooms packed with people. So this is due to both I think government regulation will like really discouraged churches are prevent churches to do from doing that. And also, people are just kind of paranoid and afraid of catching this virus still, right. So that’s the situation where like, yeah, where things are opening back up, but leveraging our online platform is still going to be an important part for us to continue to do our thing as churches and I don’t ever, I really don’t think is as much of a tech not technology, tech savvy, innovative guy, whatever you want to call me. But as much of that, as I am, I’m also very much like, I have a deep appreciation for in person worship, and I don’t think live streaming or online church can ever be a complete replacement. For that, I think there are certain aspects of our faith, like the incarnation, for example, like Jesus Christ did in like, Skype, call us or zoom, call us to come tell us about the gospel and, you know, die for our sins and stuff like that he came in the flesh, right. And like, I think, man, as as powerful as the virtual world is, and I love it, I just don’t think it’s like ever gonna be a complete replacement for our in person gatherings. But in the meantime, I think we should use this as an opportunity to learn about the tools we can leverage to stream worship online, especially for folks who are really, like I said, just concerned about coming into a room of people and potentially, you know, they could be older or more vulnerable to the virus, or, or Yeah, maybe there’s just regulations that the government has that we kind of simply can’t get around, get around legally. So you know, if we want to comply with that, then we have to make sure we have some online options as well. So that’s why, yeah, this forced everybody to come online, but I don’t think the need to be online and do it well, is going to go away anytime soon.

Alex Enfiedjian 07:35 Yeah, and it’s interesting to hear a tech guy whose whole business and ministry is online, say how important in person gathering is like, yeah, that’s really eye opening. And I think you make some really valid points. And well, I

Jake Gosselin 07:48 think it’s both meant, well, I’ll just jam on that. Because like, yeah, think about, like, how Starbucks is like, the most successful Coffee Company out there. Right? And it’s not because they have even the best coffee in the world or whatever. Like, and sure, like I could, I can make coffee at home, you know, or I can, I can meet people, my friends over Skype or FaceTime. But there’s something valuable to these in person live gatherings that we have. It’s part of our culture, it’s part of human nature, and that we we just, we just love it. I think it’s a good part of human nature that kind of built in desire for real life experiences and community. And that’s why not only do we see that in the church, but we also see that in other places, like movie theaters, like we all love getting together and watching on the big screen in a movie theater, right? Like, that’s why I just don’t think there’s some folks out there who are like, oh, online churches, the future. And I’m like, Yeah, it’s a part of the future. I just don’t think it’s ever going to be a replacement.

Alex Enfiedjian 08:45 Hmm, yeah, I heard the term phygital Have you heard that term, it’s like physical and digital. It’s kind of like the new it’s, it’s for basically from for a marketing for small companies, they need to become phygital organizations sounds really stupid to say, but like, just the concept that like, we have to seamlessly move between live and in and online. And, I don’t know, I was thinking about just the potential though, that so many churches have just tasted just barely tasted by going online and seeing numbers. You know, you hear churches are like, wow, we have, you know, four times more people watching our services now than we had ever in our building. And I think that shows to the scalability of online and obviously you you know, are able to reach 100,000 or more, you know, viewers on YouTube because because it’s totally scalable you create one video and it goes to multiple many people you don’t have to do you know, 18 webinars or you know, it’s it’s, you’re not contained to a building, even though the building is valuable. So I think I think it’s worth churches doing online well, and creating that experience that maybe it’s not equal to in person because nothing can ever be as valuable as Like that human connection, but we can’t discount the connection of what online does bring. Yeah, and and that there are real people behind the screens. I think that’s the biggest takeaway that I have learned through this time is that there are real people behind the screens who have real needs and who are there because they need you to minister the gospel to them through their device. And I think that’s why we should seek to do online as best as we can, knowing that it will never, you know, replace the gathered church the ecclesia or whatever it is at clay sia, however, yeah, so yeah, man, so So okay, well, with that kind of like fat, you know, groundwork laid? What do churches need to do to get a good live stream? Like let’s talk about the gear, because in my last episode with Carl Barnhill, we talked about kind of the content of what our live stream services should be showing. And that’s kind of a moving target at this point. But the gear that’s static, like you need this type of gear, and there’s no getting around it. So what would you say is like the minimum amount of gear that a church needs to get a decent quality online stream going?

