 Okay, good morning everyone, welcome to BC 314, our course on media and technology here for joining the class today. Can you turn to the class? May I request you to please pray and then we will get started. Yes, let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, I come to you under the name of Jesus. Thank you for this day. We thank you for all the strength that you have given us to join the class today. We thank you for your grace, mercy and kindness upon us. And God, I pray that this class would be a blessing to us. We will learn every single skills that we can use for your kingdom and be with us for the Spirit. You help us to understand when Pastor teaches us the things God and I pray for a good Wi-Fi connection throughout the session. And God, may everything that we speak and we do through the class be done for your good. We give you all the glory and all the honor in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Alright, good morning everyone. Once again, let's pick up from every pause, last one, I think it's more than two weeks ago. And then we will move forward. Let me check my video. Alright. So two weeks back, we started off talking about the steal equipment. Just a quick preview, we spoke a little bit about software used for making graphics and nowadays we have AI-generated graphics as well. So you can give a little text prompt and you can get a graphic-generated for us. It's generated as it's, you know, a lot of advancements of things I've done. And, you know, we use some of that these days as well. Or you can at least have some initial ideas generated through using AI. You can have some graphics generated. We do editing software, we do edit video. We talked about that. We just shared some practical things that we learned along the way as we worked on video editing. And then desktop publishing software, we went through that. And the last one that we looked at was on media presentation software. And these days we are using proper presenter. But there are many other commercial software that's available that you can use. There's also even free and open source software that you can use. And of course we have PowerPoints, except for PowerPoints or slides that can be used. So there are just so many options available if you want to present projects and to serve as a meeting. So let's move forward now to talk into some other areas. Hopefully we'll cover cameras and get into some of the audio visual, audio part, audio content part. And slowly I just give us some ideas on these things. So cameras, photography, this is another area that is very useful. It's useful because, like they say, one picture is worth a thousand minutes. So if you share a very nice picture of what's happening, it communicates a lot to people. So sometimes you want to share pictures about the service or ministry bring down the work that's been done. So all of these things, you can take the photographs, you can share them with your congregation or with other people. It can be very impactful, it can be very inspiring, it can be very encouraging. And it also lets people know what exactly is happening. So I have been using photography users' pictures to communicate whether with your congregation or to people outside is very useful. It's a useful thing. So just some thoughts on this. I'm not getting into details, but just to give you some idea of how we think about this. So obviously nowadays we take lots and lots of pictures using our smartphones. And in many instances, this is very good. It's good enough to me. You can take pictures, we have a phone. You can use them on social media, use them in other places. And it does the work for us. It's good enough. Just some guidance when you're doing it. Many times you would normally take pictures in landscape, horizontal mode. So you can get a view of what's happening. Take it at a good resolution. Generally recommended is 1920, 1080 pixels. And at a good frame per second. Generally it is a default setting. So that determines the amount of light in the sharpness of the image. I'll explain that later. It's a good lighting. And if you're doing a video, you know, you don't want background noise on it. Or sometimes even other shadows and this thing that we consider background noise. So that's so in general, you know, what pictures we take with our smartphones more than enough. But when you want to take pictures that you would later want to use in other things like, if you want to use these foot pictures on your website, or you want to use these pictures in some other material, being brochures or you're doing documents, video documents. They're using those pictures too as part of your presentations, things like that. Then that's where you would like to have some high quality, good quality pictures. And this is where cameras come in. So for general purpose, social media use, you know, smartphones are good. But in other cases, you want high quality. You think about buying some camera. So when you're going to think of buying cameras, then there's some guidance, you know, you would want us to say what are the quality pictures that I would be able to get using this camera. Is the camera itself easy to use? And if it's something that, you know, if you're covering events, events that are being held in different places, you need to be able to move the camera around easily. So is this camera going to be stationary? Is it going to be something that somebody needs to carry around, move around to cover an event? Then we need something that's light, not heavy, easy to use, fold, so on. Then you also want to think about control of settings, which we will explain it later. You know, so that I can compose my image the way I wanted to compose a picture. So I can have control over the settings that will keep the person taking photos that much more control. But when you buy a camera, you also ask the question, you know, can I interchange lens? Okay, and maybe I start off with the basic lens. And in the future, if I want to, you know, buy additional lens, people, can I use other lens with this camera? So those are kind of questions we would ask. And then of course, what is the cost of buying