 Okay, recording is on, let's take a moment please to pray and then we'll get started, may I request somebody to please pray with us and we can start. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for this wonderful day. Lord, we thank you for the gift of life that you've given to us. Lord, as we are here to learn more about your world and how we can expand it as we fulfill the Great Commission. Lord, we are here calling upon your blessing to be poured upon our pastor to continue in the anointing of teaching and educating and expanding for your own kingdom. Lord, I also pray that we not only hear but also be doers because the Bible says that way it is not good for a man to only be here or not a doer of the word. Lord, we do pray that those of our kids, brothers and sisters are not joined. They also join in peace. I do pray the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and we say Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining the class, our course on media and technology. We've been talking a little bit each time on different aspects of the we've been now talking about digital equipment, software, hardware that we could use. And so we're going to continue from where we paused last week. Let me share the screen. Yeah. So. We've covered all this and we came to the section on video equipment where we are about to will start from them. We covered all of this information on audio equipment and podcasting. So we kind of introduced a little bit on video production. Last week, there's a lot that we can do in video production. You can think about so many things right from, of course, the live stream of our Sunday services to doing, you know, we do five minute short, five minute devotionals. We used to do 20 minute teaching and we can also do short documentaries. We can capture videos of testimonies, share that online. So many, so many, so many different things. We are working on trying to do some short films, which are like short five minute films that that that address a particular theme or a topic communicates something. So there's a lot that we can do in video production. So generally, you know, and I'm not necessarily gearing into the exact equipments that we need, you need one or more cameras, obviously, video cameras. You could use portable cameras. If you are outdoor recording certain things or sometimes we use this portable cameras, even that's connected in our sun during our Sunday services, it's fixed in certain places where it's not easy to, you know, put people to stand and hold a actual video camera. We make use of these GoPro camera and put it there so that it can keep recording live action and so on. You need a tripod, microphones, external microphones, mics with shields or wireless mics that usually people put on there. Now, if a person is speaking or acting or singing, usually acting or speaking, you use these wireless microphones. And there are several options when we think about the background. This is what what is referred to as a set. The simplest one is what we what is called as a green screen. So basically, it's just a green screen, literally what it is. And what happens is when they shoot the person or the action behind against the green screen, they can replace the green screen with other backgrounds. So literally, they would say everything that is green be replaced by this image. So that means, you know, the person speaking shouldn't wear anything green or because everything that's green is going to be replaced by by the image that they superimpose. So, you know, in our early days, we used the green screen a lot. We didn't have a proper set like we didn't have any actual physical background. So I would go into a room that had this green screen and I would sit in front of it and I got the sermons. And then they would put something in the background. To make it look nice, they replay. So that used to be the way we used to do it. And, you know, sometimes we still can do use this if just to make it easy in terms of you don't have to actually have to set up, you know, the backstage, the set or the decor, just sit in front of a green screen should replace the green with any other picture, make it look nice. So a green screen along with some very basic lighting is a very easy way to get started. So all you need is a soundproof room, a camera or a few cameras and these basic lights and you can record very nice, good video programs. And the video, the video editor, the person editing it can just replace the green screen with whatever they see fit for that. So that's an easy way to get started. And in terms of lighting, you know, nowadays we have these LED lights where you can actually adjust the brightness, the warmth, even the the color lighting can be adjusted. You could have color lighting coming forth, you know, different colors, so on. So it's made things a lot more easier. You can buy the LED lighting or rent them, use them for part of it. And then there's a reflector kit that just reflects light to make sure light falls properly on the subject, on the person preaching and so on. They're just for you to know that these are these are the kinds of things that go into doing a video recording. The other things like what's known as a gimbal, let's if it's if it's not on a physical tripod, there's a handheld thing that they use to hold the camera straight. And of course, you need the editing software, your decent computer. And you can have captions that are put on your video that people can see. High quality memory cards are important, capture cards. You know, so this is for you to capture the live stream video and then take it to your computer battery. So battery power, if there's no wall power source, you need battery power. So just some things to keep in mind if you're putting together some video equipment to do some video programs. I've also shared a basic configuration here. You know, of course, depending on how much you have or are willing to spend or so on, you could buy higher end computers and so on. But this is something simple enough for editing, video editing. The video programs. So typically you want good RAM. So you'd be on the higher end of 32 GB. That's good, at least 16 GB. But if you have 32, that's very good for the people working. You need a good, strong processor for a more course. That's that's good. You need a lot of storage. So I've just given you basic specifications from always do better than