 So again, thank you all for coming today. So, got some stuff going in the, got some questions in the chat. So thank you for that. Bill, did you want to, so I'm Eric Eli, the digital minister for the Southern New England Conference. Again, welcome. Bill had a question, if you could raise your hand, Bill, just let everybody know who you are. He had a question about hybrid worship. So I think we'll start with that today. Oh, I think you're muted, Bill. Have it. I must have an old Zoom because it didn't unmute with the space bar. Bill Pelts, I'm down at the Southwest corner of Connecticut, the United Church of Rowe Eden. And we are pre-recording our services and we're not about to go live stream in the immediate future, but probably long term. My question though is how are we defining hybrid? Because we all know when we go back to live in person worship, we're gonna have some kind of a hybrid service. And are we doing a full service the way we're doing it now or are we going to be changing it up a little bit? So that's an excellent question. And I'll give my response to that. And I offer others to follow up with that and what they think hybrid means to them because as I tell everybody, there's two things I tell folks. Not every piece of technology fits for every church. Every church is different. Every community is different. While there's a lot of commonalities, so there are differences. And also that this is not a sprint. The journey in digital ministry is a marathon. So if you're in group today and you're joining us and you're hearing about other stuff, other technologies that you don't quite have that you're using in your solution, don't think you're behind the curve. Again, we're all on the journey together. And at any point during this, you're invited to jump on in. This is not a one-way communication. So to answer your question, Bill, what I envision as hybrid worship is having folks in sanctuary, in the nave, in the church, who are participating as we would recognize in our not-so-distant memory and of time gone by, but also being able to send audio and video, having us not even to take the technology out of it, still creating a space for folks who are either live streaming. So they're watching on Facebook or they're watching on YouTube or an independent platform and as well as Zoom. So, and I know that for many, Zoom is an attractive platform because Zoom enables this. It enables us to get together. And even though we're kind of in a little thumbnails on the screen, we're still able to meet us as community. And so for that, I think one of the things, so here are the characteristics, here are the things that I think about as we kind of travel and move towards a hybrid worship, if you would. And that is that when folks come to us and come back to church, they're in sanctuary, the important thing for me, aside from the technology, is when you're speaking, that you're speaking at the camera. So there's a Sony camcorder in front of me, but as soon as we go into worship, you're the person, the liturgist, whoever the worship leader, pastor, readers, the tendency is to look at the room as a whole. And so I'm really not looking at the camera. I'm looking at the room. And I think it's important that, and it's just as, and for pastors who are here, it's, I know that even though our church in East Longmeadow had a streaming system in place, and when we went into lockdown back in March, it was strange to preach to a lens. So just as that, we had to make that shift, I think we have to make the shift to not, of course, you're going to speak to folks who are in the room, but you're also gonna give, make it so that you have your eyes on the camera, sometimes you have your eyes on the room. And then things like, open up your bulletin page, whatever or this, whatever you do in your context, make those references. If you're gonna use bulletins, make sure that you have a copy on your website or the person that people can get a copy. Or what I would prefer in my saying, again, this is my setting, not yours, is to use a lower third. You know, so in a lower third, and having that call and response like you would at the call to worship is, you know, on screen eliminates the need for, you know, a bulletin. But it also makes the, it also makes the, you need a little more technology to do that. So that's a part of the answer, you know, in terms of technology, I believe there is, there is a, you know, if you have a, if you have a camera set up like we have here, you can, and it's a pretty timely question though, but you can take the feed that you're, you know, that you're using in terms of, you know, your streaming software, if you're using streaming software like Vmix or OBS, and you can output that to Zoom. And in fact, that's exactly what we're doing right now. So if I come over here and I spotlight myself, I can then go to my console and I can bring up in, you know, the software, things I want to highlight. So there's a Blackmagic Design Ultra Studio 3G. I can also play a video so I can go back. This happens to be an old countdown from my husband's church, but I can, I can bring that in and then, you know, remove it and go back to my mouse. There we go. So I could take that out. So, you know, what we're talking about in terms of hybrid worship we're doing right now, and in fact, how I'm doing it, I could just, I guess I can turn the camera. Well, I'll do show and tell later, but yes, it is possible to take what you're creating in, you know, in the worship space and, you know, make it available, make worship available for those who are online. So at this point, I'm going to stop talking and just see if anybody else has any other, you know, input on that. Yeah, I'll throw something in right away. This is Dick Robinson in the attic. We're essentially doing some of that already. I think I've described before. I've actually got just recently a three computer system set up with the first computer is OBS and we're using that as our front-end sound board and camera feed that and goes to the