tenebrae (/ˈtɛnəbreɪ, -bri/)
Latin for “darkness”

Happy Easter folks!

Aside from the western festivities of Easter (Public holiday, Easter show, bunnies, chocolates), Easter is an important part of Christian faith, commemorating the death - but also the resurrection of Jesus!

This year, my church’s tenebrae service was held at our Bankstown campus. This was the first time I had been inside their building (they recently moved to a new shared location), so I had no idea about the room dimensions, lighting situation, sound setup, network infrastucture.

The “AV desk”

Up some near-90-degree set of stairs is where the AV team runs ProPresenter as well as operate OBS for livestreaming.

The computers aren’t as powerful as the ones in our main campus (mainly because we stole all the parts that used to exist in the computers 🕵️‍♀️), but interestingly the network switch only supported 100 Mbit speeds, which turned out to be a nightmare.

Sound

The sound setup was sort of cursed.
From what I quickly scoped out, there were three mixers cascaded together.

Our Bankstown campus' Soundcraft Ui16 mixer was cascaded into a larger console (don’t remember what brand or model), which was then cascaded into a little Behringer Xenyx that went into the livestreaming computer which ran OBS.

One of the channels was a bit dead and had a bad hiss - probably had a bad preamp

Cameras

Since there weren’t any lights (apart from some candles), the livestream would probably be just the slides. Hence the fixed Panasonic GH5 camera was useless.

But that said, 🕯️candles🕯️!

As the tenebrae service progresses, candles are progressively extinguished (making the room even darker than it already is). I wanted to try and project the candles onto the projector as an IMAG source, so that the congregation at the back of the hall could also see what was going on.

I borrowed a Sony camcoder, since I had one lying around

To get the video transmitted, I used my Vaxis ATOM 500 - which worked pretty well for a 5m point to point distance.

Unfortunately the slides given to me weren’t transparent - but had a black background - so I couldn’t easily just overlay the slides of the camera without some keying. The computers were pretty old however (and again, 100 Mbit network switch), so I could only maintain 16fps which was stuttery, though for static slides and slow moving candles - it looked fine.

Here’s the livestream if you want to give it a view!