 Okay, good morning and welcome everybody to BC314. It's our second lecture this week on media and technology. Hope everyone's doing fine, everyone's doing good. Let's take a moment to pray before we get into talking about digital equipment today. We'll talk a little bit about software and a few things about hardware that's used. Could somebody please pray with the class and we'll start. Anyone? Great. Pastor? Yeah, go ahead. Asha. Dear God, thank you so much for everything that you're doing. Thank you for this day and thank you for all my classmates and Pastor God. Lord, as we're about to learn about the digital equipment Lord, that we may understand what it is to know the digital skills God has learned. Yeah, thank you God for this time where we learned, where we interact and know what it is. I understand everything you have for us to understand God. Lord, we pray your spirit to lead us and guide us. I just want to join you in praying. Okay. Good morning, everyone. So today, today, maybe we'll take maybe one or two more lectures mature. We will go off digital equipment, a little bit about software side of things. And then of the physical equipment. Mainly from the perspective of graphics, audio, video production, live streaming. Now, as I said yesterday, this goal is not to train us how to use all of this. Obviously, that we cannot do in a very short time. Some of the students who are here, they get to do it during our Sunday services and other occasions. And in fact, some of them have become very good. Some of our students who were studying with us, who were serving with the media team, then eventually became part of the media team, they joined us as staff. So that happens for the students who are here physically and when they get involved in those areas. But the purpose or the intent in going over this lesson on digital equipment is just to give us an exposure. The goal is for us to have enough information so that when you are interacting with your teams, you may have a graphics team, you may have a video production team, you may have people who you may even hire vendors to do this for you on special occasions and so on. So you will just know at least how to communicate with them, understand what you're saying, make decisions and so on. So from that perspective, I'm sharing this information because personally, I had to make this journey. So I thought, okay, I'll be a pastor and I want to minister and teach the Word of God. True, that's good. But then you soon realize that you've got to deal with all these other things about audio equipment, media teams and they are coming to you and asking you for information and guidance and so on. And if you don't understand what they're doing, it's very hard to make decisions. So it was a learning process for me also and I'm continuing to learn. I tell them, hey, please tell me what are you doing? The people are doing the video production, the live stream and of course I go up online and read so that I understand. So from that perspective, just to give us enough information. Some of you may be in places of leadership or you may have to make some of these decisions. So at least you have a little bit of a background. Okay, so that's the intent. I'm not here to kind of train you on these things. I'm not an expert myself, but at least we'll have some information to work with our people. So when you talk about this equipment, we are referring to both the software and the hardware that we need for media work. So graphics software and there are several software packages that are generally used. Adobe cloud, Creative Cloud is something that's very commonly used, very popular. And if you are a registered nonprofit, you can get a discount as well. If somebody within the organization submits a little application for you and you get a discount. So I encourage you to tap into that if possible. That's something we've been doing for a number of years now and so we kind of benefit from that and all our media team people have access to it. They do their work using the Creative Cloud. Of course, there are also free web applications for graphic software that you can tap into. And I've just mentioned a few of these and I'm sure there are several more web based. Now, a lot of these are web based cloud based. So you don't need necessarily to install anything on your machine. Just set up an account and you can do it very easily. So you can explore using free applications as well. On the video editing side again, you've got commercial as well as free video editing software. I've listed several here. We use Adobe Premiere Pro for our video editing work. Of course, there are a lot of other commercial versions available as well as there are free editing software that are available. And it's good to, I mean, either if you are interested in it or your teams are interested in it, you let them pick one that they are comfortable working with. And there are definitely a lot of tutorials, video tutorials that they can train themselves and do well. Now, when it comes to video and video editing, it's good to have some sort of understanding of it because, you know, you as a communicator. So you may be a pastor, you may be an evangelist, you may be a preacher, but you are the communicator. You're the one who is delivering the content, your media team or your vendor that you