I'm trying to keep this in the Technology category, so I'm going to be vague about the church stuff 🙂

During the pandemic, we always just set the laptop on a music stand in front of and slight to the side of the podium, and plugged the audio cable to the side of the podium to get quality sound. During the portion of the service when the feed needed to be off, the owner of the laptop walked up and manually took care of it. The whole setup always drove me crazy. I know nothing about professional camera setup, but I figured there had to be better ways that were simple enough.

At the end of last year, my organization had a bunch of money left over, so I asked the Bishop if I could use the leftover funds to buy a USB camera with a good optical zoom, and mount it above the doorway at the back corner of the chapel. He said he'd definitely love to have a camera installed, but to work with another member of our ward that apparently just went through the same exercise at the stake center.

It ended up taking a few months, but we bought a Fomako 20x NDI camera that uses PoE. The podium audio connects directly from the chapel wiring closet to the camera using an extra cat5e cable already in place (to keep audio and video in sync), and then another cat5e cable runs from the camera to the main managed switch that the church installed to provide filtered internet. Turns out that thing provides PoE to devices that need it. Other than running directly from the camera to the ports we put in the wall right behind it, there are no cables anywhere, and it seems some folks never even noticed the camera.

The software side of it has been a bit more interesting - the guy that helped me that was part of the stake center setup said we would need to use OBS software, and then install a couple of add-ons to get that to work - NDI source for OBS, and VB Audio Cable to pipe sound from OBS to Zoom. We did that for a little bit, and it was annoying and needlessly complicated. On top of that, I was trying to help the other Ward in our building get set up, and they were struggling with it. Later on, while trying to research ways to simplify, I learned that the company responsible for NDI - Newtek - has their own software tools package. One of the tools is a very simple system tray app called Webcam Input - it finds the stream from the camera on the network, and transforms it into a local webcam signal on the computer. Essentially, it's just like plugging in a USB webcam, and it works beautifully. I immediately ditched OBS and the extra add-ons.

Now, I just have a Surface Pro that I hold on my lap and handle the Zoom stream. When it comes time to shut off the feed for a certain part of the meeting, I turn off video and audio, and share a nice PDF that explains what's going on and that the feed will return momentarily. The other ward installed the NDI tools on the clerk PC, and they simply shut off the camera during that portion of the meeting.

I'm looking for ways to simplify it even more, but it's already awesome. I love it. Does anyone else reading this (if they got this far) also handle this for their church service - or something else? If so, how do you do it?