adjacent computer over the network, which is a Zoom master, if you will. And then the third computer actually is a Zoom-E or a Zoom slave and primary. So we see what everybody else sees. Zoom secondary. Yeah, and it also was sent up to a 50-inch monitor right behind the camera so the pastor can see what everybody else sees and networks. And so essentially we can go forward with that if we go hybrid, I'll have to get the camera and the monitor out of the way kind of because they're right up front right now. Right. And one of the things I just got asked Sunday and it didn't hit me until I got home after service was can we live stream what we're doing with the Zoom and everything? Well, I'm trying to figure out how to get that back into OBS or do I need an additional computer to take the Zoom live stream? Because you can in Zoom, if you go to the bottom where the settings are, you can, if you go to more, there's a little hamburger menu down there. If you go to more, there is a way to share. So you pop up the, there's three dots in the lower right-hand corner. Okay. Right on the interface. And you can go live on Facebook, live on YouTube. Okay. And I also noticed that there is a, now they used an additional, there was a Zoom update a few days ago. And I know that there's a, they have a new one out, live on custom live streaming service. So you can send out this stream what we're doing here to any place that'll accept it. That's a perfect thing. Where are you seeing those options, those other options you said that were in Zoom? Where are those? It may be for me, it may be because I'm the host. Yeah, you have to be the host to see them. So my apologies. But if you go straight, if you move your cursor straight down, you see polls from left to right, you have mute, stop video security, participants, polls, chat, share screen reactions. And then there's this more hamburger menu. And if you click on that, I can send folks to breakout rooms. I can stop the recording, pause the recording, turn on closed caption and go to other services, stream to other services. So if you are the host- Okay, I've never noticed that before. Yeah, if you go to host, if you're the host and you go down, you'll see that. So, so from, and I'm just seeing this, so let me just dig into the chat here for a second. Our sound on live stream was terrible. We decided to do both a virtual pre-recorded service and an in-person service that mirror the service. Also, there are security concerns, children being on screen, exactly. And some people who do not want to be on live stream, we will be installing a live stream system before we go hybrid. Yeah, so that you bring up, so sound was always be a, in terms of video, in terms of video and audio, audio will always give us challenges. But, so I'll let you in terms of the, in terms of the church that my husband serves at the church I'm at now, how they, there is, so what he did is he set aside, even though he has three cameras, three PTZ cameras now a little involved, what he did is he set aside a space. So, and you, what you can do in the PTZ program, you can create virtual stops, so that the camera operator, even if they try to move the camera to this, you know, two pews wherever that is, right? It won't happen. It'll, it'll, it'll lock them, you know, from doing that. If you have a camera and a tripod, like I have in front of me, you know, you make, you know, the camera operator should be aware that, you know, children cannot be, cannot be, you know, on camera. So, at St. Andrew's in Long Meadow, again, three PTZ system, what they did is they only stream a portion of the service. They stream the, they streamed the liturgy of the word, which includes, you know, reading, you know, call to worship. So, you know, call to worship, the first reading, second reading, Psalm gospel and sermon, and then the stream stops because right after when, when the, at least in St. Andrew's, when you shift, when the most, when most of us at Palaeons ship to the, to the Eucharist, the children come back into the worship service. So, so since that was the case and the children are invited to sit really anywhere in the church, they made that decision that they were not going to stream the whole service. Any other thoughts? Related to that, that question about children on camera who's been raised, of course, for us as well. And I think one suggestion, I don't know if it's valid, if you get releases from kids like they come forward for a children's message, does that automatically make it okay or release is not really valid? Some churches do that. So, I'll say that some, some churches do have releases and they have the, both again, it's the, you know, the child's name and the parent signature. So I think it's not so much like, oh, here sign the release, you know, you have to, you know, you have to, the parents have to be comfortable. Oh yeah. You know, with their children online. May I jump in on that, Eric? Sure, yeah. Well, I'll just do. I work in a church that is very comfortable. No parent objects to having photographs or their kids never have questioned it. But we are very much aware that we cannot film foster children. We don't have any in the church. We're very much aware that in the event of a contentious divorce, we have to be, we may have to protect one parent and the children from letting the other parent know where they are. That situation has not arised. So what we, and we also know that some churches put a note on every door saying we filmed this. We thought that was particularly unfriendly and not really terribly UCC. So we put a notice at the very end of our order of worship, our worship bulletin. So people are forewarned in writing and they can make a decision. We also, instead of having an opt-in, which we thought was really complicated because every single child and every single video clip would have to be examined to see if that child is present and identifiable. We came up with an opt-out. So we just automatically assumed this is part of our culture and our process. We