have hired who's going to come and do the video recording and editing. They know the tools, but they don't know what you want to get across. So for you, it's important that you understand a little bit about what can happen, what cannot happen. So you tell them, hey, I want it like this or this is what I'd like to, how I would like it to be done, you know, so that you communicate that to the people who are going to edit your video so that what you want to get across to the people is actually what will be put across. If you just let them do it, they will do whatever they think is in their minds, which may not be what you want to get across to the people, right? So to that extent, you need to influence, you need to speak into the work that is being done even in the video editing, right? So it's not your micromanaging, but you're being careful of what is getting across to the people. Otherwise, if you let them on their own, they'll do just random, all kinds of things which may not be what you want to get across to the people. So, you know, just even as recently as a couple of weeks back, you know, we've been doing this video editing and all of that for a long time, but a couple of weeks back, one of our graphics people decided to change the what we call as thumbnails, the cover graphics for our videos. And they started, you know, I'm just saying this example. This is a small example to say that, you know, you need to be watchful of what people are doing, what your media team is doing. So for whatever reason, this person decided that they're going to put for our Sunday sermon videos, they're going to put the, you know, the pictures of the preacher on the video, on the thumbnail graphic. Now, right from the very beginning, and this is just a personal and an organizational decision, right? Other organizations would work differently. I'm just speaking from a personal and organizational perspective. From the very beginning, we said we don't want people's images to be put out simply because we want to downplay as far as possible. We want to downplay or focus on the preacher or the pastor. Let it be the content which is a draw for people to come and use the resource rather than the picture of the preacher. So that was just a guiding principle right from the beginning. One change we made along the journey was, OK, for the daily devotional, OK, just for the daily devotional videos, it's OK. You can put the picture of the person speaking because it changes week on week, and it's kind of helpful for the audience to know who's speaking from that perspective, but don't change it for anything else. We don't want people's pictures to appear on any other graphics. That was the only exception we made. Because our other, the motivation was, let's not put the focus on the speaker. Let's keep the content as the main reason why somebody should come and watch the video. Then suddenly this change was made when I let it go one Sunday, but then later on I saw this thing and I said, oh, this is not what we want to do. And then I had to give feedback. And this happened recently, just maybe about a month ago or so. So I did give feedback. I say, guys, look, this change is not good. Let's stay with what we originally had in mind. Keep the people off the cover graphics, the thumbnails. Just put the sermon title, keep it that way. Now, it's a very small thing, but it is an important thing for us, meaning we always want to keep people out of the way and let the content speak for itself. And we want to keep it like that. So I'm just mentioning this because you as a leader, as a pastor of the ministry, you decide and you need to be able to speak to your media team. People tell them, hey, this is what should be done. This should not be done. They understand everything, but you are saying it. So similarly, when you get into the details of the video production, you should be able to, you know, communicate your thoughts and ideas. So here are some things that will be useful to know. One is about multi-track editing and multi-cam editing. That means you can have different cameras coming in on the shoot on your subject. If you're preaching from the stage or if you're speaking into the camera, you can have multiple cameras coming in. And then at the time of editing, they can, you know, edit what's happening. They can show different angles. And that's good for you to know because sometimes you can tell them, hey, don't shoot from these angles in the auditorium. Don't do, you know, there are certain things we don't want. It might disturb the people or we don't want people to become, to come upon the screens. They become very self-conscious on that. So because you know that you can tell them, don't do these things. Keep it like this. Other things you can do with video editing is motion tracking, which is we can zoom in on a particular object in your video. And you can track that object through the video. So if you want to blur over somebody's face, you don't reveal their identity, or you want a text box displayed throughout, you know, throughout a particular object during the video, you can ask for those kinds of things to be done. You can color grade. That means you can change the whole color scheme or the color grading of the video. So sometimes you might say, hey, you know, usually I let these kinds of decisions be made