a camera? So in terms of the different camera options that we have, we just do a little comparison. There are a lot of smartphone cameras, which we just mentioned. There are basic point and shoot cameras. We just turn it on and shoot. It doesn't give you much liberty in terms of just in settings or so on. Then there's the next step is our mirrorless camera. So sometimes it refers to as microphoto, it's cameras. And then at the top of the line or top end is the DSLR cameras. Now generally, people would say, like, yeah, if you can, you know, if you have the money, definitely it's good to invest in a DSLR camera because of many benefits. You can, you know, you'll be able to generally these cameras give you the flexibility to give you a lot of control on what you're particularly going to take. You can see through the lens, you can compose your image, control a lot of the settings and they filter out a lot of the noise around the picture. And of course you can expand, you can change lens, you can do a lot more with it. So depending on the kind of camera, you know, basically like we said, you can start with smartphone cameras, just tell people, hey, just shoot. And this is what we do, you know, for some of our social media pictures, we just tell our people, hey, just shoot with your phone and send it in and, you know, we'll touch it up and use it on social media. So that's kind of when we want to do something quick and easy, we'll use that. Then there are people who may have their own point-and-shoot cameras. They are small, they easily carry around. It's not very big parking. They can take it when they go on trips and so on. They use that. They get those images and they share it with us and we can use those pictures. But as a church, when you want to invest in something, we have invested on what these DSLR cameras that we use, when our media team goes to cover an event, they would try to get the best pictures as possible because we're going to use it in other places and we're also going to keep people record of things happening. So generally, think about these things and, you know, some of the things that will help you make a decision about the kind of camera, the details that you look at, is there a manual mode allowed, that means can I manually control or adjust the settings before taking a picture? So basically, there are three main things, right? The aperture, the shutter speed and the ISO. Am I allowed to control these things? If the answer is yes, then okay, yeah, that's pretty good. It's going to help you take better pictures. The aperture is basically the opening of the lens. So if you want more light, you'll open it up a little wider, bigger, or if you want to cut out light, you produce the aperture. So that gives you a control of how much light comes in. Along with that, there is the shutter speed. That's how quickly the shutter will open and close. Again, that also controls the light that hits the sensor. And so if you use slow speed, obviously you're going to let more light come in, which means the image is going to be brighter. And if you use very high speed, you're going to let less light come in. So you adjust that based on the ambient light and where the sun is. Those kinds of things, you adjust that so you can control how much light is hitting the sensor. And the ISO is the level of sensitivity that you want. So now if you look for higher ISO, you can make the image more sensitive. So in darker situations, in situations where there's dark, you increase the ISO, give more light. You want it to be a little sharper. And there's all the minutes bright, a lot of light around. You can control how much light you want to allow. You want to allow more light, increase the aperture, lower the shutter speed, and increase the ISO. You let more light come in, get it right. So you play around with these three controls and you can compose your picture along that. Honestly, as a pastor, I'm not doing these things. I don't take photographs, I don't do all that. It's obviously the media team that does it. But when they come to you saying, hey, we have three options, we want to buy a camera, and here are the three options, then you compare these things. Okay, here's one camera, there's another camera, another camera. Of course price is an important thing, but at the same time you look at, what is the difference? And then the control that we have over these cameras, and in terms of that, settings control versus cost versus how easy it is to carry. So you look at all these things, and then this is the best camera for our use that we're looking at, therefore let's go with this. Just for you to understand and make the right decision. You and I are not going to be as pastors going around busy shooting photos. We are basically missing the words, but when it comes to making information on making a decision on which camera to buy, these are some things to think about. Some other things, of course, is the quality of the image that you can get. So you can also ask, you know, what's the best image that can come from this camera? Are you going something of higher quality than a 20 megapixel? That's good. How quickly, you know, what speed can we take photos on this camera? So the frames per second. So if you're going to be using the camera for action-related things, then of course you want to higher frames per second. That's not the purpose of this camera, but just general shots, then you don't need something very, with high FPS. Also another question you would ask is, can I save the raw image or in what format does this camera allow me to save the images? Many cameras these days will allow me to give you both the raw and the jpeg. So the advantage with the raw is that you can work on that raw image and, you know, sharpen it, refine it, color grade it, et cetera. Work with it to improve the final image and then save it in a jpeg format. So that's the advantage. If you can actually work with a raw image, make it the color you want and then save it. So that's an advantage. So these are some thoughts to keep in mind when you're deciding, okay, we're going to invest in buying a camera. You look at all these things and