I gave my first webinar in a long time and things have really improved from a few years ago.

There are two components you need to provide: video and audio. Unfortunately, most of the services that combined video and audio also charge a premium over the individual services. So I ended up going with separate services.

There are many services available. Here are the best of the video services. Of course, I will always be glad to hear about other services that I may have missed.

Video conferencing

WebEx - the old standard. And old is right. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone, it is just too complicated and ultimately too expensive. It reminds me of Norton Utilities - an application that was originally hot and cutting edge but now is a cash cow getting by on its reputation without upgrading.

Central Desktop Live - This looks promising. It has a nice calendar feature which is helpful and they provide a conference call number that you can use. Unfortunately, I had a lot of technical problems which were mostly my own fault for not understanding the software better. On the other hand, other packages were so easy that I assumed this one would be too. I will be giving this one another try. Support for the Mac is there but a little misleading. It definitely requires more set up time than the other apps I looked at.

Glance.net - This is what I ended up using and I would recommend it highly. It is simple to use as it just duplicates your monitor. There is a simple dotted line that shows you what is being sent out. It is simple for the incoming audience. All they need to know is the code to login and they are in. Glance uses Java and the client app is small and no one had any difficulties getting started, it was pretty much invisible. The pricing is $50/month for unlimited number of meetings for up to 15 attendees.

GoToMeeting - A spinoff of GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting lets you host an unlimited number of meetings for up to 10 attendees per meeting for $49/month. They have GoToWebinar which allows you to have an unlimited number of attendees for $99/month.

There are a number of different services that I chose not to mention for various reasons: no pricing freely available, excessive babble about “synergy” and “business strategies”, extremely high pricing or serious limitation (in my mind).

Recommendations

For the casual user, I would recommend Glance.net. It was extremely simple to set up and use and things went off without a hitch. I will be giving Glance.net another look.

This is a continuation of a guest post that I did on Faith and the Web run by Anna Belle Leiserson, a great blog. We haven’t actually met but she was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog.

In that blog, Member-Only: A Wiki in Sheep’s Clothing, I talked about the challenge of introducing any new technology to a congregation. We were successful with the Members-only site because we (finally) focussed on making it useful rather than the technology itself. This article gets into some of the tweaks that I had to do to smarten the system up for public consumption.

I covered content in the previous article. Here the issues are

• the Main Page
• Security
• Categories
• Things you need to know
• Resources

Almost like Jeopardy!

Make the Main Page Special

The Main page is the landing point for everyone coming into the members-only site. It is important to make it as attractive, informative and easy to navigate as possible. This typically means making it very non-standard from a wiki standpoint but this was crucial to helping people get oriented.

“Look What I’m Missing!” The main page was set to be accessible without logging in. This meant people could browse part of the site before they asked for an account. They were intrigued by what they saw and were highly motivated to get an account and actually use it!

Security

Security is an absolute requirement.

You can set the site up so that only members can read and edit pages. Visitors can be allowed to see a small subset of pages but they can’t edit or create accounts.

Our policy is “No Pseudonyms Allowed.” We have a “Request an Account” form that requires the first and last name, email address, phone number and a reference from the congregation. Then I manually create the new account. The system emails them with a temporary password which they have to change the first time they log in. Believe me, this is a lot less work than dealing with spam.

Establish Categories

Categories are the life blood of the wiki and you need to use them to create some structure. Categories are tags on a page that allow you to find sets of articles in the site. You can easily create pages that collect all the articles in a specific category, Help for example.

The extension (plugin) Dynamic Page Lists (DPL) allows you to create dynamic content based on combinations of categories. With DPL you can easily create lists like: New Pages, Recent Edits, Most Popular, which all figure prominently on our main page.

Things that you need to know

 but are hard to find out

• MediaWiki:Sidebar - this page controls the navigation bar to the left.
• MediaWiki:Common.css - CSS put on this page affects all the other pages.
• Templates - Just be aware that almost anything in curly brackets {{…}} is a template or magic word. The contents of a template page are substituted into that space. These are used extensively on Wikipedia. Templates make it easier to create a consistent look and feel but it also makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Magic words are system variables like {{PAGENAME}} would be replaced by the actual page name.

Resources

• MediaWiki software
• MediaWiki Users forum Great resource for figuring out how to do things.
• Dynamic Page List Extension (careful, there are two other variants)
• Preloader - for creating boilerplate. Users hate empty pages.
• LinkedImage - optional for certain functionality in DPL
• Word2MediaWiki - Word macro for converting word docs to wiki markup language. Not great but a start.

After spending the week at GA in the Communications room, I saw a lot of video taping going on and figured it might be useful to talk about the setup at Chalice.

We started recording our services as part of a multisite program with Temecula Valley UU. Our biggest use has been by our pastoral care team showing the services to shut-ins. This has been a big draw and there has been a steady demand for the recordings by the committee.

The Sony Handycam DCR-SR100 turns out to be a nice piece of work. This is not a professional quality camera but I highly recommend it for starting to record video of your services.

The main benefit of this camera is that it has a 30-gigabyte hard drive that stores over 7 hours of high-quality video which you can download directly to your computer or burn from the camera directly to a DVD recorder. That’s pretty sweet for newbies.