Jake Gosselin 11:09 Yeah, so the live streaming setup can be as simple and budget friendly, or as advanced and expensive as you want it, there’s a such a wide spectrum. And I think, for your typical church, where you have, maybe your churches, typically 100 to 200, people in attendance, like all kind of a lot of the recommendations I’ll give, I think will be for that type of church, because that’s a lot of the folks probably listening just statistically fall into that that bucket. And maybe I’ll kind of think through some of the mistakes I see I’m literally seeing and hearing on people’s live streams where they can make a couple simple tweaks here and there with their gear software setup that would really make the you know, 80% difference of the quality at the end of the day. So when it comes to your live stream, you know, you have a couple things going on, you have a video, some sort of video capture device or devices, you know, sometimes it’s multiple devices capturing video for you. Yeah, via audio capture device. Fortunately for all of us, a lot of churches, we already have good audio capture devices in place, we have microphones, we have mixing consoles, we have our sound system that’s already kind of built into our sanctuary, ready to capture high quality audio. And then of course, we want to capture our presentation software to like pro presenter, usually his most popular software out there running lyrics, running our pastors presentation for their sermon and such. So that’s kind of how I break down like the those are the three various content mediums we want to be able to capture, then we can send it online, the video like live action video, like your people on camera, high quality audio, and then the pre some sort of presentation software, that’s, you know, and you can get more creative, but beyond that with your live streaming strategy. But if we’re to kind of at least just capture, let’s say, what’s happening live in church on a Sunday morning, those are the three primary things we want to capture. So if you’re just getting started with a with a simple setup, because maybe your church has just been doing, you know, very kind of rough, Facebook Lives, YouTube lives using a smartphone, because that’s kind of the brilliance of this is you can you can use a basic device like a smartphone and simply just go go live with that, but the quality, and you’re just gonna be it’s gonna be pretty low, you’re going to be pretty limited in everything that you can accomplish with that type of advice. So I would always recommend for churches, you know, if you really just want to up the video quality for your setup, I would get your hands on some sort of sort of entry level mirrorless camera, you guys have probably seen these before. Canon makes some great cameras, I think it’s the the Canon M. I’m actually not going to try to name the model for it. But the one I actually have is the Panasonic GH five. Oh, the Canon m 50. I think that’s the model the that’s kind of an entry level mirrorless camera, the Panasonic GH five, that’s what I use for all of our cameras. Or you could go the PTC optics route. PTC optics makes a bunch of great pan tilt zoom, that’s what PTC stands for. pan tilt zoom cameras that can be remote controlled. They’re ideal for your sanctuary environment where maybe you’re just gonna keep a couple cameras mounted permanently and someone can remote control them from your tech booth. So those are the few the camera options that when you compare it to like a smartphone, you’re going to see a significant bump in quality and you can spend anywhere from six $700 for like the the Canon m 52. Like you know, a PTC optics camera is like $2,000 totally I think it’s totally worth the the investment in the increase of video quality that you will get From that type of camera setup, and then with the camera, you’re going to need some sort of video capture device to send that video feed from the HDMI output on your camera into your computer, or maybe a video switcher. We’ll talk about more options there. But you got to get that video feed from the camera to your video switching software or device somehow. And that’s where a video capture device comes in handy. So you have a video capture device like the Blackmagic ultra studio mini recorder. This is the one I’m actually using right now to film this video, I’m going from a gh five HDMI into the ultra studio mini recorder and then it goes Thunderbolt three into my laptop. So that’s how my computer can capture this camera signal. AJ makes a great HDMI capture device. And then these capture devices though it’s like it’s they’re very hard to find right now. Because everybody is like good. Try it who is buying all these things up.

Jake Gosselin 15:57 Another out, though, like if you go to the PTC optics cameras is like they actually have USB outputs on some of these cameras, where you don’t need a separate video capture device, you go straight from the camera itself, plug USB into your computer, and then it shows up, the camera will show up as a webcam on your computer. Simple as that. So that’s the kind of the first recommendation I have for the video improvements and just having a good solid beginner set up. And what’s great is you can get multiple cameras down the road, like you can kind of expand on the system as needed. So it’s kind of the beauty of these using these mirrorless cameras.

Alex Enfiedjian 16:35 Yeah, can I can I? Can we dig into a little bit about cameras and lighting and all that stuff? like yeah, we’ll talk about because we still have to talk about like the switcher or even the, you know, lyric software, like how are they getting the lyrics on the screen, or the pastor slides, those types of things. We’ll talk about that later. But let’s real quickly just dig into cameras. So like, just give some advice, like if people are, you know, because let’s say they were using a camera in the back of the room before and now they want to up the quality. So what kind of like lighting tips or angles should they be thinking about when they’re trying to you know, like, and obviously like every stage is different and every you know room is different. So it’s got to be generic enough advice, but just general tips of lighting and and framing and how they should be thinking about angles and those types of things.