then you make a decision. And there are of course lots of good facts, so brands, that are available in these days. This information for you to when you're making a choice on camera or your church ministry. Now let's change our topic a little bit and talk about the PA system, the audio equipment. This again, this probably is a very important part of ministry. That means, because obviously we want people to hear the word of God and which means that when you're up on a pulpit and you're preaching and teaching people need to be able to hear or for that matter let's talk about the worship. When people are leading worship, you want the congregation to be able to participate in that worship in a meaningful way. So that means the sound system plays an important part in all of this. So just some general information here. So we need to keep in mind that whatever PA system we are using and we will talk about this in a little bit. It is actually creating what we call as a sound field inside the hall, the auditorium. So whether you're in a small hall that seats 15 people or if you have a big auditorium that seats 700 or maybe even 1000 people basically using the PA system you're creating a sound field that means there's a distribution of sound inside the auditorium and how and this PA system that you're using and the way it is set up creates the sound field and the person people who are sitting depending on where they are sitting are going to have a different experience. So one main thing is in the sound level in the decibel level that it is going to be so let's say the goal is to have something uniform as uniform as possible and as comfortable as possible in the sound level right? You all want something where you know it is it's so hard on the years that people can't enjoy or participate in the worship or they can't listen very clearly to what you say when you preach right? It's got to be the sound that they hear should be comfortable and it should be clear it should be able to hear very clearly what is being spoken or the worship leader of the music and so on so that's our goal because otherwise it can be very disruptive and I've entered I've gone into some auditoriums where I remember once when I went to one particular service and we were actually sitting at the back and it's not a very big auditorium maybe 200, 300 people auditorium and we were actually sitting I was actually sitting on the last the second last row somewhere like that and the sound so painful on my ear I actually wanted to get up and leave it's not that they were singing that the people were singing the worship was good meaning these were good people good worship but the sound was so painful I'm sitting at the back I actually wanted to get up I couldn't sit there I was wondering like how all these other people sitting inside this auditorium and they are able to endure this sound the worship itself was good I mean the songs that were being sung was good but the sound that was coming on the ear was so painful and I I I mean I just sat through it and went through it I'm just sharing my experience where the songs that are being sung may be very very worshipful etc the band may be doing their best all of that if the person sitting inside the auditorium if they are not having a good sound audio experience it can be very difficult and then in our own context when we've been in different auditoriums I've had people many times come and complain to me we can't hear the sound at the back that side there I can't hear anything or sometimes they come and say I'm sitting here it's too loud it's too painful they come and share this and then immediately doctor our sound came and say hey this is the feed that we bought we've got to do this we've got to fix it so how would you go about addressing that so the thing to understand is that the PA system that you're using is creating the sound field and then you need to measure at different points in the hall in the auditorium you actually need to measure what is the sound level now measuring the sound level is very easy so you can download an app on your phone the simplest way to do it yeah you download a mobile decibel reading app like you can download a sound level meter or decibel meter just download this app it's available and just put it on your phone and you can walk around in the auditorium and record it they just let the band play set them turn on the PA system band play and they just move around in the auditorium and say hey this is the sound level that's actually at these different points in the auditorium and you will obviously notice that at some points sound levels are very high some points maybe it's a little lower you can record that so you get a little understanding of the sound field inside the auditorium now as a guide this is something we have to keep in mind about 65 dB is good for the human ear if you go below 45 they are not going to be able to hear clearly it's too low if you go above 85 dB it's going to start hurting their ear people are going to feel start feeling uncomfortable and it is going depending on their tolerance level they will start complaining so basically this is 65 between 65 and 85 dB is where you want the sound levels to be now of course you need to take into account that okay then the auditorium is full of people there is going to be a lot of absorption so then the actual sound level measured in an empty hall would be different the sound level measured in an empty hall would be different from the sound level when the auditorium is full of people the level must be there are people obviously so you also have somebody quietly measuring when people are inside the auditorium right so when there are people sitting there inside the auditorium a lot of absorption is taking place people are wearing multiple clothes so the sound is being absorbed by people and different things that are there inside the auditorium and so the net sound feel may be very different from when you do it in an empty auditorium right so when people are there you measure okay so this is what people are actually experiencing when we have people sitting inside the auditorium the worship team is playing or