by the video editor. I'm not directly involved, but sometimes, you know, because you know it can be done, you can ask for it to be done. That, hey, change the color grade and make it look a little brighter. Maybe it can enhance the mood of the entire video that's being produced. And of course, there are special effects. You can create some animations, transitions and so on. So for example, when we were under lockdown, you know, during the pandemic time, we were under lockdown. And so, you know, the Sunday sermons were being pre-recorded. They were actually being pre-recorded in an apartment. And, you know, just using one standing camera. And so that pre-recorded video would be released on Sunday. So how can you make that recording a little bit more engaging for people that you can ask them, hey, okay, you know, I'm pre-recording this video and we upload it, we send it off to the media team. Okay, guys, when you're editing it, make it a little interesting. You know, and so we did request that during those days. You know, show the script just come again, show some graphics come again, or maybe even do some things because it's a very kind of dull recording, you know. I'm just standing in front of the camera and recording the Sunday sermon. And we had to do that during the pandemic. But you know that during the editing process, some of these things can be done. So you specify and say, hey, while I'm talking about this, do this. While I'm talking about this, please do this. Please show this picture. Please show this video in between, et cetera. And you can ask for the special effects just to make that video a little bit more engaging. And so you can ask for those things. You can work on the action. You can speed things up, slow things down and reverse what can be done. Video editor rendering. So basically once they finish the video work, they have to render it. That means they have to put the video into a format that can be then released. So that rendering takes a lot of time. So, you know, when you are planning for things, you need to keep that in mind. Because if the longer the video and the greater the resolution of the video, of course, the rendering will take longer time. So keep that in mind as you are planning something. So, okay, I'm going to record it. And I need this thing to be released tomorrow. Well, you know, suppose whatever you're recording is certain high quality and it takes a couple of hours to render. Some of these high quality videos will take hours to render. You need to factor that in as you plan, right? So don't just think that, okay, the video they'll edit and they can, you know, release it. No. They record the video, they edit it, and then they have to render it. And depending on how long your video is, that rendering itself can take sometimes a couple of hours. Just keep that in mind. And just a small thought here about, you know, if you're using your phone, you can use various video editing apps that are on the phone to work with your video. Okay. So there's just a little instruction here on video editing software. One more thought, and I'll pause for some questions. It's about desktop publishing. So when you are creating maybe books, graphic, brochures, magazines, newspapers, things that are going either for print or for digital editions, eBooks, you will typically use what we call as desktop publishing software. Something all of us are very familiar with, of course, is Microsoft Word, which can be used as well. But then as you want to do a little bit more complicated stuff, more, you know, more control things, we, our team works with InDesign. And so, and also our printers, they work with InDesign. So for example, the books that we physically print, I would send the content as a Microsoft Word document to our publications team. They would do all the proofreading, all of that. And then they send it off to the printers. And the printer then typesets the page in InDesign. So they would, the final layout with all the whatever needs to be done, formatting, everything is done by the printer in InDesign. So the person who does it, we usually refer to him as the desktop publisher, does it. And then they send back the proof for us to look at a PDF document. We look at it, everything is fine. Then when we give the go ahead, then they go ahead and print the books. So that's just something for us to be aware of. And, yeah, so, yeah, that's about what I wanted to share. Yeah, so this is all, this is another interesting part. When if you're printing things or getting things ready to be printed. As far as media presentations, this is something we use when we are presenting inside, you know, auditory window, putting things up on the screen during a service or a presentation. Typically you use this for showing your song lyrics, your scripture versus your sermon slides, so on. So there are church presentations software. Now there are commercial versions. When we start, you know, several, several years ago, we started out using EasyWorship. That was, you know, simple for us and sufficient for us at that time. Then we moved to ProPresenter, which is what we are using now. So we use this to, you know, show the lyrics of the music, the worship lyrics, along with various backgrounds. It helps you change all of that makes it look nice when it comes up on the screen. Then we