Jake Gosselin 17:20 Yeah, the it’s the need to bring out all of our worship services online I think have exposed how poor a lot of churches lighting situation are like inside inside of their sanctuary because a lot of times these spaces are built out and like nobody’s really thinking about, Oh, can we actually clearly see our subjects on stage like the people who are preaching singing leading songs, they just put some like typical, you know, lighting fixtures in the ceiling, and they don’t think about that. Fortunately, yeah, you can solve this pretty easily. The best lighting technique is is what they call a three point lighting technique where you say you have a given, you know, subject to just standing on the stage there. So if I’m, if I’m standing on stage, I’m looking out over the congregation. Ideally, we’re gonna want to have a key light and a fill light that that are, you know, in front of me and kind of at a 45 angle vertical from me my like my eyeline, I guess and then also a 45 degree angle horizontally from me. So I know it’s a little hard to demonstrate that on a podcast here but basically have the good front lighting the light, that’s the light fixtures that are lighting the front of your subject. And then ideally, it’s great to have some back lighting. So for your front lighting use, I like ellipsoidal light fixtures, those really light your subjects well they’re just going to be a nice, you know, often I like to have my friend lighting be kind of like almost a daylight color temperature. So not too cool of a color but not you don’t want it warm somewhere kind of but closer to the cool side of things. And then for a backlighting you can use there’s lots of these like led color fixtures out there. Usually, if you throw back lighting up against the wall behind you, that’ll look good, create some separation. You can also have another backlight kind of pointed at the back of your subject. So it kind of brings out their hairline and creates some nice separation as well. But start with good front lighting, use just regular light. Don’t use those color LED lights because it’s gonna make your people look like a aliens or something like that. Just use natural tungsten lighting or regular lighting there and then use your LED washes and stuff like that should just be good backlights and visually that will really help help out the situation a lot. And then of course, you know, you’re going to want to make sure the exposure settings are good on the camera as well. You’re going to be working with aperture ISO or gain as well as shutter speed. There’s again like we could talk all day long about those settings. It’s a little hard to you know, just especially describing them in a podcast format. It’s a little a little tricky, but you’re going to use the law lighting fixtures, you have maybe even some natural light coming from Windows, but also the exposure settings on your camera. And it’s kind of like this balancing act to kind of get you that final product of what looks good.

Alex Enfiedjian 20:10 Yeah, so people should spend at least a day on this before they decide to put it up on Livestream. So, and again, that this is why I really want to highlight and point to Jake’s course on live streaming. And so he will walk you through every single step of this process, he does a great job explaining it and breaking it down, making it simple. So if this is overwhelming, just go get his course, you’ll be happy that you did. So let’s talk, maybe talk about the actual act of you know, blending in the lyrics and then pushing it out to the internet. What does that

Jake Gosselin 20:43 look like? Yeah, so capturing presentation software, the easiest way to do that is if you have pro presenter seven, if you don’t, if you pro presenter six, I’d say upgrade because it’s totally worth it to make the upgrade. Now it’s a much better software. And what’s awesome is they have what’s what’s called MDI is a way to send video from Pro presenter to your streaming software over over a network. So it could be it could be Wi Fi, I would recommend though, using a hard wired network, so there’s no like lag or latency. And pro presenter lets you create a separate seat screen, virtual screen for your live stream. And then you’re going to remove the black background. So you just have white lyrics, put it as a lower third, like the lower part of the screen. And then you’re gonna send that those lyrics on that virtual screen over MDI into your streaming software. So that could streaming software could be E cam live, it could be V mix, those are my two favorites, he camps from academics for Windows, it could be OBS, too. And you’ll open up those applications. And they automatically detect any SDI signals on their network. And you’ll see your pro presenter screen as an option there to add an overlay onto your your live stream video. So that’s definitely the quickest, most efficient way to do that, especially if you’re doing a simple setup. And this is the setup we cover in my beginners course where like, you have one good camera, you want to get lyrics from Pro presenter, and then pull audio from your mixing console as well. It’s just like a really, you can get a really good quality with just very few pieces of gear in place. So

Alex Enfiedjian 22:21 yeah, and I want to talk about audio maybe in a bit, what kind of budget are we talking about, like to do a basic setup? Well,