this. If you're buying a computer high end graphics card is important. Of course, the operating system and a good screen for them to work on. So these are some things to keep in mind, you know, and of course, these things will keep getting better. And I'm sure they will always be better hardware available as we go along for this. So think about this. I'm just sharing this information with you. So if you are planning to do short videos, other video programs, this is kind of the equipment that you need to get started a little bit about live streaming. Live streaming has become quite common these days. Almost I would say many, many churches today do live stream their services. Of course, we do, you know, there are some very easy ways to do it. You through YouTube and through other platforms that you could live stream. You could even have something going through Zoom or Google Classroom, things like that. You could make what's happening in a particular setting available to people in many other places they can connect and watch the program. So however you wish, you know, you could live stream and open up what you're doing to avoid your audience from anywhere in the world. They can connect and listen to what is being shared and so on. Just to share a few things of what we've done or we are doing. When you're having live stream, it's nice to have live chat that people can respond or share their thoughts on what's happening or interact. You may wish to have a countdown to your live stream, build a sense of anticipation, OK, you know, in the next start of five minutes ahead of the program starting time and come down to it or something like that. Also, it's useful to record your live stream so that you can share that live stream recording at other times. So, you know, that that whole live stream is recorded and can be available to people. You could the advantage of using some of these live streaming platforms is that they have what we call as content delivery networks, which means they offer the content in proximity to the people where they're watching from. So their experience is much better. So they handle all of that YouTube and so on. The content is delivered from the proximity closest network to where people are watching from whichever part of the world. And also, when you use some of these streaming platforms, you get analytics, you get information on how many people watched, who's watching from which part of the world they're watching. So on. So that's useful when you use some of these live streaming platforms. So generally, when you said doing a live streaming setup, this is just an overview of the setup. And let's go over it just for you to understand. And then, you know, we're not asking anybody to learn a memorise. This is just for us to understand. So, of course, we have audio and video inputs. We love multiple cameras, multiple sound audio inputs. They go to the regular connection. We'll get it in the next picture, but they come to what is known as a switch mixer and a switcher. So we use black magic video switcher. That means you'll have multiple cameras and at any point you can, you know, you're showing one particular shot or something coming through one particular camera. And of course, sometimes you can mix them also and show multiple cameras on the screen. But generally you'll switch between cameras. So that's what this black magic video switcher does. So there's a person sitting, you know, deciding which part, which camera shot to show to the live streaming audience. Sometimes you'll also be relaying back into the auditorium. So that also can happen. But this one is for the live streaming switcher. That goes out to what is called as an encoder. So that means this encoder prepares the audio video content to be pushed out to the internet. Now we have two options we can do it using software or we can use doing hardware. There are pros and cons to this. Hardware generally would be faster, but it also means you need to configure your hardware. So many generally people may opt to use the software approach. And we are using a, we have both options available with us. But we normally on a regular Sunday, we use, just use the software option to encode. So basically we have OBS software running on a Mac. And so that does the encoding for us as well. And then that's pushed out through a router switch to the internet. So that goes to the internet. And basically it goes to your streaming platforms. So for example, from this computer through the internet, we push it to all people's church, bank, or YouTube channel. Simultaneously, we may, you know, push it to our Facebook channel or other streaming through our website, etc. So, so here we actually have a server set up that does this multicasting. So we have a server. So we push it to the server and the server does the multicasting. Now you don't need this server if you're doing only one channel. If you're just pushing it directly to YouTube and you're only using YouTube, then that's fine. You go straight from here to YouTube. But if you want to do multicasting, which is doing multiple channels at the same time, then you kind of set up a server here in the middle to do that multicasting for you. So we have this server set up, which simultaneously we put it out on multiple channels. And then people come to whichever channel they want and they see it. So this is a high level overview. So if you go back to this setup that we have, so this is mixing the audio for the auditorium, that is the in-house or front-of-house console. All the audio comes in here to a broadcast console, which then goes the audio and then the video goes to our streaming Mac, that runs the OBS software. So this streaming Mac also receives all the video input. And they're from the video switcher, the Blackmagic switcher. And then this then encodes everything and sends it out to be sent on live stream. This looks a little bit more complicated, but the point of this picture is that you can have multiple image or camera sources. So let's say here we have about five camera sources. They're all coming in. They're going to the switcher. And from the switcher we're going to the, where is this Mac book? Yeah, this is the Mac, which of course the person doing the switching is able to see what is he switching to. And sorry, this is the encoder. This is the presenter. So all of that is the switcher that is switched comes to this encoder. And that is then