found it, we think it's going to be much easier to opt out. We had everything ready to go to an ounce in March and COVID came along. So we don't know if it's gonna work or not. We'll find out in a year or so. Yep. Thank you, Bill. Yeah, so to give some backstory not to fill the air, but the situation at St. Andrew's was driven by foster children. We had to care for the foster children and it was an issue. So yeah, had to do it. I think if I could just, I'm a former school teacher and so I know there are positive and negative consents and I would definitely recommend positive consent because often people don't read things and later on somebody might say I don't remember receiving something saying that if I didn't want my child photographed I needed to let the institution know. So it's better to get a positive consent. Right. Thank you, thank you, Tom. Anybody else on that? So I have another question. So I wanna go back to the first question we had in chat. One license versus CCLI each with streaming pluses and minuses. One license tends to have more of our catalog, our catalog being the pilgrim press. There's more coverage and more licensing and more stuff covered in one license than CCLI. I know that for some churches who have contemporary worship services with worship services with contemporary music, CCLI may be a good choice. If you do both, if you're doing that, both, I would recommend both. You both have to report. So at one point CCLI, I believe you did not have to report what you're doing each month but I believe CCLI now has that requirement as well. Back up just a little bit and sort of explain the background behind that. Sure, Sean, sure. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I contacted CCLI. I was confused. I'm still not sure how reporting works there. They have a streaming plus feature which I don't know whether that's better to use than their catalog. And the reason I pursue a song select, the reason I pursued it is that they're streaming plus feature. The plus part covers pre and post music. Okay. Which I don't think one license does. So that was the reason I was pushing this to try to figure it out. And I didn't know if anybody knew what song select does and has experience with that on CCLI or not. Does anybody have experience with song selects? I don't personally. And can you explain, Rich, the pre and post what they cover? Can you elaborate on that? So I heard discussion about being careful about playing explicit music before and after a service because that's not contained in the worship service itself. And I heard people saying, so you sort of noodle on the piano and so on, don't play anything real. And the streaming plus, their full pack streaming package on CCLI does cover that. Whereas if you actually played real music at a time, you'd need a CCS license because it's outside the strict worship. So I got myself in a rabbit hole trying to sort this out. Right, yeah. That's a good question. In my mind, the worship begins when the countdown begins, whenever, you know, when you hit go, that's when, at least in my mind, that's when the, you know, whenever it's available, that's when we're worshiping. Yeah, well, I heard comments. I know two sessions ago about being careful when the piano or organist is playing before the worship actually starts and the postlude at the end that you can get into trouble with that. And so enough said, CCLI will, their big streaming license does cover that. So thank you. Thank you, Richard. And now I will look into that and I will report back to folks. Okay. I know I'm a little behind on reporting and given that. That's all right, I'm not. I'm just trying to sort through. Oh, yeah, yeah. We all are. Sort of like, like everybody. Yep, my phone's going off. Thank you. Yep, no problem. Thank you so much. Let's see here. We have another question. We are planning our annual meeting for February on Zoom. Any tips or guidance for making this happen smoothly? So if you have an annual meeting, of course, in an annual meeting, you vote. So how do you vote with annual meeting and how do you capture it? So first thing I would say is record the annual meeting so that you have a copy of it. The second for voting, you can use the polling feature on Zoom. So if I go down to the bottom here, polls. All right, let's just say there's polls. So I don't have mine fully set up. But anyway, you can during the, and I would, and unlike what I was just trying to do, I would pre-set the polls, you know, fill in all the information and what, like, you know, if you're electing officers, if you're deciding on, you know, whatever, make sure that you have those questions in line and set up beforehand so you don't fall into what I just fell into. Is it possible now to do that on the fly? It used to be, I thought that it was... Yeah, you can, but I looked at it and, yeah, because you will, in annual meeting, you will have questions that come up and you are able, if you do pre-populate, then you're able to add, you know, in addition to that, just by, you know, bringing it up. So yes, you can do that. And then there's the question of, because I think some of us may be in the situation where folks phone in, and I believe you can, you can, you know, again, you're recording, the folks are on the phone, they're listening, they have no video, but they can, you know, state their vote. Or you can have them, if you wanna keep the vote, you know, like, if you wanna keep the vote confidential, you can offer a telephone number, an additional telephone number that they can call. And call in their vote. And that would be like, you know, the phone in the secretary's office or call the church or something like that. You know, and that actually I checked with my supervisor, Tiffany, Tiffany Vail in the conference. And that's what, you know, she had a workshop not too, too long ago about that. I believe it was in the summer, if I'm not mistaken. And she said, for folks who do phone in, you can use, you can have a separate phone, phone number four folks who do