Celebration Church – based in Jacksonville, FL – produces, broadcasts and records several live religious services and events every week. After each engagement, the church shares the recordings with religious institutions and online audiences around the world. Last year Celebration began planning for the construction of a new 2,700-seat worship sanctuary and seized the opportunity to upgrade its recording and broadcast workflow from SD to HD. To simplify the transition, the church enlisted the expertise of WAVE, a systems integrator and design firm located in Charlotte, NC.

From inception through to final delivery WAVE collaborated closely with Celebration to implement an audio visual lighting (AVL) design for the new sanctuary that included both an HD projection and broadcast system. The original blueprint called for Apple® ProRes recording devices capable of synchronizing timecode stamps across five different ISO feeds – for which AJA’s Ki Pro Racks proved ideal. The devices’ gang recording capabilities helped simply the process, as the Ki Pro Racks could be linked together via LAN connectivity through an Ethernet switch. This allowed the Celebration team to assign one Ki Pro Rack as a master recording device that could control all others in the chain.

Paul Henderson, WAVE Design Principal shared, “We have worked with AJA gear on a number of occasions, and it has always been reliable; Ki Pro Rack was a natural choice for this environment and for Celebration’s transition to HD. We knew it would fit seamlessly into the workflow and also cut recording and ingest costs significantly.”

Celebration’s sanctuary officially debuted in November 2012 and currently houses eight AJA Ki Pro Racks (located in an equipment room) and five Sony cameras (spread throughout the sanctuary), in addition to a Ross Vision Switcher, coolux Pandora’s Box Media Server and more (based in a central control room).

Ron Dubois, Celebration Church’s Video Engineer, now relies on the Ki Pro Racks to capture weekly footage of each event in Apple ProRes. At the completion each service or event, he removes the drive modules from the Ki Pros and transports the modules to an off-site office for editing in an Adobe® Premiere Pro® suite before sharing the final version with other churches or on Celebration Church’s website. “One of the biggest advantages of the Ki Pro Racks is that you can easily swap out drives as you would on a conventional server. I can pull out a drive, take it over to our office five miles away, hook it up to our edit suites and I’m ready to go,” he says. “That alone saves us a ton of time and really helps boost productivity.”

With the Ki Pro Racks in place, Dubois also has the flexibility to replay pre-recorded services and events directly off the recording devices. He notes, “If a pastor isn’t available for a service, we can easily replay an earlier service that was recorded in the sanctuary right off the Ki Pro Racks – just like that.”

Leveraging the integrated web-browser control on the Ki Pro Racks, Dubois is also able to store devices in a separate equipment room and control the master recording device remotely. “We love that we can start and stop the devices all at once without being in the same room. It saves us space in an often overcrowded control room,” Dubois explains.

“The Ki Pro Racks are a great, economical way to make the transition to digital without having to invest in a huge, expensive server. No matter how much we push them, they continue to perform consistently – even if they’re running all day long,” he concludes.

For further information visit www.aja.com