streamed out. So from the encoder, we can stream it out to, so this is the hardware encoder, which we could use if you needed to. This is a software encoder and that is streamed out to the internet. So basically the idea is you can have multiple cameras coming in, multiple audios coming in, the switcher does selection. It's encoded and then sent out to be streamed. And it's also going out to very simple. So we have an LED wall. So all of this is displayed on the LED wall as well. That also happens. People can see it at the same time. They can watch what's being shown. And whatever is mixed can be sent out to various outputs. The LED wall, if you have people watching on screens, they can also see. So you don't have to memorize this, but just to get an idea that these are the equipments you need for video production. So I've listed a live stream production. So I've listed this here, the OBS software that we use, the audio video switcher, the encoder software, the RTMP server. This is the Ingenix server that actually distributes, does multicasting to various outputs. So that's just available for us. So the point here, what we do is, at least what we do is, we actually hire our cameras. So on a given Sunday, we may use multiple cameras and these are all hired. So I think we have one or two of our own, but we also hire these cameras. And I've just given a costing here per Sunday. With per camera, we generally, this is what it costs us in Indian rupees. The LED wall, this is what it costs us in Indian rupees. Just to give you an idea of what's involved. In addition to this, of course, nowadays people are spending time and attention on the whole stage. How do you set up your stage and then what could the background be? So for us at this present time, we just use a big LED wall at the back on the stage and that enables us to change the graphics and make the stage look good. The rest of it is all plain with instruments and so on. Of course, you could do all kinds of things with LED walls on the stage, except up to each local church, what they are comfortable with. But I've just given some information here where you could go and see, get ideas about what different people are doing. And of course, there is the software to control the graphics that are displayed on the LED background as well as software for controlling the stage lighting. So this is what we use. So I've just shared that with you. So you can use, control the lighting, turn lightings on and off, dim, bright. And also control the graphic that comes up on the LED panel on the stage. So this is what happens on the stage production. So if you're interested, you can explore these things further. One last point here about the livestream-related matter is, again, we are not doing this, but we are working on it or moving towards it, which is we could actually do live audio translation of our services. So if the service is in English and you would like to have people connected in other languages, you could actually do live audio translation of the sermons. You could use live interpreters, or you could even nowadays use AI-powered interpreters. This live interpreter is actually that was started way back in the 1960s, I think, when Paul Yeongi Cho in Seoul, Korea, he started doing that. He would have a lot of visitors coming into his services. So they had live interpreters sitting at the back interpreting, and they provided headsets and wireless headsets to people, and they would actually sit and listen in their own language live. So it was kind of a pioneer in that. And then many other churches started doing that. And that same live can now be translated to live streaming. What is interesting is that nowadays, even AI-powered interpreters can be used. So we're kind of looking at this solution, AI-powered, but trying to set up our own so that we don't have to pay fees for every language we choose. So we are going to create our own platform so that we can translate in live into many languages, have our own platforms, and stream live into that. So this has to give you an idea of what can be done with digital media. Let me pause you and see if there are any questions, and then we'll go forward. Any questions or anything we've covered so far? Okay, so now I'm going to change subject a little bit and share a few things on software platforms that are useful for church. Right, so this is our next chapter, software platforms. So it is good if as a church you can leverage software platforms for a lot of the work that needs to be done. So I'm just going to sharing some of the things that we do. Of course, for our regular office work, our church staff use the typical office products word and email spreadsheets and so on. So we do both options, could use Microsoft products or Google tools and so on. For accounting, we use a local Indian accounting software. It's called Tali, and of course it's customized to follow Indian rules, Indian taxation rules and other things. So that's why we use that. So different parts of the world, they would have different accounting software that is tailored for the regulations for that country. So it's good that as a church, you use something that's relevant and useful. I'll just show you some of the, actually all of these are open source products. So you could download and use them. So for people management, so as a church, of course, you would want to manage your staff, people information. For that right now, we're using a free open source product called Rock RMS. Our plan is to move away from it and build our own. So they're working on that. But for now, we are using Rock RMS and you could also consider using it one minute. Let me just try to show this to you. I think I may have shared this with you in the past, but let me just try to share it with you. Here are some of these things. So this would get an idea. So this is our installation of the church management system that we are using. So it's basically the Rock RMS, that product that we've installed for ourselves. So typically we can log in. And as soon as I log in, I can see people's birthdays today. So these are the people who have birthdays today. So, you know, we could wish them. Now, sometimes I do, I log in and I do this, I send them a greeting. But we have a member care team who'll be, who use this every day. So they log in, they see all the people who are there. They call them, wish them, speak to them and so on. And then, you