that. Just a small heads up because it's the poll registers a vote by computer. And if we have two or three people at sharing the same computer, that affects the count for the quorum. It does. And so, again, talking with Tiffany yesterday, if you're, if the, so the solution to that would be if you have folks who are on boards, what you can do is have two people in the same location, a room apart on two separate laptops or a mobile device. And you can vote in like that, you know. You could also, if it's time for voting, you can bring up, you know, bring up the link, click on the link, you know, go to your email, click the link, turn the volume down and just vote right there, you know. After you log in. And I would create a, I guess I would create a login. So make sure that folks, you know, when they're logged, you know, when they're in the meeting, they're, you know, before they get in the meeting, they, you capture like we do, you know, we have the registration here and you have to fill in, you know, your name and your church and your state and that sort of thing. So that's another way of doing it. Make sure you have a record of folks, but kudos to y'all for, you know, like embracing this. So how many, just as a, just as a, you know, hand physical poll, how many have upcoming annual meetings still? Okay. And how many have completed their annual meeting? There you go. So is there any, you know, rich, rich Jim, Elizabeth, Paul, is there any, perhaps Tom, is there any advice that you could give since you've already walked that journey? Well, I, the advice you just gave was immensely helpful about quorum and creating a login registration, separate laptops for couples in different rooms. We had a rather smooth meeting, but it was only by dumb luck. So I can't, I don't have any tips for you. I just noticed in the text box, basically was my answer also that we just did a video hand raise or for those that didn't use that, the reactions option on the bottom. And that seemed to work fine. Nobody had any concerns about it. There we go. Exactly. Thank you, Jim. As long as you have a good consensus that, you know, we've been fortunate in that respect with our previous annual meeting that there wasn't a lot of raging controversy. As if we, and if there was no confidential vote or, you know, that kind of thing that was happening in this particular annual meeting. So. I'll tell you what though, I don't have a tip for you, but I might have an alert and that is parliamentary procedure was very constipated. I was looking for a better word. And it was very hard, you know, in an open meeting in a space, you have visual cues and hand gestures and your whole body language enters into being able to get someone's attention or to tell people to wait and so forth. But when it comes to a Zoom meeting, there are times when people out of order want to, you know, they'll say, well, I make a motion that, you know, well, that sets us all down another rabbit hole and it's very hard to control that. And maybe somebody else has some experience with that. I'd love to hear it. We had a congregational proposed budget meeting last autumn and we put it on a webinar. So I was able to turn off everybody's video and microphone. So the only way they could make a motion or an amendment or to speak to an emotion is to raise their hand, that little icon at the bottom of the screen. And the way we chose the person making a motion or definitely the person's second saying this is worthy of discussion was the first person to raise the hand because everybody kind of jumps in on it. But that provided a very real source of control. And then those people who were planned to give reports they became co-hosts. So I didn't have to go and turn on their video and their microphone and that cleaned everything up. What we did find rather unexpectedly is there are two ways to write a poll. One way, and you just have to kind of check it out ahead of time, but one way writes one question at a time and you pull up one question at a time. The other one, all the questions are just in sequence all and then you just scroll down one after the other. But the webinar, and then we had a limit of 100 people who could come to the webinar, that's the downside. But that gave us the control that allowed parliamentary procedure. Thank you, Bill. I'll say- Another question. I'm sorry, go on. At our church, we had our annual meeting on Sunday but we had a very small group participate. We had 25 screens open. Most people were there in video and some were a couple were by phone and then the rest were maybe by phone or without video. So we were able to follow the parliamentary procedure pretty well. But again, we had a small group and people would put two hands up for seconding or two fingers up. I would say whoever's running the meeting, big monitor. Right. And I was gonna say that like 32-inch monitor just so you can capture, you know, everybody. And that makes it easier than trying to scroll back and forth. I'm sorry, John, go on. Sorry, it's a very minor point but it can be helpful just to make certain that whoever is moderating or chairing the meeting recalls that it's all the more important in Zoom. I think this, although it should be a regular practice never to say that a vote is unanimous because it's often the case that the presider has simply missed awareness of somebody who is voting no. So if you just take that off the table and say that the motion either passes or fails you avoid the risk of stepping on somebody's toes. I've encountered that a couple of times. Thank you, John. Back to the point on the webinar, just a clarification is that not a Zoom function or is that a separate kind of platform? It is a Zoom product. And if you need a pro-liceness or pro-subscription to either create a Zoom meeting which is what we're in now or a webinar. And in a webinar, you have options to limit discussion. I would think for an annual meeting you would want to be like we are in a standard Zoom meeting. Well, Eric, when somebody raised their hand to speak