also can show scripture verses and we also bring in our sermon points as the sermon is going, sermon slides come in. And then now we also are doing live streaming. So we have something that comes up in-house for those inside the auditorium and something that comes up on the video that goes on the live stream. So all of that we work with ProPresenter. And there is a free open source version as well that you could use in case you don't want to use a licensed worship. Okay, let me pause here before I get into the camera stuff, camera side of things. Is there one with me so far? Say go ahead. I was just going to ask pertaining sermon slides. In your course of experience and years pastoring, what has been or what would you advise preachers not to do when it comes to preaching the word and then having their slides projected? I know there's a danger of getting people distracted or getting the attention away from what you're saying on all ANOVA dependence on the slides versus speaking heart to heart. So I don't know if you could just speak to that to help us, you know, so that we don't fall into a situation whereby there's so much emphasis. There's so much emphasis on the slides, which is good versus we speaking from our hearts and trying to create that picture in the minds of people based on the words we're speaking. Good. Yeah, good question. I'm glad you asked that. So I'll just share my experience. I'm not saying my experience is universal or everybody will agree with me. I'm just speaking, you know, my experience. So, you know, there are two things that personally I wanted to achieve. One was one is we understand the impact of, you know, of people hearing and seeing. So if you do have some supporting slides coming in while you are speaking, it definitely has an impact on the audience. So that's a good thing. But there are some downsides also. One big downside that I have not been able to resolve, of course, is that because people know that things are coming up online, they have stopped opening up their Bibles and they have stopped taking notes. So I feel a little sad about it because for me, I love to see people opening the Bible or I love to open my Bible myself. And secondly, it's a good thing to take notes when you're listening. Like there's an old saying, a blunt pencil is better than a sharp mind because our minds can only retain so much on the first hearing. But even if you write down with a blunt pencil, you can go back and refer to it. But anyway, so that's been a downside. I don't know how to resolve it. But anyway, from my personal thought process was, yes, when all of these presentations, software and all of that became available for us, of course, it's been a long time now. But I said, let's use it. There's nothing wrong in using it because it actually will enhance our communication. So in addition to listening, people can see, you know, you can reinforce a point or whatever you're showing, you can help reinforce your communication. So that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. So we decided to use it. But then there was the challenge where of how can we, one, it shouldn't look like a presentation. It should be a message that's being brought as opposed to, you know, like a, like we have a typical presentation, you know, slide after slide that it shouldn't be that way. And second is the point that you brought up is how can we have freedom that if I feel like going off in a certain direction to emphasize a certain point, which may not be on the slides, how can we have the freedom to do it? So here's how, you know, I'm just, again, speaking my own personal experience, how we reconciled it. So from the beginning, we, when we started using slide, the PowerPoint slides and all of that for as part of the sermon, I chose not to pay attention to the slides, meaning I know the slides are there. I have my notes with me, but I'm going to speak as though I have always been, you know, as I've always been speaking, which is deliver the message. I told the PowerPoint, the person handling the presentation, I said, you follow me. That means you pay attention to what I'm saying, and you change the slides accordingly. I am not going to pay attention to the slides. So that was from the very beginning, we started off like that. So I said, Hey, you just follow me. I don't even have a controller for the, for the presentation. I don't use it. I just, I have my sermon notes for my, for me. And I just speak and let the person who is in charge of the presentation just follow me. So that way I'm a little, I'm free. Right. I'm not being controlled by the PowerPoint. I don't have to pause and tell the person next slide. I don't have to do it. I can just, just flow, just flow, just deliver the message as I had originally planned. So that was something we started doing very beginning. So our presentation people, all the people who serve in the media team were going to be responsible for the presentation. That is the projection of the sermon notes, sermon slides. They are trained to do this. That means they have to follow the preacher because I'm not going to stop and say next slide. Nothing. I'm just going to flow. Keep pay attention. Keep following. That's one thing. Now, there are times when I, when I make glance at the monitor and I see that they're not following me, then I correct