This Article is printed in the January 2010 edition of the Adventist Messenger.
I remember sitting at my computer back in the year 2000, while I was pastoring in Newfoundland, trying to watch a video over the internet on a 56k dialup connect.
What an unpleasant experience that was. Kind of like driving through a Newfoundland snow storm in January.
The video would start and stop every few seconds and you spent more time staring at the word “buffering” on the status bar then watching the video. And to make things worse, for a few seconds that the video actually played in between stops, it was choppy, pixilated and hard to see.
Well, those early days of Internet video and the unpleasant experiences associated with it are long gone. Streaming video and audio have come a long way since then.
Youtube
According to an online source, 57 million people listen to Internet radio every week and in 2006, people watched more than a million streaming videos a day on YouTube YouTube has just announced in May 2010, that the number of videos watched daily at the website has broken the two-billion mark as the service begins celebrating its fifth birthday. (Source from Yahoo News)
21 million Canadians viewed more than 3.1 billion videos online during the month of Feburary 2009
Online video consumption continues to grow at an astonishing rate. comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, released a report showing that 21 million Canadians viewed more than 3.1 billion videos online during the month of Feburary 2009. comScore, Inc. also reports that an average of 15.5 billion videos are watched online in North American each month and 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally in Sept 2009.
With the recent technological advances in faster networks for mobile devices such as Apple’s 3G iPhone and the Blackberry Storm, online mobile video consumption is alive and well.
With these staggering facts in mind about the Internet and online video consumption, streaming your audio/video sermons is a huge evangelistic tool.
Getting Video Online
Here are the steps you need to follow to get your next sermon from the pulpit to the information highway:
Step 1. Record the events from your church (sermons, seminars, etc…)
To record an audio file, you can use a computer with audio recording software or a small mp3 recorder with a line input. To record the video you should use a digital camera that has a firewire output.
Step 2. Transfer your recording to your computer.
Connect your video camera to your computer using the firewire connection and cable. The computer will detect that your camera is now connected.
To get the audio from a mp3 recorder you can connect the devise to your computer by a USB cable. The computer will detect that your audio devise is connected.
Step 3. Edit your audio/video file on your computer and convert it to a format suitable for use on the web.
You can use one of the many specialized video editing software programs available like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas Pro, Quick Time Pro or Final Cut Pro for the Mac OS X to edit your video files.
For editing audio files you can use software like Audacity or Fission for Mac OS X.
Then you can export (encode) your file(s) to a web format like: Flash (.flv), MP4, Widows Media (.wmv), Real Media (.rm), Quick Time (.mov), MP3 (for audio).
Step 4. Upload your file to a media server.
Contact your website provider to ask for media storage. Then use a FTP program to upload your file(s) to the media server.
There are many choices available for a good FTP program. File Zilla is free for Windows. For Mac OS X an excellent choice is Transmit.
Step 5. Add information about your file(s) on your website and link to them.
If your church website is an Adventist Church Connect site that is provided by the North American Division to every church in North America, then you could use the media modules already available to you. These features make it easy to add info about your audio/video files like: title, description, URL (a link to your file location to the media server), duration, size etc.
If your church is not using an Adventist Church Connect website then the best option for video is called, “JW FLV Player” and can be found online at http://www.longtailvideo.com/.
If you are using a website that is powered by a WordPress CMS then you could use the sermonbrowser plugin available at http://www.4-14.org.uk/wordpress-plugins/sermon-browser.
Well, I hope this information and step by step guide will help you in getting your audio and video files from your church to the internet. Lets continue moving forward and learning how to better use the technology opportunities God has made available to us for Leading People to Jesus.