I turned their microphone on. So that way we didn't hear the dog barking. Oh, right. You might be out here in the background right now. So a webinar, thank you, Bill, for that. So a webinar gives you more control over, so in a webinar you could have the, if you were talking about parliamentary procedures and people, you could have all the officers, giving you an episcopal term, moderator and stuff present as speak as what a webinar would call the speakers. And then everybody else. So there's a demarcation of who is running the webinar and the participants. So again, it just gives you more control. That's an additional license, isn't it? Above and beyond the Zoom basic license? I think it is, yeah. Yeah. It's like 30 bucks a month or something like that. Right, right, right. Because I had to do the, I had to convert one meeting that I had set up, you know, in my diocesan work and I had to convert it to a webinar and it was, I had to upgrade. Yeah, so good. Thank you, Jim. One thing, one comment from Elizabeth, our organization plays really old compositions to avoid an issue in pre and postlude. We have one license. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, and that's how we, you know, as if you can remember if you were joined us in times past or organist just completely, you know, has completely noodles around, you know, it's just so there's no, there's no worry. So let's see, I'm gonna make sure I have all of the thing from Lisa, Lisa to everyone. I will be using Zoom as a platform, a Canon camera for part, for a part, live part remote meeting that I'm running on Thursday night. Is there a way to have the live participants hear the questions from the remote participant? Yes, but they're, what you run into is the, you have to be careful because what you can create is an audio loop and you'll, so people would start hearing themselves back in the same mix. Okay. So that's a limitation of Zoom. I just, I've not ever accepted that and I'm always feeling like there may be there's another way to do it. So we have, I just, let me just tell you the scenario, maybe there's a better solution. So we have an open position for the minister, our music choir director, music person. We have a search committee. So we have a candidate coming in the sanctuary Thursday night, gonna be at the piano and the organ playing. We have a couple people from the music committee in the church, socially distant. And then we're gonna have a couple people on Zoom. So I've set up my Canon camera on a tripod. I have a capture card. I have it connected to my laptop. Works great. But I always feel like those people that dialed in, they have to go through me, ask them, and I have to tell the group their question. Is that correct? Is there any other better way? So the way you can do that is by creating what I call a mix minus in audio. So this is an audio question because in creating a mix minus, you enable the folks who are in the sanctuary to hear what is being conveyed over Zoom. But the problem is that you don't want their voices then coming back into the microphone and being fed back to them. So I'm doing exactly that right now. I have the setup as a mix minus, so I'm hearing you, but you're not hearing double. And the way I do that is with the headphones. So you could have the folks where, how many people are gonna be in church? Probably like six. And then a couple people on the phone remote. But you had said earlier, one thing you said earlier sticking in my mind, we have OBS and we have two cameras installed in the church and we're live streaming. Maybe there's a way I could use my system that I didn't even know I could do because you said you brought Zoom in through your streaming system. So is that something I should explore? Yeah, in fact, let's talk offline, but it's the same and I haven't diagrammed this, what I'm doing today, I haven't diagrammed it yet. So what we're doing to give you some background. So I'm working on all that things, all those things. We are, what Tiffany and I will be working on in the very near future like tomorrow is taking some of the things that traditionally have been on the conference website that have been under COVID-19 response. If you can recall, there was resources there and we're gonna take them out and put and basically have a digital section on the website just for stuff that we need, stuff that, so guides and things. I know folks have shared their system layouts two weeks ago and I thank you for that. So all that stuff will get placed there. Okay, thank you. Yep, no, no, thank you, Lisa. Anybody have a comments or any additional help or things here? Trying to find my phone, I don't know, make a ring. Let's scan down the, any advice for improving video quality such as YouTube, Vimeo, et cetera from Tom. Tom, you wanna dig into that a bit? Just that what we do is we run Zoom and PowerPoint and what we do is we have live music from people who are sharing remotely. We have a singer who plays the harp guitar and we have another singer who plays brass instruments too and we occasionally go supplement with videos from YouTube or YouTube and the quality, it's just really hard. People complain about it a lot. So, sorry, so if I'm understanding correctly, you're sharing the video, you're sharing YouTube videos within Zoom, is that correct, Tom? Right. You're running from Zoom like sharing a screen. More generally is we have an audio visual system at a church that we bought and so we're running a hybrid service right now. A couple of people come in and they see the big screen and on the big screen is everybody like this, like we are here. Exactly. So, it's kind of going through a lot of places. Okay, sure, but my point was where are you, so are you running, like how are you inputting the video? Well, I have two laptops set up and one of the laptops is plugged into the audio visual system and that just kind of sits there. That's kind of participant, somebody was saying before so that you can see what other people see. And then on the other computer, I'm running