I started live streaming the worship services at Faith Lutheran Church since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously I was recording the full service, going home and editing the video to just contain the sermon, exporting and uploading the sermon, children’s message, and Sunday bible study. Now that we live stream, a lot of the time involved with after church editing has disappeared.
This guide will go through my current work flow on Sunday, what I now do after services, and the equipment I use to make it all happen.
Basics
Before you start buying equipment or setting up your live stream make sure you have the following:
- YouTube Channel – this is where we live stream our services. The account must be active for a little while before live streaming can be enabled. If you want to live stream from your mobile device using the YouTube app you need 1000 subscribers. You can live stream from other apps without this restriction.
- Fast Internet – you need at least a 10mbps upload speed. Use speedtest.net to check your upload speed. I typically only stream using 3.5mbps to give plenty of headroom. If you share your wireless network with the congregation, you may need to change or restrict access during services so any internet use during services doesn’t interfere with the live stream.
- Photoshop or other software – this is useful for setting up thumbnails and other artwork on your website or on the live stream videos.
Kit.co – Equipment List
This page lists the equipment we use for the live stream – including the camera, wireless mics, and HDMI capture device. You don’t need this exact equipment and you may already have similar gear you can already use. The most important part of the live stream is good audio. If the people watching cannot clearly hear the Pastor they won’t watch. At a minimum you need to mic the Pastor (even if he doesn’t use one for amplification) and get the direct audio feed. Don’t rely on capturing audio from the camera’s onboard mic.
https://kit.co/jffmrk/church-live-stream-setup
iPhone Live Stream
This is the simplest setup. You can put a phone mounted to a wall, or on a tripod near the front of the stage. This is what I have people do when I am not able to attend church.
- iPhone – with YouTube app (if you have 1000+ subscribers) or Prism app.
- Lightning to 3.5mm connector
- StarTech 3.5mm mic/audio splitter
- COMICA wireless mic
I connect the wireless mic output to the iPhone to get good audio. The live stream is “no frills” and starts and stops from the app you use to stream.
Computer Live Stream
Most of our live streams are from the computer. Using a basic camcorder mounted to the back wall, we can zoom in to frame the altar and where the Pastor usually stands. An HDMI cable is run from the camera to the USB capture device. Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is used to layout the scenes and control the live stream. We have a slide show and countdown running before the service starts and switch to a new OBS scene with a basic footer and a full screen video of the service.
You can use either Mac or Windows computer. The computer should not be too old and have a stable internet connection. If you use wireless, make sure it has a good signal. It would be even better to have the computer directly connected to ethernet to avoid any wireless interference.
The live stream is pre-scheduled on YouTube. Whoever is doing the live stream will need to have access to the YouTube channel to start the stream. During the live stream I use the “Record” feature of OBS to record the sermon on the computer. This allows me to upload the sermon immediately after the live stream to make it available to those that just want to watch the sermon and not the full worship service.
Post Processing & Podcasts
At the end of worship service when I am home I also upload an audio only version of the children’s message, sermon, and bible study. This is published as a podcast to allow anyone to listen to the messages without watching the video. This is useful for those driving in their car and listening to the message later in the week. I have a pre-recorded intro music added to the beginning and pre-recorded outro clip added to the end.
The audio levels are usually not uniform so I do a little processing on them using a compressor and normalizer to help boost the quite parts, decrease the loud parts, and overall level the output to try to make it sound uniform to anyone listening.
- Audacity – a free audio processing editor. I used this for a while before I switched to Adobe products.
- Audition – is part of a paid Adobe CC subscription.
- Anchor.fm – a free podcast website. It can also distribute your podcast to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other providers.
- iTunes – I use this to convert the audio to an MP3, add a thumbnail and title information before uploading to Anchor.fm
Questions?
Let me know if you have any questions or need more details.