Jake Gosselin 22:29 yeah, so you could you could start with, let’s say, for a camera, you know, on the low end, for a camera, you’re not gonna wanna spend probably, you know, less than $300 for a inexpensive camcorder you can find at Best Buy, like the Canon hF 800, I think is the model number. But if you really want like professional looking quality, that’s when you’re going to want to get one of those mirrorless cameras that I recommend, like the Panasonic GH five Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, like, it’s just, it just looks really great. And it’s like that’s gonna be that’s gonna be around like 1000 to $2,000 price point for that, or PTC optics camera. So you get that, or you could do for you, again, you could do the few $100 out, but you just know your significant, there’s gonna be a significant reduction in video quality. And then a lot of these other tools, I think most churches already have like in terms of, probably you already have a computer in your check booth that you could use to run your streaming software. And you already have your mixing console in a place you if you probably already have pro presenter, hopefully you’ve upgraded pro presenter seven, right. So a lot of these tools are pretty much in play. So most likely, the new investments that churches are making are pretty much in the the the camera gear side of things. And that can range from a few $100 to a few 1000s of dollars.

Alex Enfiedjian 23:49 Yeah, and I think if you guys want to see what a good, clean, simple setup looks like maybe Jake, I can find one of your little church service videos where you show your setup and where it’s you guys in a room. And there’s three of you and it’s just it’s cutting back and forth. And I want to talk about that right now. Like, give some advice to not not just the camera angles, but when you should cut from one shot to the next shot. So for your little live stream setup, like you know, you got the piano shot and you got the leader shot and a couple close ups like how do they know when to cut? Why to cut? Like, what’s the philosophy behind like good video directing, I guess?

Jake Gosselin 24:30 Yeah, yeah. So the setup you’re referring to if folks ever go to mission Lakewood church on YouTube, you can see our service videos that were we pre record and publish and we’ll probably continue doing that for the foreseeable future because we we don’t even have a space to meet it now because the schools are all all shut down. But the that setup that we’re talking about now we’re getting into multiple cameras, right? And that’s kind of the next level where everything I’ve described so far was more of like a beginner’s level where you’re just sending a video camera feed and your pro presenter lyrics into software like ECAM live or V max that just runs on a computer. And what that software is doing is it’s switching video for you. It’s also encoding the video to be then you know, sent online into broadcast to your audience. And there’s kind of some limitations with beginner setup like that. And when you get into multi cam setups, that’s when you’re going to end up investing in more hardware. So you’re going to get more cameras, but also, you’re going to want a dedicated video switcher, in my my favorite switchers are the ones why black magic, the ATM switcher ATM, they make different ranges, they have the ATM Mini Pro, which is a good starting point. For some churches, I have the ATM television studio HD, which will allow for some like more growth and adding more cameras down the road. But what’s happening there is instead of all that processing, video cutting, and all that stuff happening on my computer, it’s happening on the separate device, which then kind of eases the workload from from my computer. Or I could completely bypass haven’t use a computer at all. So that kind of gives some context to this, that particular setup and what folks will be will be seeing if they go check out our videos on our on my Church’s YouTube channel. When it comes to video switching Yeah, so this is kind of like an art like where it’s kind of hard to describe how to know the timing of this and what we do. We’re actually we use Ableton Live to run our click and tracks and we automate lyrics and lighting, you know, do all that fun stuff, you can actually automate video switching angles with Ableton Live as well. So we, you know, we go through and build out our song sessions and chipper who’s our music director who builds those out, like, he knows our camera setup, and we have our MIDI cues that we drag onto the Ableton timeline for the song. And we just kind of pick like, you know, what’s gonna, we just kind of feel it out, like what’s gonna keep this kind of visually engaging for the congregation. And so usually, like higher energy points of the song, you’ll, you’ll see more faster camera changes, if a particular instrument is playing will feature that instrument. I mean, right now we have a simple setup of a wide angle of all three of us kind of a side wide, wide angle of all three of us and then the the hands of our pianist, right. So it’s like, it’s very simple to choose from. So whenever there’s an instrumental will like cut to his piano hands or whatever, and then cut back to the the other angles after that. So I, I would say, watch, like a lot of great productions already out there, like stuff by Bethel, or maybe some of the other bigger churches and just get a feel for it. Like you’ll notice, man, like, sometimes there’s switching angles, like super, super fast. They also have way more cameras to work with. I think when you have fewer cameras, it looks kind of weird to just keep bouncing back and forth super fast. But even like, even like having a benchmark of like, okay, maybe during a given verse, I’ll bounce around it, you know, every two phrases of lyrics or something like that, or it’s really hard to quantify that though.