the Zoom meeting. I'm hosting the Zoom meeting. I'm running the PowerPoint from there and by way of your screen and then I'm also running the videos off of that computer. Okay, well, in share screen mode. Yes. Okay, so that would be, yeah, I was trying to thank you for explaining that Tom, I appreciate it. So that's what made me frustrated about Zoom and that's why I configure the system the way I did now so that you can just cut things in and out very quickly like that. And they still retain their resolution. So I will, what I will do is I will diagram what I have. Okay, and I will send it out. No, there's multiple signal paths and everything and I couldn't really, I can give you an overview but to really dive into it, I would need to show you a visual which I don't have. But basically, you're sharing via a separate channel over OBS, is that the basic notion? Or the separate? Yeah, so what I'm doing is I'm not using my laptop camera, even though I'm on the laptop in front of you. I have a separate camera. That's why you see me look down a bit. I'm working on that. But the laptop here is running Zoom. And then what I have is a computer to my left which is running VMIX. And I have a, if you've seen the video beyond webcams, I have the GC553 feeding, taking the output from VMIX and feeding it into the computer. And I have my Zoom camera set to this box and not to the laptop camera. Same thing with sound. So everything's coming in here embedded, video and audio out of the computer. And VMIX allows you to do that. They allow you to send a separate signal apart from what you may be live streaming. So I could live stream. I could go to Facebook right now and live stream this thing out. We're not gonna get the full effect of what you're seeing. Anyway, so because I'm using that alternate input as a camera on VMIX, I can select any video I want. I can select photos, I can select music and just have them go into Zoom. And of course, when you do this, what you're gonna want to do is to highlight or spotlight myself, spotlight the channel that's everyone seeing the audio and video on. So yes, Richard. When it comes to images, which you just referenced, I think if we were to choose one for a virtual background or to use in a shared screen, I take it we have to be watchful about copyright as usual, right? Yep, yep. Right. Yep, definitely. And again, I keep referring folks to this platform but it's a church motion graphics. They're a really, they're a good company. They are, what they do is they give you the ability to select your graphic and they have graphics for lower thirds. They have graphics for, like the welcome here that you just saw for the thing here. I'll switch over again. I won't spotlight it, but I'll just show you that. This is actually church motion graphics. So what they'll do is they'll give you welcome. Thank you. They'll give you the whole package for specific, either our season or they'll give you a specific for a specific service. They also have like Richard needs backgrounds. The nice thing is, is you can, with their products, you can use, once you download it, you can use their products any way you like. You can edit them, you can, you know, change the bonds, change everything. And within their licensing, within the user agreement, you're allowed to use them as you would. And also to live stream. A company like Igniter Media, they also have some, they're a little bigger than church motion graphics, but you can use their graphics now that were in the, within a time of COVID. So they're allowing you to live stream it, but their graphics are more made for, you know, indoor, you know, in person worship on a projector. So a little different setup, but church motion graphics gives you the, allows you to do. Okay, let's see here, scrolling down. We did a, we did either a raised hand on screen, if on video, those without video used either a hand raise icon or verbal confirmation. We had 25 windows participants and families in our meeting. Thank you, Elizabeth. Anything else you wanted to add to that? Okay, scrolling down here. Another reaction from Jim, we use the reactions option via zoom and also from Elizabeth, are the videos local to your computer? Yes. Oh yeah, don't. So that's one thing that I always, always download the video and have it available locally on your computer. It gets really tricky. Cause remember, if you're using your laptop to send out the zoom, you know, stream, then you're also asking YouTube, you know, you're asking the, and even though you may have a, you know, a decent download spec, you're asking the computer also now to, you know, decode that and run that at the same times you're asking for, you know, you're asking your computer to do a lot. That's why I have separate. So I have the, I have the laptop that the only thing this laptop has to do is, you know, is, is worry about zoom and handle the workload for zoom V mixes for switching. And then I have a, I have a third laptop here that I use if somebody wants to, you know, add, you know, they, we, if we go to a website or something like that, I can, I can cut to that. There's a software available from a NCH software called debut software. And that package will allow you to record videos from things like other, other platforms. Like, so some cases it's difficult to download exactly, but you can screen capture it, save it as a separate video file and then use that locally, but you still have the copyright issues that you need to go through whenever you do that. Right, exactly. So you have, you know, you, you can't go to a, you know, a random set like, oh, this is a great, you know, this is a great, you know, doxology that you've found on, you know, and say, oh, you know, let's, let's take that. You have to ask for permission. So, and that came up when we did our, our worship conference wide worship about the room on Thursday night. So we have someone coming into the room, cool. I don't want to, I don't want to put pressure on Bill Pelts, but he has a great analysis of copyrights, which he