I blogged previously about the setup for broadcasting church meetings. And again about some alternatives. But in the interest of trying to make improvements, I am still working to make the church meeting broadcasts better. This is an update from February 2021 to catch some of the changes that have gone on so far this year, including adding a on-podium microphone.

First big change was to buy a dedicated laptop for the broadcasts. We bought a Chromebook to minimize maintenance. As the Chromebook will be sitting unused 6 out of 7 days, I didn’t want to be responsible for constantly monitoring it for viruses and malware. And with a cheap price tag and long battery life, it seemed like a good fit.

But there came the first bump. It turned out that the Vitage webcam we use combined with Zoom on Chrome doesn’t quite give us the controls we would like. While the camera is capable of nice clean HD video, the Chrome driver is defaulting to a blocky, low resolution. And the Zoom client on Chrome doesn’t give any controls for selecting a different resolution. Very disappointing. I hope Zoom fixes that in the near future, but for now I’ve switched to using an old Logitech webcam I personally own that defaults to a much higher resolution.

In 2021 our unit switched meeting time to after noon, and two other units have the building before us. The Takena ward has been setting the camera up on a tripod and leaving it in place after their meeting, so I’ve just gone with it and started using the tripod. While this looses the advantage of having the camera on the podium that can move up or down with the microphone, it does give a little wider angle which some people like (I still prefer it closer, but whatever). I do move the camera closer than they do – they set up the tripod on the first row bench, but I move it on to a table to get a couple feet closer to the speaker, and that gives a convenient place to put the laptop.

This caused a second bump though. There seems to be something strange about the audio angles that caused the audience noise, even that from off to the right, to be picked up by the mics on the camera. And having the camera mics further from the podium meant the signal from the speaker was lower. Again, Zoom didn’t have any sort of gain control for the microphone, which is a nuisance. So after a couple weeks of complaints, I purchased a lavaliere (aka. lapel) mic and clipped it to the mic on the podium. The one I bought is a USB device with a 20 ft cord, so I just ran the cord down the existing mic shaft and over to the laptop. It worked well, and really cut out chapel noise.