Alex Enfiedjian 28:04 Yeah, I think the point is that the more cameras you have, the more engaging and in depth and immersive you can make the experience. And so I think for churches who have the budget and who aren’t afraid of, you know, tiptoeing into this, like, dream, big plan for multiple cameras planned for somebody who’s switching. And, you know, like Jake said, Go check out what other churches are doing. So you can get a sense for like, Oh, that feels good, or Oh, that feels really like poorly done. And then just experiment and go for it. I think that’s the beauty of life is it’s a never ending learning process. And so yeah, just go for it. I think what you said is very helpful that you should feature what you hear. So in other words, your eyes should see what your ears are hearing, you know, so that’s kind of a good, just general point. And then like you said, the more intense the song gets, the faster the cuts. And then, you know, even little things like the downbeat. Like if you can get your video to switch on the on the downbeat of the chorus, like, feels like it’s one experience. And so, yeah, there’s those are some really helpful tips. And I think, like I said, Don’t be afraid, guys, just try it out and start small and add and go for it from there. I thought it would be helpful. So you know, like you said, most churches are in the 200, or under range, right. Some of them are, you know, less than 80 people. I think the average church size in America is like 80 people. But we do have listeners who are at larger churches, I’m at a larger church, I wanted to share with our listeners just a little bit about our setup. And I’m not techie at all like nothing compared to Jake and so I’m just going to share what we have. And then I’m going to share maybe some leadership tips that I’ve learned in kind of helping get the best out of our tech crew and our camera operators. And so I’m gonna share that and then I want to talk with you about audio because there’s a whole missing component to our conversation at this point. And we’ll we’ll wrap that up at the end, but So at our church, we have like, I think we have four or five cameras, I think we have four cameras on like the, the tripods with the handles, we have to ptcs those remote control cameras that are kind of just placed in different angles, but you know can get different shots. We have now this is new for us, we have one roaming camera person on stage. Actually, we have to because it’s all live streaming, there’s no one in the room and so you know, who cares if they’re in the way cuz they’re not blocking anybody. So that’s new for us. And it’s been nice to get some really cool like up close guitar shots with nice movement to them. I heard a Bethel actually did I hear it from your awesome Bethel YouTube video where like they do the figure eight movement on the camera? Probably. Yeah. Yeah, probably heard it from you guys. So that Yeah, they kind of like move the camera, like constantly, so it creates energy. And then we have one director who’s running the switching software. And who’s also directing the camera operators through like one of those headphone comm systems. And then obviously, we have our pro presenter person who’s just like pushing the lyrics, because we’re not as smart as you to put it to Ableton, although I should take your course. And then I’d be able to do that.

Jake Gosselin 31:09 But so you have seven cameras, seven cameras total.

Alex Enfiedjian 31:12 I want to say there, there might be more, there’s like a drum cam that just pointed the drums. And there might be there might be more than that. I don’t know. So here are some things that I think really make a difference to take the the execution of video, because we were doing video before. But now, like we had to do, we’ve had to take it to like a whole other level, right? So what we’ve done now is like, okay, we ask our directors and our camera operators to listen to and learn to listen to and learn the songs, just like the band does, learn the songs, learn the song structure. So they now they’re going to be checking Planning Center and learning and preparing hopefully, that’s kind of we’re trying to cast a new vision for that. The second thing is we we actually practice with the camera operators and the directors before our service. And we like include every element of the worship time, including speaking moments, prayers, I mean, we don’t say the prayer but will be like mumble mumble, mumble, you know Jesus name, amen. So that the band can practice that how that transitional pair is going to go and the camera operators can kind of get a feel for it. And then after we practice before service, we have a tech huddle. It’s like five minutes. Everyone’s in the back with their, you know, Planning Center open on their phones, we talk through all the important shots, who’s leading which song important instrumental parts, who’s praying, when they’re praying, and if we’re going to talk like on top of an intro of a song so that they can get to our face in time, you know, because what what I found Jake is like, the big mess ups we’ve had are that we we were not pre emptive. In our shots, we were reactive in our shots, meaning if there was a guitar line, you know, you want to see the guitarist, the moment that your ears hear that line. But what we were doing is we were hearing this big guitar line, and but they were filming the drummer, you know, and by the time the, the camera operator got to the guitarist, his part was almost finished. And like that’s a huge distraction, you know. And so I would say those little leadership tips of having people listen to the songs, the tech people, you know, having them practice with the band, and then and then having that little huddle has helped us just even only over the last couple weeks, get more preemptive with our shots so that your eyes are seeing what your ears are hearing and that there’s not this cognitive dissonance because it’s such a distraction. I don’t know about you, but I see it and I’m like, oh, show me the person talking. Show me the person talking like it’s, it’s horrible. So anyway, yeah, those are my thoughts. Do you want to add anything to that? or?