was gratefully sent to me, I recommend it. Okay, Bill, are you willing to share that with the, with the group? Of course. Okay, if you can, you can send it to me and we could send it, you know, just put in the chat if you have a, if it's online. Well, if you have everybody's email, I'll send it to you a little bit later today. Okay, and I promise I will gather all that stuff up even from previous meetings and like that available to you. From Richard C, would you mind repeating what the black magic design device is all about? Can you elaborate on that, Rich? No, I, I came in slightly late and the image on the screen was the device that you use to bring in additional, Oh, the musical material. Oh yeah. So that's a, that's the Aver media. I'll just bring it up here. I think I have it and I don't. All right, so I'll just, I'll just hold it up to this camera. This is a, it's in the video beyond webcams. It gives you the model number, but this is the Aver media GC 553. It is basic, it's basically a 4K gaming video capture card. So you have a HDMI in and a USB-C out. So your computer, if you're running this, your computer has to have a USB-C or USB, USB 3.0 connectivity. So, and you'll, you'll know that if you have, if the port is blue, if you look inside the port, sometimes you'll see a blue connector. If you don't, the best thing to do is the best thing I could, like I said on the video, the best thing to do is to go to your, go to the specs online of your device and make sure that it's USB 3.0. What is it that enables you to import the music you did or the visual you did? Oh, so, oh, so, so once you, so I'm running a separate computer running VMIX. And VMIX allows me to compose, you know, it lets me to take, mix in, but it's basically what it means, what it says, mix in either visuals, audio, or graphics, full motion video. It's what, it's, so it's actually, I'm using it more as a switcher in this example, but it's actually the device that you could use, that you would use to live stream, because what it will also do, it will also send an encoded, you know, RTMP feed to either Facebook or YouTube or any platform you want to go to. How do you spell VMIX? Small V, doesn't Victor, or Victoria, and then capital MIX, VMIX. They're Australian, it's an Australian company and the company, and I'll do a, I think what I will do is do an overview, my next video that I send out to folks will be an overview of VMIX and what VMIX is. So I was, up until a couple of years ago, I really liked, there was another software package called Livestream Studio. Livestream is, the company has since been purchased by Vimeo and there's been a lot of changes and since I've, the licensing structure is a little wonky with them, but I would recommend VMIX. Ed, is there such a thing as a glossary or a dictionary of terms? In our two meetings, I have taken notes nonstop and I don't understand half of it. Right, so that's one of the things that I'm working on. I have a word doc, just with all of the acronyms, you know, the acronym soup is all I like to call it, just with all that stuff. So you can go and refer back to it. And it's opposed to like, you know, having a doc, you know, having a document and having that as linked on our website, it's going to be a, it's going to be one article, just living and breathing. And so I just add to it as I need to. And you don't have to. If I may, I downloaded the VMIX program. It's got a 60 day free trial, which is kind of nice. And I was able to my delight to be able to download a PowerPoint that I had prepared for church the previous week in about 10 seconds. It just took the thing and brought it in. Now I'm sort of stumped as to where to go from here. But so if you could send me your configuration, Eric, as you said, that would be really great. Yep. So what we're experiencing today is, you know, a step towards, you know, hybrid worship. So I'll be happy to provide that information. In relative to the... I apologize, I keep looking down because I don't, I have a solution for not looking down and looking at. Right, right. So that's forthcoming as well. In connection to the VMIX, you're just talking about the, I mentioned before, we use OBS, which is free. And I know VMIX is licensing. And you mentioned the additional output that you use to send over to another computer. That's, I do that with NDI, which also is free. Yeah. It has some delay. I've conquered some of that by tightening up our connections and using a gigi switch on the three computers involved. Is, does direct output you use there and the capture card eliminate more lag? It does, yeah, it does. Yeah. And there's a way to group all the lag. So you're not seeing lag. So actually, you know, what you're seeing on screen is a little, you know, like I'm speaking, but I can see a little delay. Yeah. You know, in the, you know, in, in, in Zoom. So, and I've just gotten over it. There's a, there is a little delay. Anytime. So hardware devices, like you may have seen the Blackmagic 810 mini, mini broadcaster. It's, you know, it's got all HDMI, four HDMI ins and then one HDMI out. And you just push the button on what camera you want to select. When you have hard, when you have stuff like that from hardware, when you have a hardware based system, what we call the latency or the lag is minimal. When you go through a computer, the latency is there. You know, it's a little bit, it's a little bit. And there's a, there's a couple of tricks you can do to minimize that by, for example, like to get them to get the least amount of latency as opposed to having a separate output card just to feed, you know, this, what I'm doing is I'm using the graphics, one of the, you know, the second screen, you know how computers would have two screens and you could either, you know, have, you have your main screen in Windows or on a Mac and then you have your extended screen. That's all this is, is Vmix telling the extended screen to, to use this, to use this box. Stream, you know, go use this as a secondary monitor. So you're actually