them. You know, this is sad because I have to correct them publicly and say, hey, please move, you know, please move, move ahead and move back. That happens rarely. I generally don't do it. But if I glance at the monitor and I see that they're not where on the same slide as what I'm speaking on, then I just please move forward. But otherwise I don't, I don't, you know, I don't interact with them. I just like to flow. The second is if I need to say something that is not part of my notes. It's not part of the slides. But I feel that we need to go there and, you know, speak about it. I take the liberty to do it. And that all our pastors are free to do it. Okay, yes, it's not, it wasn't, you know, so many notes, it wasn't in the slides, but you feel that you need to, you know, talk about it and address it. The Holy Spirit is moving in that it go for it. Doesn't matter. And again, here, our media team is trying to do it. They know that I'm off the slide. And so I might even tell them, I said, I might just say, okay, this is not on the slide. So just follow me. So what they will do is then they will project the scripture onto the screen, which I may be referring to. Even though it's not on the slide. So they, there is freedom to move. And the media team follows along. So this is how we've struck. We've set ourselves up so that one, we're able to flow freely. And two, if we need to flow into something which was not there before, we can do it and the media team will follow. I hope that helps. That helps. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you. So just to give you a little insight into what happens on a weekly basis. Now, you know, in order to prepare the slide presentations, the media team, of course, you know, needs time. So what I do is at the beginning of the month. Okay. So in the beginning of the year, I prepare, you know, just a general idea of all the 52 Sundays. This is what the sermons are going to be. I shared it with our pastors and the media team. So they have an idea that, okay, these are the sermon topics for the year. Of course, we can change it. It's not set in stone, but they have an idea so they can start thinking about their graphics and what they want to do and all of that. Then on a monthly basis. Towards the end of the month. I send them the topics for the sermon topics for the coming months. For example, today, I sent them the sermon topics for the month of what's April. And I made some changes from what I had sent them at the end of last year. I said, okay, three Sundays I'm changing the topics. It's on the same team, but I'm changing this topic title. So there is that freedom to do it. So they will work with that. I sent it to them today for the month of April. They can start preparing the graphics and all of that. Then each week, usually by the Wednesday of the week. So this happened. Yeah, Wednesday of the week. I have to send to our media team. We simply call it as the text, the text for the presentation and the lower third. So I send them the text. So this is what we're going to have in the PowerPoint. So I have to send that by the Wednesday. So the sermon has to be ready or at least the main points. I have to get it ready. And by the Wednesday of the week, I have to send it to the media team. Now, sometimes I slip up, meaning I need a little bit more time. So I might send it on a Friday, Thursday on some really rare occasions. Hopefully I send it on a Friday, but generally I try to send it by Wednesday. This contains the main points of the sermon and the scripture text that need to come up. So what happens, the media team, they prepare the PowerPoint. And they also prepared graphics for the lower third. The lower third goes on the video. And the PowerPoint is used at all our other locations. So that same sermon is going to be preached at all six locations. So only one location is on live stream, but all the other five locations, they have in-house presentations happening. So the PowerPoint is used at all those locations, five locations. And in the central location that goes on live stream, they use the lower third. But the content for that is sent by Wednesday. So the media team will prepare that and they will send it out to the, we refer to them as the media presentation team. That is the team that's responsible for projecting. Usually by Friday, they'll send it out. So they already have everything ready. Then of course I can always prepare my sermon to add the meat to the bones, all that I can do, but it's following that outline which I've already sent to them. So I can add scriptures, I can add anything else to the sermon. And so then when we are delivering the sermon on Sunday, it's like as I explained, we follow the same thing, the sermon that we've prepared. The person doing the projection will follow us as we're going. Now on some rare occasions, I will tell the team no presentation, which I did on the last Sunday of January this year. I told the team, hey, everybody, you guys can have a break. No need PowerPoint today. No presentation during the sermon. I'm just going to preach. So that was one particular Sunday when I intentionally just said, no presentation, I'm just preaching. And it was a simple sermon. It was a sermon on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So I just told the media team, hey, no need to project