Jake Gosselin 33:34 Yeah, no, I think it’s awesome. Like the the the communication especially when you have live camera operators like that having like, having a good calm system so they can talk to each other. You know, and folks like maybe they’re just trying to figure out how to navigate that like I would I would encourage people to check out Bethel productions YouTube channel, they actually have they’ll share their multiview with like the the calm so you can kind of hear how Chad their video directors talking him through stuff. But they’re Yeah, they’re a team like, what do you what I was like, what I visited them and hung out with at that conference and film behind the scenes there what they do, like, they’re very tight knit team, and they just kind of know, you know, like, they’re just I don’t know, like, I don’t specifically, I think I don’t specifically remember Chad having to tell people like, oh, there’s a guitar solo coming up. I think their camera operators just knew they just knew the songs. So that’s that’s a really important point for sure.

Alex Enfiedjian 34:29 Yeah. And with Bethel, like they’re so fluid and flowy that like that, that team has had to learn to anticipate and just and they have so many cameras, they can kind of be everywhere so they can you know, get Oh, one other. One other thing I would say if you’re doing live cameras with a live director, which I think some churches will do and many churches will hopefully you know start doing last little bit of advice is have a wide shot. That’s the that’s your safety net. So if you’re roaming camera operator trip And falls on his face which we have had happen twice? Oh, no. We’re like, we need to get wireless gear for this guy. But you can always go cut to that wide shot. And you won’t have like this, you know, this weird shaky shot in the middle. So it’s kind of like your safety net shot. So

Alex Enfiedjian 35:16 yeah, cool. Well, we’ve

Alex Enfiedjian 35:16 talked about the cameras. We’ve talked about lighting, we’ve talked about this switching software. Now, we got to make it sound good, right? And you’re actually releasing another course because you’re a beast, man. You’re crazy. About broadcasts audio. So how should our listeners approach audio for broadcast? And what are the best practices, tips and mindsets that we should adopt to make our videos not just look great, but sound amazing, too?

Jake Gosselin 35:45 Yep. Yeah, so most of us have our mixing console for our regular live worship venue in our in our church or sanctuary worship space, whatever you call it. And that mixing console is creating our mix for the people who are in the room, it can also create some monitor mixes for our musicians and such. But the mixing console, especially when you have just one of them like that, it’s gonna fall short in creating a really good mix for your online audience. And some churches will just send their main mix from their mixing console to their online audience. And it just sounds it just doesn’t sound good at all. Because when people are listening online, they’re not hearing the musicians and your pastor and all them in the context of the actual acoustics of that live room. So that’s why there’s such a disconnect between, you know, you may, you might think it sounds fine in the room, then you listen to it on your phone or on your computer, just like Wow, sounds horrible. So we need a separate mixing solution for your online broadcasts audio. So my favorite way to do this, and I was inspired by seeing how the guys at Bethel do this is to use a digital audio workstation, like Ableton Live Pro Tools, Logic Pro, any of those digital audio workstations, which probably a lot of us, you know, maybe even be using already to do multitrack recording or production. But you can actually use that software to create a separate high quality mix for your live stream. So what you’re going to do is, is you have a mixing console, maybe you have like the X 32 by beringer. A lot of these mixing consoles are doubling as large audio interfaces that you can plug them into your digital audio workstation like Ableton. And you’re going to send your individual channels of audio from your mixing console into a computer and your tech booth that could be in a separate room as well if you have like audio networking set up at your church, but at the very least, you could just USB cable out of your mixing console into your computer. And then you’re going to be able to mix that audio in your digital audio workstation. And you just have so much power more power and capability to really dial in a professional mix when you do it that way versus your regular mixing console. Because even these digital mixing consoles we have like the X 32 it’s great because yeah, you can apply EQ gates compression, basic processing, but when you’re using a digital audio workstation like Ableton Live, you can just you’re pretty much unlimited in how many plugins you can add to a particular channel of audio to really hone in that sound in you can use the same third party plugins that professional music producers are using to cut like all the album’s that we’re listening to from even popular artists out there. And just have, you know, really amazing compressors and reverb. And you can even do this cool drum replacement trick. I’ve yet to hear drums mixed for online that were like truly the actual microphones and kick drum and stuff like that, that you’re hearing. Dude, I’ll listen to it. I’m pretty. I’m pretty hard judge. I’m a very, I’m a very hard judge. But I’ve yet to hear a mix where like, I mean, it’s it can sound great, but not like blow me away. And like when you’re listening to Bethel, in hearing their drums on their live stream, like you’re not listening to the actual kick drum and snare drum on that drum set. Usually Tom’s Toms and cymbals and stuff sound good but kick and snare drum, you just have to have us that sound dialed in right in. The trick to do that is to use a drum replacement plug plug in like trigger two by Steven slate. And what it does is in the moment, it will listen for whenever your drummer hits their snare and then it will replace it with like a professionally recorded produced snare drum sample of audio snippet of audio. So that’s what the audience will end up hearing. It’s just like, sounds fantastic. So for everybody who’s listening to Bethel online and be like, why did the drum sound so amazing? It’s like because they replace it. It’s not that easy. Trump’s, hey, cheese replacement. Yeah,