just looking at a secondary monitor. So if I go into the settings here real quick, if I can do it, can I do it when it's on? I don't think I can do it when it's on. Yeah, I could have it. So you could actually see my mouse moving around. You know, so if I, sometimes I'll lose my mouse, you'll see me hunting for the mouse and that's because it's, you know, on Zoom. So any other questions? Let me make sure that I got everybody's, yes, and you mentioned NDI. Someone mentioned NDI and NDI is you can do, there is actually a how-to video. In fact, there's, with Vmix, there's tons of how-to videos on how to do this stuff step by step. But to take all the videos, you know, and those things and then synthesize them into one system, I will, I will do that for you. But the folks at Vmix, they're, they're, they're church based. This was a software developer, I don't know, a software developer about 10 years ago, Australian who wanted to livestream the service. And so he built Vmix. But, you know, you know, back, back in the day, like seven months, even seven years ago, I, you know, I would say, if you looked at Vmix and other solutions, I would like, ooh, okay, it doesn't, looks a little, doesn't look polished, you know, but Vmix has come a long way. I have to admit it. It's all, it's doing, it's doing lots of stuff right now. So it's, it's pretty good, pretty good package. And they have, they have a really good support system. So if you go into Vmix.com and then you look for the forum, that's, they're really kind. I mean, they really, they're fast, their response of their, they really do their, their deal. They used to have, and I think they still have, if you go, if you dig far enough, they have a discount for churches because they're, you know, church based. There's now, because of COVID, thank you, because of the virus, we, there's like a six or eight month waiting list. So if you want to get, you know, so the package that I'm using here is the 4K version. So, and that's like $600, but they have, they have, they do have a coupon and you have, you have to, you know, sign up for it, but they do, they will give you a discount and they do give you the 60 day trial, which I thought about doing here, but I didn't want to be annoyed by the, you know, so a lot of this is my husband's equipment that I'm using. But yeah. So some goodies, if you want to, there's a couple websites you can go to and Facebook groups. One is the Digital Creators Workshop. It is, it is a part of, it's a member of our conference who heads that and moderates that. There is also churches that live stream Facebook group. You can ask churches that live stream just about anything. They, you don't get this snarky, you'll never get a snarky response. The folks in there are, are, are us, or the church. So you get a lot of folks from all different sorts of backgrounds and they'll, you know, you'll see that in the response. And it's kind of cool to be part of that. You know, like we have our community here. It's nice when you're, when you're on their Facebook group that you're part of a larger discussion. And that the churches that live stream is a, it was started by PTZOptics. So know that that you'll see a lot of PTZ. Oh, we recommend this. We recommend that because it's, it's a started by those folks. Then there used to be a YouTube channel, Streaming Geeks. Same deal, Streaming Geeks. They have, I think merged with Pete, with the churches that live stream and they merged with PTZOptics somehow. PTZOptics is out of Downingtown, Pennsylvania. And somehow they're, they're, they're merged. Another good one is Blackbar. It's BLKBR and that is the channel name for the, for that, for those folks on YouTube. That's a YouTube reference there. And there's another one, Pro Church Tools is another resource for you. It is the workings of Brady Shearer. So the Brady Shearer is out of Toronto, Canada. And he has weekly, has weekly broadcasts. I believe the folks from Blackbar. Blackbar is First Church Niagara. Evangelical, but they, if you've ever gone to YouTube, you've probably gone to YouTube and you look up like, you know, church mixer or church audio and all of a sudden you're getting, you know, results for, you know, you know, a 64 channel digital board, you know, and you know, running, you know, AES 550 and you're like, what, and there's stage monitors and you're like, wait a minute, that's not, like, that's not our church, you know? And then you get, if you look up, then you'll probably get folks on a cell phone. So there's nothing in between Blackbar kind of, even though they are a, they're a larger church. They kind of, they kind of, when the, when they, they were starting their channel late last year and when the pandemic hit, they really revved up and they have, they actually have a discord, they're on discord as well. So if you go to blackbar.com, you'll, you can link to their discord. So discord is a chat service. Could you repeat the first one, please? The name? Digital. Digital, let me look it up. Digital content workshop, digital content workshop and that was created by Alex Shea Will from our conference. So that, that's us. Did you say that was a Facebook group or? That's a Facebook group. Okay, thank you. Thanks for, thanks for the clarification. So I will be busy and not that I'm not busy, but I will be more busy in the coming weeks, putting this together. So putting the resources all online for this, as opposed to repeating it. Did I miss anything in the chat? Just want to make sure. I don't think we did. Does anybody have another, another question that we didn't cover something that's been, you know, on your mind, on your heart? You know, please, please feel free to do. Okay, I think we are, I think we're getting better. So it's a five after 12. I recognize that it is lunchtime for, for most folks. Thank you. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Lisa. Until next time, folks, take care. Be well, be patient with others, and most of all, be patient with yourself. Take care. Take care all, bye. Bye.