anything. Just keep the sermon title throughout because the purpose is just to share about the baptism of Holy Spirit and get and pray for the people in Mass to receive the baptism of Holy Spirit. So that particular Sunday, nobody prepared any PowerPoint, no slides, nothing, because it was just going to be free flow and be planned for that and let it happen. Okay. Any other questions on this whole presentations aspect? Okay. I hope this information is useful and hope I'm not boring you. Just to let you know what actually happens behind the scenes. Okay. All right. Let's go back to where we paused. What was it? Oh, yeah. Okay. So now, sorry, that was the end of, you know, what we do in terms of software presentation. Now I'll just quickly try to talk a little bit about we have, yeah, I think we have enough time. Camera and photography. So again, you know, I'm personally, I'm not an expert in this. I don't, you know, do this myself. There are people who do it. And maybe some of you in the class are great photographers. And so you probably know a lot more. But I put this information together just so that we understand certain things. Because sometimes, you know, my own experience when I'm working with our media team, they'll say, you know, I want to buy this kind of a camera. Like, what is that camera? And then they will tell me, you know, this camera is better than that camera because of this reason or et cetera, et cetera. Then I had to like understand what they're saying in order to say, like, okay, does it make sense? Do we really need to buy that kind of a camera? All of that, those things, you know. So from that perspective or sometimes when they say, oh, we have a problem, there wasn't enough lighting or this and that, then at least I understand. I can, you know, empathize and understand why things didn't work out. So I'm speaking from that perspective. I'm not myself, you know, a great photographer or something. And you don't need to be. But it's just for you to make those decisions as a pastor leader. Right. So basically, you know, nowadays you can use your smartphone, your basic smartphone to take pretty decent photographs and the settings that are typically recommended. If you can, if you can do this 1920 by 1080 pixels, 30 frames per second. If you want to do a recording with your phone or photographer with your phone, you ensure good lighting. If you're doing a video recording, just make sure there's no background noise. Now, there are a lot of things that go into getting good quality photos when you're using your cameras and some other things that you think about when you're considering buying cameras. You know, how easy to use the weight and the size, the economics, what are you controlling the settings and can you grow the camera? Meaning if you buy a camera, so I ask these people, these questions, okay, you're buying a camera. How many years can we use it for? Because it's very expensive. How many years can you use it for? Can you add lens to it? Because that's a very important part of it, right? So would we be able to, you know, extend it by changing the lens or, you know, things like that? And of course, price is also important. If you know these things, you can ask them, you know, before you make a decision to buy a camera, you look at all of these things and say, hey, how easy is it to use and if you're using it for outdoor or you're taking it for on travel, for events outside your location, is it something that's doable, things like that? So generally, your smartphone cameras are pretty easy to use, you can use anywhere, anytime, but it may not necessarily be the kind of quality you want. It may just not always be there for you to use in further use, like if you want to use them on videos or use them on print graphics and so on. It may not be there. So that's where you then decide to, you know, go one level up to buy cameras. And when you're buying cameras, of course, there are different kinds of cameras. There are the basic level point and shoot cameras, small little ones, just point and shoot. Again, there are little, maybe sometimes now the smartphone cameras are almost on par with these point and shoot cameras. And but, you know, they bring in some additional benefit. You can have control over certain settings like your shutter speed and aperture and the amount of light you let come in, which of course you can't do with your smartphone camera. And then you have the higher ends coming in, which are mirrorless cameras and your DSLRs. So at the top of the range, you know, on the higher side, you know, it's okay. I want to buy a DSLR camera. I'm going to get good pictures. I can do a lot with that and so on. Or if you don't want to spend as much, slightly less mirrorless cameras. They're much more easy to carry. They're not bulky. They're not, they don't have, you know, they don't need too many accessories and you can take them around with you easily. And they are pretty good in terms of giving you the kinds of images for what you want to use. So mirrorless cameras are more compact or easy to use and so on. And you can think about that. So typically when you're considering buying a good camera for your church or your ministry, it's most likely you have to make a decision between buying a mirrorless camera or a DSLR camera. And again, a couple of factors