Victory World Church is a megachurch headquartered in Norcross, GA with two external campuses, along with a thriving online constituency serving the over 8,000 members who regularly participate in weekly services either in person or via live feeds. A host of products from AJA Video Systems assure that a reliable workflow is in place to produce the church’s highly complex productions without a hitch. Multiple HD Ki Pro Rack record/playback units, FS4 frame synchronizer, KUMO router, ROI region of interest scan converters and multiple FiDO Mini-Converters play a role in capturing and distributing video to their audiences near and far.

Chris Winnie is the Lead Video Engineer at Victory World Church and oversees the technology infrastructure for the entire organization.

“Everything that we broadcast is live to stream. There is no produced content. We use a lot of AJA equipment because it delivers the quality and stability that this level of programming demands.”

Victory World Church works closely with Clark, an AV integrator specializing in site specific House of Worship audio, video and lighting needs. Each new technical leap at Victory World Church generally involves three to four months of planning and execution, always working with best of breed solutions.

“We’ve been burned in the past using equipment that wasn’t up to par, so when we do builds we go with top of the line equipment and never cut corners,” added Winnie.

A typical Sunday service is captured by four Hitachi cameras, one on a jib and three on tripods with operators, along with three Canon cameras that are mobile on stage with operators. All of the mobile stage cameras go into the AJA FS4 for frame syncing and format configuration to 1080i at 59.94. Clean feeds from all of the cameras go into a combination of Ki Pro Racks and Ki Pros that are housed both in a server room onsite and offsite at satellite campuses.  There is a dedicated fiber connection between all of the campuses and each Ki Pro lives on the same network for easy file transfers back and forth. Winnie controls all of the Ki Pro devices via the web interface served from the Ki Pros’ built in webservers, triggering gang recording remotely. AJA FiDO fiber converters are used throughout the facility, mainly to transport signals to the projectors in the main auditorium.

Featured onstage, behind the 10 person band, is a 30 foot TV wall, along with two 16 foot screens on the left and right side of the sanctuary. The setup is also flanked with four vertical projection pillars, all being fed with realtime content off of the Ki Pros via Avolites’ AI video mapping software. The content featured on the screens is generally a combination of jumpback content, live video, lyric videos and more. AJA’s KUMO 1616 router is used to route all of the video to the screen surfaces on and surrounding the stage. KUMO connects to a Hog 4 lighting console to change the video routing and reflect what the AI media server is doing.

AJA ROI region of interest scan converters are used to feed three on stage monitors so that any given presenter can get a heads up of what content is being played at any given time on screens throughout the sanctuary, communicate with the video director, and also review any related notes during the show. The main video router for the production itself is a Grass Valley Miranda with 512 inputs and 576 outputs that control all of the audio embedding and de-embedding that goes into the Ki Pros.

A Ross Acuity switcher is used to control video from every source in the main sanctuary and works alongside four computer graphics workstations. The workstations all run Pro Presenter and are directed to display different graphic overlay and lower thirds content for each of the live streams (whether the feed is for the main campus overflow room, a satellite location or online channel).

A typical Sunday service at Victory maxes out capacity in the main church that seats 2,200, along with two overflow rooms that seat 900, plus satellite campuses and online viewers that reach thousands of online viewers tuning in to live broadcasts. The next project for Winnie is a new control room build out with the team at Clark, exclusively for the church’s online campus to ISO record every camera and destination via Ki Pro Racks.

“An added benefit of the Ki Pro Racks is that we can record and playback live while the show is going on, and immediately have a recorded segment to hand off to an artist who may want a copy of their performance for another purpose. Our equipment is constantly being updated with the best of what’s out there, because at this level of production there is simply no time for failure,” concluded Winnie.