know, of course, you could go into, you can find, look for people. So if I just look for myself, you know, you can search, you'll find all the people in your database. There's a lot of people with the name Ashes here. So if I just look for myself, then I can get, you know, so it gives me, it gives my information and my family's information. So you can look at the person's information. You can add comments to them. So when people, you know, sorry, the interactions that you've had with them, you can add some comments. So I can, you know, say, call. So I'll just say this is a test message. Call and spoke with Ashes today. He is doing fine, etc., etc., you know, whatever, etc. You can type a note. So you record a note, right? So that, so our, our member care team, as they call people, they record this kind of message that they called and spoke to that person and very, whatever. So those interactions are recorded here. So when we go back and pull up somebody's information, we see what has happened over time. So I'm just saving this thing. Of course, I can delete it. And then other, other, other parts of their interactions with the church are recorded here, their documents. So when we, when we give them membership documents, when we give them the water baptism documents, those things are attached here. Of course, in my case, there's nothing on it. So, it's all blank. But, you know, those documents are there when they became membership. That information is here. So that's about what we use. We don't use all the other things that are available. If they are by the college applicant, then that information shows up now. So I just did a test. So that's why it shows up. But actually, you know, it's, so all of that are kept in this church management system. So literally, and then we can see reports here. So I can, you know, I can see report, we can see reports on, you know, who are people in Bangalore, Bangalore, by college or children, first time visitors and so on. So we create various reports on this data that we could then look at. And our, our member care team, when they want to look at certain, you know, reports to call people to send them but the greetings and so on. So they use these reports from here and, you know, interact with people. So having this kind of a system and also a Bible college students data is also in our church management system. But we, we've actually moved it to a separate place. Similarly, on this rock RMS as well. So having something like this is, is useful in managing all the information of your people and as well as, you know, recording what's happening with them, if as you interact with them, talk to them and so on. So now we started actually using this from 2018. So it's been about six years. We are planning to move away from it, not because the product is bad, but it just, we feel that, I mean, when we wanted to make changes to it, customize it for our own use, that those were some challenges. So we felt, okay, let's build our own to manage the data. So, you know, once we build our own, we'll move all the data into our own system. But this is, is free. It's open source. So it, I think it's a great product being free and something that we could all, I mean, you could use. The next product that we are using is what we call as human resource management software. So this is mainly for our church staff. It means for all the staff, staff and consultants. So for all the staff who work for church, and for all the consultants, the people who work hourly basis and so on, they, they have access to the human resource management portal. So I'm just going to log in. I am an administrator here. So I can see a lot more information than the general staff. So I, so for the general staff, they will not see all these things. But I get this, you know, so they will see a fewer links on there and fewer information on their dashboard. But as an administrator, I can see all of this. But most common, the reason we use this is for people to report their time. So, you know, we keep, for example, last week, my time sheet. So everybody who's, who's doing work, they report, have, they have to report their time. So I also report by time what I did last week, based on the actual work, you know, what projects I did, what was my activity, what was my hours. I submit my time sheet every week. So like that, all the church staff report their time here. Then we have our admin person. So I submitted on the 3rd, 10th of March, our admin person will approve it or, you know, check it and approve it. So basically this, all our staff and all our consultants report their time sheets. Then we also use this for leave application. So if I want to apply for leave, I have to go here. And I have to apply for leave. Sorry, apply for leave here. So it's all recorded here. So we know who took leave and again, it goes through an approval process. Our HR person will approve and so on. So these are two primary things that we are using this for. There are other options you can do performance reviews in this system. We, of course, we also store all our staff information here. I don't want to show that. We could also do performance reviews within the system. We can also manage recruitment within the system. So we were leveraging this a little bit, but we don't use it heavily these days. Recruitment and performance reviews, we haven't started using it yet. Mainly we use it for time and leave, but there are other features that you could use this for. So again, this is a free product. It's an open source product. You can have it set up for your organization, your church. And this way, it's a very good way for everybody to feel accountable, report their work, report their time. We can record leaves when people are on leave and so on. And so it helps us manage our staff well. So let me, I will show one more thing maybe. So let me just again share my screen. I'll just show you one more thing and we'll pause. I don't want to overwhelm you with too much information one day. So there are a lot of other things that we use. So I will let me just or maybe two more. So again, all of these are open source products. So we use what is called as a repository. We haven't forced people to use it, but we've started work on it. It's a free product called Bookshelf. And where we try, our goal is to document all our standard operating procedures, so on, so forth, in a central place. Otherwise, all these information