Victory World Church is a megachurch headquartered in Norcross, GA, with two external campuses, along with a thriving online constituency serving the more than 8,000 members who regularly participate in weekly services either in person or via live feeds. A host of products from AJA Video Systems ensure a reliable workflow is in place to produce the church’s highly complex productions without a hitch.
Chris Winnie is the lead video engineer at Victory World Church and oversees the technology infrastructure for the entire organization. “Everything we broadcast is live to stream; there is no produced content,” he said. “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 AV integrator Clark and each new technical leap at Victory World Church generally involves three to four months of planning and execution. “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,” said Winnie.
There is a dedicated fiber connection between Victory World Church’s campuses, and each AJA Ki Pro lives on the same network for easy file transfers.
A typical Sunday service is captured by four Hitachi cameras—one on a jib and three on tripods with operators—along with three mobile Canon cameras 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 AJA 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 video wall, along with two 16-foot screens on the left and right side of the sanctuary. The setup is also flanked by four vertical projection pillars, all being fed with real-time content from the Ki Pros via Avolites’ AI video mapping software. The screens typically feature a combination of jumpback content, live video, lyric videos, and more. AJA’s KUMO 1616 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 presenters can see which 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 controls 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.
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. 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,” said Winnie. “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.”