the preacher is preaching this is what they are actually experiencing in different parts in the hall right and the goal is to keep it between 65 and 85 okay 65 and 85 that range throughout the auditorium it's very difficult to get an exactly uniform field sound field throughout the auditorium you need to position your speakers and all of that in a nice way for us to get a very nice uniform sound field it's not easy and in many auditoriums it's not even possible to find out the architecture of the auditorium but as long as the range is at a comfortable level from 65 to 85 people aren't going to be happy they'll be fine so this is something to keep in mind very simple tell a few people download the app on the phone just record the sound during the service or during the meeting just see it's within this range fine nothing to worry about if it is below people are going to say I can't hear if it is way above there is a tolerance level of course they won't complain when it is 90-95 but if it's getting too loud you're going to have complaints people are going to say hey I can't handle this it's painful and so then you know what to do that's the solution okay so this is something very simple but it is very important so we do tell our people and our sound people hey keep checking make sure everything is fine and people are comfortable at the back of the auditorium they should get to hear the front should not be too loud they shouldn't feel they use authority all that to keep a good uniform feel now so that's as far as the sound feel the sound levels, audio levels which is important now when we talk about the PA system itself so what kind of a PA system how would you go about thinking about buying a PA system these days we have what we call as a prepackaged PA system everything is put into a box the different components so it's very easy for us easy to carry about more and so portability is a good thing we have prepackaged systems but then there is not control over what's happening whereas if you have the ability to position your speakers in the different parts of the speakers in different places we have better control we make sure we don't do that so you have portability so for example when we have some portable systems it's easy just take one or two boxes they have amplifier and this one the speakers it defies all built into one box but especially it's useful when we are doing some events, small events here and there we just take it we have 1500 people so we just put it there plug it in connect your microphones so it serves that kind of purpose we can move it around easily and which we do we have different events in small venues it helps us with that but then when you have a large gathering then you don't use those small portable systems you've got speakers that are big and support the whole audience in the auditorium and the speakers have to be positioned properly so that there's a proper sound so different things that go into it there are microphones cables, amplifiers mixers there are signal processing effects that you can create through software I'll just mention that so engine when you're talking about this bassist I'm not an expert, I'm not an audio engineer but I'm just speaking from a pastoral aspect in the sense that it's good to understand these things so then you can know what is going on things are going wrong so basically you have you would have these speakers on the stage this very basic setup and you have what we call as a front of house front of house FOH front of house console so you've got a big mixer sitting up in front of the auditorium you don't see it in this picture but you've got mics through which the sound is coming in it comes into this console it's all mixed and the output is sent back to speakers which then provide the sound for the auditorium so this mixer here this console here is mixing the sound from all the speakers that are being used inside the auditorium and it's sending the output to the speakers that provides sound inside the auditorium now at the same time let's say we are having live streaming that's going on for live streaming the sound has to be mixed differently so the output from here the raw output goes to another console where over here somebody is doing mixing of the sound for streaming so over here there may be additional output coming from a presenter for the live audience and there is also this this Mac is then being used to mix the output and then this one goes out to our live stream so the audio is being mixed so main thing that you need to take away is the sound that is mixed for the auditorium the in-house and the mixing of the sound for the live stream audience both of these have to be done separately because the control for the live stream is a little different from what you do in house right so you actually need these two different consoles or mixers taking place so sometimes what we have what we have observed is people on the live stream they say hey I can't hear properly the audio is not loud enough everything is fine inside the auditorium everybody is happy inside the auditorium but our live stream audience they are not happy with the audio what is the problem the mixing for the live stream has to be done differently maybe they have to boost up the volume etc to make sure that the live stream audience can hear comfortably at the level that is good for them so that has to happen and so just keep that in mind so like we said there are pre-packaged PAS systems which are being accomplished about portability versus control so what could be the main components that go into this audio system and these are very basic things that you need just to keep in mind the output power of these speakers are measured in wattage so typically for a small audience you may need about 350 to 500 watts for large venues you need about 500 to 1000 watts or bigger more the crowd the more wattage or power output so if your sound person comes and says hey the current PAS system can only give us 500 watts but we've got a venue that has 1000 people so this is not going to be enough then he's just letting you know that you need more powerful speakers for the kind of audience