Jake Gosselin 40:03 but ya know, it’s the thing, right like us that. Also tuning vocal tuning, very important for people to have, you know, it’s just like, our voices, especially when we’re listening in a broadcast context or post production context, like, you know, you got to put tuning on the vocals, or else, it’s not like you’re gonna be overusing it, you don’t want to sound like t pain or, you know, Owl City or whatever. But it really helps lock in that sound. Because the there’s things that we can hear in a live environment that are more our ears are more forgiving. But like when you’re pushing this online, and we’re listening back on our devices, were a lot less forgiving on those formats. So vocal tuning, drum replacement, those are some of the advanced tips. And when you use a digital audio workstation, you have a decent computer have like a quad core 16 gigs of RAM, like maybe a newer MacBook Pro. And that’s, that’s plenty of power to handle it like I have all these plugins running on my computer in an Ableton Live, it takes like 15% of my processing power on the computer. So it’s not even that processor intensive. And then what’s cool is, you’ll be able to send the master output from that digital audio workstation to wherever your live streaming software video switcher is. So that’s what the that’s the latest thing that I’ve been focusing on this new course we’ve developed, we’ve had 500 worship leaders and tech team leaders join in on this like beta program that we’re doing over the month of June. And we closed enrollment to uh, yesterday, but it’s gonna be once the course is done. I imagine by early July, we’ll it’ll be open back up for more folks who want to hop in. So yeah, that’s awesome.

Alex Enfiedjian 41:41 Yeah. And I think you mentioned it, but if not, we’ll do it in a second how to get the audio from that to the to the switcher to embed it into the the video. Yeah, no, I wanted to add of just a few points to what you said. One is, well, personally, we don’t use drummer placement. We don’t tune our vocals. We just try to get people who can sing well. But I know that’s not the case. Do you want me Do you want me to make a YouTube video judging your live stream? I do. I do want you to judge my livestream.

Jake Gosselin 42:12 Please Did you see I made it, I made a video like I called it online church review. And then I thought I thought yeah, then a bunch of people were like, hey, do this church do this. And so maybe I’ll do a second version. And I’ll add, I’ll add your church to the oh my gosh,

Alex Enfiedjian 42:23 now scared. So okay, you should and I will be embarrassed and all my listeners can just, you know, laugh. But, um, maybe I’ll try to find a live stream link to put in the show notes. But so, you know, mic placement is huge, you know, and like getting a good sound, I would say if you want good sound, start with your source, you know, get

Alex Enfiedjian 42:44 good, get

Alex Enfiedjian 42:45 a good bass tone. From your stage, get a good bass tone. Teach your vocalist how to hold their microphone, you know how to not pop into it with the peas, you know? You know, make sure your guitar pickup sounds good. And I you know, we do use our real drum sounds and we, yeah, we’re we are though talking about switching from like, right now we’re just mixing on like a little broadcast console, you know, it’s not little, but it’s, you know, 32 channels or something, or maybe 64, I don’t know. But we’re talking about switching to a DAW because we can, we can only take it so far on the little console, you know, so I do agree with that completely. But I would just encourage the listeners listening, that if you want a good sounding band, like teach your band how to be great musicians, it there’s like, you could put Shane and Shane on a stage with like the worst gear and they’re gonna make it sound good. Or you could put you know, a lame worship band on a stage with the best gear and they’re not going to make it sound good. And so, you know, go back through all of my podcasts about worship or you know, musical excellence, go check out Jake’s channel, teach your team how to play better. And that means you have to learn how to play better too. And so just let’s keep challenging ourselves to grow. So that’s my final word on audio, which isn’t even about audio. It’s about you know, the source. Did we talk about getting the audio into the switcher?