you take into account, how much you're willing to spend. What is the long-term use? Are you going to be carrying it around a lot? Et cetera. So you think about these factors. Some other things that generally, again, this is not necessarily something you need to remember, but just for you to know that, you know, when you're using it in manual mode, you have full control of over the settings as opposed to just leaving it in auto mode. Your aperture determines how much of light you're going to be letting in into your camera to fall on the sensor. So you can play with the aperture. You can play with the shutter speed. So, you know, if you want to let more light in, you can have a slower shutter speed. More light hits the sensor. Image becomes a little brighter. But if the ambient light is already pretty good, you don't want that much light coming in. So you minimize your shutter speed. You also minimize your aperture. And then also if you're shooting in darker conditions without a flash and you want to, if you have a more sensitive camera, it's going to stand you good in that situation. So if you're going to be shooting in those kinds of conditions, you want a camera with a better ISO for if you're going to be doing it there. But if you're mostly doing it in-house, where you have full control on the light, you don't necessarily have to have higher ISO and sensitivity. So these are small things to keep in mind as you make a decision to buy a camera for your ministry. Other things, of course, this is common knowledge. Higher megapixel means better quality. If you shoot with higher frames per second, you can take action types of shots with your camera if that's of importance. And some of the higher-end cameras, of course, will save images in a raw format as well as a JPEG format. The raw format allows you to further work with those images. You can do a lot more with that. So the DSLR and mirrorless cameras can give you both. So that's a big advantage of investing in that kind of a camera. Let's just talk a little bit about public address system. Let me pause and say, everybody's with me. You're with me so far? OK. OK. All right. Thank you. So we've talked about software. We've talked about cameras a little bit. Now let's talk about sound. So when you are, especially this is true about Sunday services, when you have an auditorium hall, like if you're sitting in a house and with 10, 15 people, you're not worried about, OK, can everybody hear me, et cetera. But when you're in an auditorium, then the whole issue of sound is very important because if you have an auditorium with a couple of hundred people sitting there and people cannot hear you, you may be preaching the best sermon or your worship team may be doing wonderful worship. But if the sound is not good inside the auditorium, people are going to, they're not going to be happy. They're going to be struggling to hear what you're saying or they're going to be struggling to participate in the worship. So this is where having a little knowledge about sound is important. So that's one thing. The other thing is if the sound is too loud, it can be actually very painful. I remember, this was before the pandemic, of course, I visited a church, this was in the US, I went to a very, very famous church and all that. OK, I said, OK, I'll go there and visiting, let me go in. I went in and I couldn't sit there. The sound was so loud. And I was telling my daughter, I said, I can't even sit here. It is so painful. So, you know, you've gone there to worship God. For whatever reason, the sound was turned on so loud that it was very, it was hurting, you know, the years. And yeah, but I was a visitor. So I had no say in any of this. But I'm just giving an example where it was so uncomfortable sitting inside that hall over there. I don't know who was, you know, maybe the people in charge didn't check, you know, what the sound field was inside the auditorium. And so anyway, so you need to be aware of this, that if you are an auditorium, you need to tell your sound people to make sure you have a good sound field spread across the auditorium. So if you look at this graphic, you can see that, you know, the sound just because you have, you know, you've got your speaker set up on your stage and across your auditorium doesn't mean the sound field is going to be uniform everywhere. You can see by the shading of this, the red is okay. It's pretty good. Orange is pretty decent. Yellow and green is pretty like these people sitting here are going to find it difficult to listen, right? In these zones where it's yellow and green. And I will explain the decibel level. So typically, and then, okay, so here's a better sound field, right? And we'll talk about, you know, your audio equipment, of course. So if you have your audio equipment, so you can see that a larger portion of your audience is getting good sound, right? And it kind of vanes, of course, as you go on the edges. So, you know, we may need to address covering these zones with, you know, with speakers and so on, but a good portion of your auditorium is well covered. And if your most of your congregation is going to be sitting in this area, fine, pretty decent. You know, they've got it pretty good, right? So that's very important. And additionally, you need to make sure that the sound levels are at, you know, at something that's comfortable, right? So typically 65 dB, 65 decibels is a good decent sound, right? So you can just look at, you know, if you look at here, when you're about 30 dB, you're down here. It's like a whisper. People are not going to listen to you. They're not going to be able to hear you. If you're at 60 dB, that's decent. They can listen to you. If you get up above 85, it's like the motorcycle. It can be, you know, starting up. It can be pretty loud. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, you didn't see my PDF. Sorry. So sorry. The PDF. Oh, I'm sorry about it. Thanks for alerting me. Anyway, you can see it now. Yes. Okay. So this is what I was talking. I thought all of everybody was seeing this. I'm so sorry. Anyway, I'll just quickly recap and we'll pause. I think we're already out of time. So what I was saying is, so, you know, you've got your speaker set up here and, you know, you can see the sound levels, how it's distributed inside the auditorium. It's not always uniform. You have places of red where it's good. Orange is okay. Yellow and green, not good. If you, you know, you play with your sound system, you can have a better distribution of the sound. So centrally here, it's pretty good. And it vanes off on the side. So these people sitting on the side will not be able to hear much. Right. So you need to adjust it. So that's, you know, you need to work with your sound system to improve that. We'll talk about that later. And I was talking about this sound level here and this graphic. I'll just quickly recap and we'll continue this next week. So what I was saying is when you're at this level, so when you're at 30 dB, it's whisper. Decent level talking audio around 16. Above 85 is like it's going to be a little, it's going to start hurting on the years. Right. So basically, if you can keep the DB level around 65 to maximum, don't push it beyond this. It's a good decent level. But you need to make sure the sound field throughout your auditorium, that means in all, wherever you go, it's uniform and it's at about 65, between 65 to 80 dB, then it's a good level. Right. So if you can measure it in a very simple way, you can download this free sound level meter. If you go, you know, you can download this app or there are a couple of other apps as well. Put on your phone and you just walk around. You tell somebody, hey, just walk around the auditorium, make sure that, you know, everywhere. The DB level is good. So when you've, when you've got your sound system turned up, you tell people to go around and we do this regularly. Like even, I think a couple of Sundays ago, we did a full check once again throughout our auditorium sound levels all good. Everything is perfect. So then we're happy. People will come in and they'll be able to listen. Okay. We'll continue this next Sunday. I'm sorry. I was, I forgot that. I mean, I didn't pay attention. I wasn't sharing the PDF. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. So Abraham CPAP application. Yes, Abraham. We will send it out maybe in a couple of weeks. We'll, we'll open it up. We'll send an email to all of our college students and invite them to submit applications for their ministries so that we can, you know, support the ministries. We will do that. We will do that. I think in April we'll do it before graduation. Okay. Okay. Any questions so far? All right. Yeah. So if, if, and if you're interested, you can download the sound meter, put on your phone, just walk around your auditorium and see, you know, what the levels are just for fun. Okay. But generally you want to keep at a good level so that it doesn't hurt the people's ears, but it should be good enough for them to listen to the message or the worship so that they can participate and check at those points where, you know, your, your, your PA system may not be reaching well. You go and check the sound levels. Make sure it's good. You can tell somebody to do it or multiple people to do it and do it when everybody's in and all the people are inside your auditorium because everybody's in sound is being absorbed. So that's when you will feel the real effect that certain parts in your auditorium are not getting sound. So then you know that you need to work on the PA system. Okay. We'll continue this next week. Any, if there are no questions, we will close. Somebody could please pray and we will dismiss. Can you pray? We are grateful to you once again, Most High Lord, for your grace and your mercy that has pushed us through these moments of our days so that we pray, commit ourselves into your hands so God once more, continue to guide us, continue to lead us, continue to be our teacher and continue to be our counselor. We pray that whatever we have been instructed in this session, we will be able to put into practical practice in our various ministries that will be a blessing to us and to others. We bless you and we commend Pastor Ashes and the entire faculty to you God. We pray that you continue to shower your grace and your blessings upon them. Father, be your guide and be their lead in Jesus mighty name. We pray that you continue to bless the entire department and entire class in Jesus mighty name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. I care what I do. Thank you, Pastor. Have a good afternoon. God bless you. Bye now. God bless.