and auditorium that you're in so he's meant to the output that the sound system can give you need something bigger so we have just generally you'll have stage monitors this provides sound for people on the stage so they can hear what's going on you've got the main speakers that provide sound for people in the audience these main speakers come in again with different built in speakers that provide sound in different ranges we'll talk about that and then many times you have what are referred to as subwoofers you'll see these big boxes sitting under the main speakers which they provide lower frequency sound to kind of so basically sound there are these different frequencies that we are emitting into the audience people are hearing a mix of this coming into the years so it has to be something that it gives a good blend so the subwoofers give the lower frequency sound now in the main speaker itself in this big box here you have what are referred to as midrange woofer and tweeter so sometimes if some person may come and say the tweeters are gone don't even want to see what's working about tweeters are gone it means that inside this box in these big main speakers be that part of the box that gives high frequency sound the tweeters they're damaged and so people will hear of course they will be able to hear from the midrange in the woofers and if you have subwoofers they'll be able to hear it but this frequency is they don't get it so they feel like something it's missing some does not complete so then of course you need to get that fixed so here's the break up here subwoofers are producing frequency the lower frequency the woofers are around 5 minute hertz midrange to under 3K tweeters of pollution high frequency 2K above the retail endpoints so basically there are these just within that speaker the different parts of the speaker that producing different frequencies I just keep that in mind because if your sound person says our woofers are gone then it's that means this frequency sound just we're going to put it here they feel something is missing or sound is not good something is missing or they say the tweeters are gone, high frequency sound they won't hear so you need a good combination a mix of these give the audience a good sound the other thing you just need to keep in mind is that the speakers can be powered or empowered after a passing so that means these active speakers there's a built in amplifier internal amplifier whereas for passive speakers you need an amplifier outside to boost the sound power of the sound so that's all it means active or passive typically these self-contained speaker systems would be active they already have a built in amplifier so you can carry a box around you don't have to carry many pieces it makes it easier and if you have a full range speaker somebody says we want to buy a full range speaker that means it's one cabinet that has all of these things built in with the mid-range and the tweeter like what we've shown is this is a full range speaker it's got everything in it makes it easy and if you want to give additional sound you can do the self-contained first make it complete out of the sound just some things to keep in mind when you're looking at audio equipment through the church and another important part of the audio equipment are in-year monitors these are things that are being used that are used by the worship team on stage so instead of using the monitors on stage that is instead of using these things on stage nowadays you can eliminate that you don't need that and instead you provide people on stage with these in-year monitors so they just put it in and they get sound coming into them from the mixer and they can hear the sound so then they know how they are sounding and how overall they are sounding so then they can adjust their their singing etc so these in-year monitors are something that's useful to invest in of course remember then for each person on stage 5 or 6 people on stage you need to buy them a receiver and of course they can bring the headset it's a little bit more expensive as compared to just having these stage monitors but it is very useful so nowadays if you can offer to do that then you can go ahead and buy these in-year monitors for the people on stage right so are you all with me so far or is it useful to me okay okay so nothing to I'm not going to ask you exams on what speaker to buy and all of that is this information for you to understand that you are sitting at your church so if you have a question please come no I'm not okay so this is just information for you to keep in mind so that you can have conversation with your audio people and talk to them and understand when they are talking to you you understand what they say so if they say hey this is the problem we need to you know we need to fix this or fix that at least you understand okay this is what he is saying you can say okay or I can say wait whatever you know it's not for us to know everything but enough to have a conversation with the person who is in charge of the sound so that you know the goal is inside the hall sometimes to be good people have to be comfortable so that the worship preaching can serve the people well but that in mind you can tell the people and I do tell our media team sound team hey I know please do a sound audit check everything you know make sure sound levels are comfortable out of the congregation gives me feedback I immediately talk to our media team hey so you know our people said sound in that corner was not good some problem was there please go and check because worship you can have good preaching but if people can't hear properly it's you know you're missing out on some of them so from that perspective it's good to know these things so right so let's take a break I know it's early but let's take a break we'll come back we'll talk about microphones some other aspects of this audio system again just this only for information so you understand and you know how to make decisions as you go along I'm not going to ask you to memorize any of this nothing it's just for you to have information so we come back at 11 o'clock and continue this okay thank you