Jake Gosselin 44:12 Yeah, so I mean, we didn’t but there’s multiple ways to go about this and it’s so much it kind of depends on your, your setup, but like the way I do it is so we use we use Dante audio networking for everything and if you guys haven’t heard of Dante, it’s like a really, it’s just amazing. It’s gonna make your life so much easier in how you get audio to and from your different computers, your mixing console, all that stuff. So we it’s kind of like Dante similar to how you can just plug your computer into your x 32 over USB. But instead of just being limited to that one USB connection, you can have like a whole network of devices and send audio to and from different things. So what we do in this would work over the USB setup, at least from this one computer to the mixer is we send all of our individual channels into the computer. Running Ableton, we mix it And then our master output of Ableton, we send back over digital audio into the mixing console into like its own channels on the mixing console. And then from there, we just use we because on a on X 32, for example, you can take one of your analog outputs on the back of the board, and you can assign it to be the direct out for a particular channel. So basically, we have two analog outputs that are going to be the direct out for our broadcast mix left and right, and then we send those XLR signals into our a 10 video switcher. So all of our video cameras, and then our audio mix the audio are combined together in the a 10 video switcher. And then that’s, that creates the final product, so we don’t even send it into streaming software. But you could do that, like you could, theoretically, you want to make sure I have a power computer that’s beefy enough to do this. But like you can run Ableton Live on the same computer as you running like e cam live. And you can virtually there’s a couple apps out there that you can send audio, kind of over this like virtual routing system on your computer. I think it’s called loopback as the app, but you can you can assign loopback as an output from Ableton Live, send your master mix out loopback. And then it can go as an input into your streaming software. So you can make these audio connections virtually or over hardware. Like there’s really it just really depends on your scenario, how many computers you’re working with, what’s the final destination. So it’s it’s really hard to recommend I it’s funny, I made the lesson on all the signal flow stuff yesterday. And I said like, there really is no one right way to do this, like, of course the bad ways to do it. But like, there’s a multiple right ways to do this, depending on your situation.

Alex Enfiedjian 46:43 That’s awesome. Yeah. And again, I want to, you know, why don’t you just tell us now because people are like I, because here’s what I could do, Jake, I could try to chase down every single product you just listed in this entire episode and find links for all of it. And I could put it in show notes and like three people would probably even click on it. Yeah, or I could just tell everybody to go to your course. Because you will explain that basically, if they start your course, they will walk out exactly knowing how to put this system to college. So

Jake Gosselin 47:11 yeah, or they could you know, or the YouTube channel as well. So you know, the way our YouTube channel we have, we have so many videos and there’s even one video on there that I’ll send you the link to that you can check out below this video where it’s like 20 minutes long, visually, I’ll walk you through a lot of what we covered here. A lot of people can take that and they can kind of like DIY the rest of the way, right. But some people just need the show me click by click exactly how to do all this stuff, how to plug it in, like that’s what the courses are for. So go to the but the one place if you just want to get in touch to my team, worship ministry school.com. That’s the website where folks can you can apply to join. And then we’re going to kind of give you kind of the right direction on like, what what courses or trainings make more sense for your situation, because it looks different for everybody. That’s why we have to talk to everybody who, who wants to take part in our training. So yeah, just go to that website URL for kind of the one stop shop to get in touch with my team. And then we can kind of direct you to the right resource from there.

Alex Enfiedjian 48:10 Yeah, now, but you do have a specific live stream beginners course.

Jake Gosselin 48:14 Yes, the beginner’s guide to live streaming for churches, I can give you that URL, too. So some of these courses we just offer is kind of one off courses that people can just sign up for. So there’s that course. The the broadcast mix mastery is the new one about broadcast audio, but that’s not released to the public yet. That will be in July or so.

Alex Enfiedjian 48:35 But yeah, sweet man. Any final words about live streaming that you feel like we should add?

Jake Gosselin 48:41 Nope, just well, other than just just like you said earlier, you just get to kind of get started and start experimenting, know that things aren’t going to be perfect immediately. But like so much of the learning process happens kind of through just trying it yourself and being able to troubleshoot things yourself. Most of what I’ve learned in my life has just been like, especially in worship Tech has been like, trying it in like, if it doesn’t work, just troubleshooting it, figuring out what the solution is. And then finally I like, you know, by the 10th time I know what I’m doing right? So it’s like, Just don’t be afraid to try it. But of course, like if you want to accelerate that process. That’s why me and my team are here to help you with this stuff as well. But

Alex Enfiedjian 49:19 yeah, awesome. Thanks, man. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your ministry. Thanks for your heart. And thanks for all the amazing YouTube videos that you put out. Thanks for having me on Alex, appreciate you. Alright, that was it for today’s episode. Thanks for tuning in and listening or watching and I would encourage you to check out all of our links and resources you can go to worship ministry training COMM And check out everything we’ve done over the last six years to help you excel as a worship leader. God bless you guys. Have a great day, and I’ll see you next month for another helpful episode.