documents, they just reside on people's computers everywhere, you know, or in emails. So the bookshelf that we have, it's almost structured like a, you know, it looks like a bookshelf. So there are different shelves. And within each of these shelves, you can create multiple books. And and then you can upload documents, whatever that you need specific to that area, so that it's all in one place. And at any point in time, we can go and retrieve information from there. So this is what we call this a repository. It's actually it's running an open source product called Bookshelf. And this is where we, you know, record or store all our basically our documents. And it's a place for us to document our work procedures and things of that nature, so people can go and have access to it. Another software product that we use is called Projects. So this is primarily used by our IT team to manage, you know, various projects and things that they're doing. Again, there's an open source project product called Open Project. And oh, sorry. Sorry. I got to share this by mistake. Sorry. So we we use this to manage different projects. And so for example, you know, we we're going through a little bit of testing here on on live coaching. So we report issues and tasks here. We are also working on our church app release. A lot of work is happening right now. So this all tasks go here. So this is primarily used by our IT team and people working on things, where we, you know, use report tasks and issues and so on. So that's another thing that we use. Right. So let me see if I need to show anything else. Yeah. Let me pause here. So we so we have talked about a different software platforms that we use as an organization, right, just to help us facilitate coordinate work. And I'm sharing this with you. I'm not saying, you know, everybody has to use all of this. But I'm just sharing this with you so that if you're interested at any point in time, you could go and use these any of these products. Remember, you know, all everything I showed you today, these are free open source products. So you don't, you can go download them from the links that we've shared. And you can have somebody set it up for your church or your ministry. And you can use it. Okay. Maybe I just mentioned a few more and then we'll stop for today. We so we talked about rock RMS. We talked about orange HRM, which is for staff management. I showed you open project, which is for our managing various projects. So, you know, different people who are running projects, they will set it up and manage their projects here. We, we for our church websites, we use a content management system called Joomla. It's again an open source product. So our example, our apcw.org website, our Bible College website is all built using Joomla. So it's a free product. You can download it, customize it, set it up the way you want it for your website, and have it running. Of course, there are other options available, or other content management. So there are numerous content free content management systems that you could use. Wordpress is again one of the major ones that people use aside from Joomla. And then there are several others as well. We use Joomla simply because for us, we felt it was most appropriate for us for our purposes. And yeah, so we've been using it for several years now. We also have our church app that is built. Now we actually rebuilding our church app. So it will be released. You know, many of you will get an email, maybe in about two weeks from now about a new version of our church app being released. So this point, this was actually our old old church app, which is no longer available. We used to use a service provided called Custom Church Apps. But this company got bought over by somebody else. And so we pulled out our church app and we decided to build it ourselves. So that's work is almost ready and we're going to launch that. But the church app is very useful. People can access content right on their phones and so on. So that's something that's good. Okay, let me pause here. I don't want to overwhelm you today with so much of information. You're all with me so far or you got lost somewhere? Yeah, I think it's okay. Okay. Yeah, I don't know because it's not this is not theology but but this is what is actually happening in behind the scenes and you know, running running the church and coordinating things. This is what we use. Okay, so we have a church app that we are building, we're working on. We have a small IT team of I think five or six people who are working and they take care of all of these things that I was showing you. They manage all these things. And I just guide them or ask, tell them what to do or give them some direction. But our IT team does all the work. And I think overall it has helped us, you know. So sometimes people say, people might think, you know, you're a church, you're a ministry, why should you be using all this software and why do you need all this? Well, it helps us become more efficient in our work. It helps us manage data much better because we have to manage data. You know, let's say in our church management system. I'm estimating, I don't know the actual count, but I'm estimating we have about 3000 people like in Bangalore. We may have about 20,000 people like all across India, whom we directly or indirectly serve. So obviously we have to manage the data. They may say, my address has changed, my phone number has changed, my, you know, whatever, they may, all that. So we have to go and update it somewhere. So having a system in place makes it very useful. People can update it, keep the data updated and helps us reach out to all of them. Okay. So let's go for a quick break and we'll come back at 11 o'clock. And I'll just show you a few more things, software platforms. My goal is not to overwhelm you, but just to give you an idea that all these options are there. And if at any time as your church is growing, as your ministry is growing, you want to use any one of these things, you can go and use it. We have intentionally chosen to use open source products. You know, that means we don't pay any licenseence for it. You just download it, have somebody set it up for you and use it. So any church, any organization can use the same products. Okay. So we'll come back at 11 and I'll just cover a few more products and then we'll close for the day. Okay. So let's come back after the break. Thank you.