Meeting as a church virtually (1)

Places of worship are doing lots of things online.   Here is how things are being done, technically, at Hillsborough Tabernacle and Tapton Hill Congregational Churches in Sheffield.

The minister's family support the minister by doing the technical side - filming (our sons), processing and uploading files to YouTube and the Tabernacle website (her husband, the author of this post).

I didn't know too much about this sort of thing before the lockdown, and that may show in my narrative below, which to some people might be stating the obvious!  

Sunday Reflections

These are filmed with a digital SLR, which I then plug into my Windows laptop with a USB cable, so I can copy the file across.  The recordings are 5-10 minutes long and around 600 - 900 MB.  I learned early on that files of this size take forever to upload to YouTube on non fibre optic broadband!   

I looked for software that would reduce video file size and found Handbrake, a free application that seemed well regarded and is on CNET.  It compresses the file size and can reduce the resolution.  The resolution of the processed file is set to 640 x 480 (they are now filmed at that resolution, but the resulting files are the same size as before).  Handbrake reduces the file size to 10% of the original.  The originals are .mov, the Handbraked files are .m4v, which play in Windows Media Player.

I then upload the reflections to my YouTube channel.

One week we used the family iPad instead of the SLR, with the video transferred by USB cable.   However, two of the congregation commented that the sound level was too low, so since then I use Handbrake to increase the gain.  This seems to have solved the problem. 

One week the stripy pattern on the minister's clothes caused a stroboscopic effect on the recording.   The autofocus on the camera causes a slight whirring noise on the video, but this is not a serious problem.

I made a page on the Tabernacle website for these reflections and add a link to the page for each week.  The website is a Blogger site, so the video is embedded.  In more recent weeks I have set them to be published at 7 am on the Sunday rather than the Saturday when I do the processing.   

The YouTube channel now has 13 subscribers, and reflections have got between 50 and 85 views each.

Readings

In recent weeks we have also made sound recordings of Bible readings. Different people make the recordings so they are done in different ways.   One recorded on an Apple device and was a file format I couldn't read, so they kindly did it again as an m4a file, which tests showed played on Apple, Windows and Chrome.  

If need be I use Zamzar to convert file formats, having shown myself that you can't do it in QuickTime or with Handbrake (which won't handle audio).  Outside church, I used Zamzar to make convert a .3gp file filmed for school work on an Android phone into mp3. 

Another reading was recorded on Skype, with the reader Skyping the minister, who recorded the call.   But the call had a "video" - still photos of the two participants with their names.  I wanted to remove this and leave just the audio and was able to do this with Movie Maker.  

I did the latest reading.  I tried the Voice Recorder app that came as standard on my Windows 10 laptop but the sound was quiet (perhaps because the microphone is on the other side of the device, I thought later) and I could find no software that would increase the gain.  Speaking louder seemed not to make the recording louder and neither did using headphones.   Instead I installed Quality Apps' Voice Recorder on my Android phone, which produced a good sound level.  It also allows editing (I needed to remove 10 seconds of silence at the end, caused when I was trying to turn the phone screen back on to stop the recording!), but I couldn't work out how to do it, so I used Audacity on my laptop, transferring the audio from the phone.   

I discovered audio cannot be uploaded to Blogger or YouTube,  so I put them on Google Drive and put links on the church website.  (Later note: make sure you make it so everyone with the link can access it, the default is to make it so only people you name have access.   If you accept the default, everyone who wants to listen will need your permission).

Links to the video are sent to the congregation by email and are put on the Sheffield Congregational Churches Facebook page.   Tapton Hill has its own website, managed by someone else, so they are sent the link too.     

Bible Studies

The Bible studies are written by the minister in Word, and sent to participants in the weekly Bible study group held on Skype.   Because copying and pasting from Word into Blogger produces a lot of spurious HTML, I remove images and leave placeholders.   I then copy and paste the text into Notepad, and from there into Blogger, putting the images back in, adding ALT text.  

Videos for the Brigades

Tabernacle has Girls' and Boys' Brigade companies.   To stay in touch, the Minister does videos, which are filmed on a mobile phone, and then copied to the laptop, processed with Handbrake as above, and then put on YouTube.   There are no links on the church website for these, but a link to YouTube is put on the Facebook page.

Our use of Facebook Live for communion services is described on another post.