Five Minutes with… Cindy Zuelsdorf, Marketing Czar, Ensemble Designs

In Uncategorizedby tfwm

TFWM: What are some of the innovative ways in which houses of worship are using your video products?

Cindy Zuelsdorf: Many house of worship customers often need to tie analog and digital video and audio equipment together. One example that comes to mind is Kenneth Copeland Ministries. They have a couple dozen BrightEye 25 analog to digital video converters for brining consumer gear into the digital path. They are able to feed analog composite video and analog audio into the BrightEye 25 and output SDI video into their router for distribution to anywhere in the facility. That A to D converter has a time base corrector in it which let’s KCM use off-the-shelf consumer gear that needs to be time base corrected and synced to house. All of the Ensemble Designs gear they use them produce their KCM’s Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, podcasts and webcasts.

TFWM: Do you also offer audio solutions?

CZ: Dealing with audio embedding and disembedding is a topic that comes up repeatedly for house of worship. For plants that are primarily using an SDI path with embedded audio, demuxing the signal for audio sweetening can be handled with a BrightEye 70. HD or SD SDI from a camera or broadcast source can be fed to the BrightEye, disembedded and the AES can be fed to a suite for level adjustments or secondary audio processing for other languages. Churches working with multiple audio channels may, for example, find Spanish on channels 3/4 and Ukrainian on 7/8 and need to adjust channels. Ensemble’s BrightEye audio disembedders provide adjustments to move those audio channels around and adjust levels as needed.

TFWM: Do you have any solutions to assist worship facilities that have multiple venues?

CZ: One example is the reference generation and distribution system at McGregor Baptist Church. They use our BrightEye 56 reference generator to make bars and black and distribute those signals with BrightEye DAs to the cameras and other production equipment in their 3000 seat sanctuary, fellowship hall, and the youth facility. House black, digital audio reference and HD tri-level sync signals all need to be clock-locked in order for all the cameras, switchers and other gear to be timed properly, ensuring all equipment works together correctly. For remote situations, flight packs are used by house of worship organizations like Joyce Meyer to capture video out in the field. Ensemble’s reclocking distribution amplifiers, sync pulse generators and video to fiber converters are used in these flight packs to make field work possible.

TFWM: Which products of yours are the most popular right now and why?

CZ: The new BrightEye Mitto Scan Converter is getting a lot of attention right now. The phone is ringing off the hook. It seems that getting computer-based material from a church website or YouTube into a video production is more critical now then ever before. Folks need a really high-quality, easy way to get that footage into HD or SD SDI. We’re really having fun with this product. People are loving it. I think because it’s really easy to use and understand. You just use a mouse to select which part of the computer video you want to output. There’s no flicker or any other artifacts on the output which makes it great for a product or for IMAG use.

Scan converters aren’t new but the technology we get to use in conjunction with our BrightEye Mitto is new. DVI and HDMI connections make scan conversion much more appealing and easy to integrate. All the digital filtering and proprietary algorithms that we developed for our HD up and down converters port really well into our scan converter for use there. Plus there’s such a huge amount of material on the web that people want to integrate into productions these days.

The other product that is getting lots of attention is our BrightEye 72 SDI/HDMI converter. Here’s a way to use an inexpensive consumer monitor for a high-end application; pairing the BrightEye 72 with a consumer monitor is as good as using a high-end broadcast monitor. BrightEye 72 can take and HD or SD SDI signal from a master control or router and convert it to HDMI for monitoring. In addition to the video on the display, you can also see captions, a graph of the audio and time code displayed. For facilities dealing with closed captions and audio presence monitoring, this converter is really useful.