 The audio captures Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound via its built-in microphone. It works well and the limitations are going to from the location at the camera rather than closer to the source. That means if someone is sitting next to the camera with a sniffle, you will HEAR it.

The camera comes with Sony Vega video processing software. I use Adobe Premiere Pro because that’s what I learned. You’ll learn that processing video can take a long time and use lots of disk space. Constructing DVDs is another issue altogether. Keep it simple and forget the fancy menus for now.

The rest of the features don’t really matter too much until you get a little more sophisticated. A few notes:

• The camera stores video in 2Gb chunks which is about 30 minutes. That screwed me up the first few times until I realized what was going on.
• The shoe at the top is propriety to Sony
• There is no way to get any other audio feed into the camera.
• The camera can take 3 megapixel stills but, frankly, it sucks at taking stills. Very grainy with lots of color noise. Any cheap digital camera can do better. Save yourself a lot of headache and stick to video unless you are really really desparate.
• Don’t bother shooting in “wide-screen” mode. All it does is lop off the top and bottom of the video. And besides, it is a big pain as far as compatability.
• You’ll definitely need a tripod despite the photo above.

Because I am anal-retentive, I extract the audio and do some noise reduction on it. There is a big air conditioner compressor and an equally big “voom voom voom” in the audio.  But luckily it easily removed. Then I can’t help but adjust the lighting because we have ugly fluorescent lights.  

Someone donated a miniDV camera recently that is a little older but I will be comparing the results.

I’ve struggled with cassette tapes, Sony minidisk recorders (multiple kinds), mp3 recorders. Finally, I did some research into small recorders and invested in a Zoom H4 and boy I have never been happier.

There are other field recorders that you might want to check out such as the Sony MZ-M100 or 200, Edirol R-09, M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 among others. There are some great reviews of all of these units in gory detail, particularly by Mark Nelson.

Why is it handy for church work?

1. It’s easy to use. On the top panel, four small buttons select between MP3 and the three WAV sample rates. The relatively large Rec button does what you think. Press it once and it flashes to signify “standby.” A second press starts recording. Couldn’t be simpler.
2. Records up to 16 hours. The Zoom H4 uses SD memory up to 1 Gb. That’s good for about 1,000 minutes (that’s 16 hours) of recording in mp3 format. Two AA batteries are good for about 4 hours of recording. So, I get in early, set up the recorder, turn it on and go have coffee (yes, before the service!). There is no rushing around to flip tapes or changing disks.
3. The two built in microphones work great for capturing the whole service: sermons, music and anything else that goes on. You can attach the Zoom to a tripod. Or, what I typically do, attach the Zoom to a mic stand (with an Edirol  microphone stand adapter) which lets you hoist the unit up higher with a smaller footprint than the typcial tripod.
4. Download the file directly to your computer. The USB port allows you to connect to your computer and download the files directly rather than re-recording them in realtime. 

But wait, there’s more!! There are two combo 1/4″/XLR jacks that let you use, well, quarter inch and XLR cables meaning that you can use REAL microphones or take the feed off a sound system. The Zoom also comes with 24 & 48V phantom power for condenser microphones (but be sure to be using the AC adaptor, phantom power will chew through batteries fast fast fast).

But wait, there’s even more!!

For the geeks, it has an onboard limiter or compressor, numerous mic models, easy gain settings, the list goes on. You can even use it to record directly to your computer if you are so inclined. Great for multitrack recording.

 
You can use the on-board mics OR the two jacks but not both simulataneously. You can set the gain on the side panel, hi, medium or low. It’s not continuous but at least it has fixed gain settings and not autogain (although that is available through the menus).

Annoyances

Every unit has its annoyances and problems. To get at some of the advanced features you have to use their navigation system which involves a menu button (the one directly under the screen) and an a tiny scroll knob on the right hand side to move between menus and edit parameters. Yikes! I can’t tell you how many times I have overshot the menus. It is counterintuitive but luckily, you don’t have to delve down into the menus that much. The toggle switch is at the right of the view above. You can just see it in the picture at the top of the page as a bump to the right of the record button.

The screen is a bit tiny and, er, hard to read depending on your eyesight. And because of the way you use it, sometimes you have to try to negotiate the display upside down. It would have been nice if it had been a little bigger. There is a post (somewhere) describing a home-made magnifier setup that attaches to the Zoom.

Summary

The Zoom H4 is very “handy” because its small, easy to setup for recording and easy to transfer to a computer. And, beyond that, it has a parcel of additional features that make it a great tool for serious recording in a small package. Its features vastly outweigh its annoyances.

Technology, no matter how neat, does not create an audience.  Lots of technology gets implemented but never used.  So, how do you create services or content that people will actually use?The key is to find an existing process in the congregation and find an application that’s actually useful to the people involved without changing the process. After a great deal of effort, we now have an online calendar that the administer uses which also generates tons of dynamic content for the website. But the process is essentially the same as the paper process that she had in place before.Some time ago, I implemented an online calendar several year ago but it was soundly ignored. I could not get anyone to use. And because it was not accurate, no one used it. The problem was a process/social/requirements issue not a technological one.