Wiscosin church turns to Dante based system
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For years, City Church has relied on live stage productions supported by multiple large video projection screens, professional lighting and a full pro-audio-quality sound system to engage the congregation. But faced with the expanding scope and vision of the church's AV productions, City Church recently did a substantial systems upgrade by engineering and installing a completely new production workflow built upon Dante audio and the new Dante AV networked video platform.
“We have always believed in using technology to eliminate distractions and deliver our message in a clear, compelling and engaging way,” says Nathan Rohde, worship pastor, City Church. “We basically just did a complete overhaul of the entire sanctuary so we can now integrate audio and video seamlessly throughout our church, our education facilities and online.”
Rohde explained that the church needed to advance its capabilities on several fronts. The production quality in the sanctuary needed improving, and full AV content needed to be shared more extensively throughout the church facility. Leadership also wanted a better way to bring the same quality of their live productions to their streaming media services.
“As we researched potential network solutions, we learned about Dante AV and the Dante AV-enabled encoders from Patton. This looked like the direction we needed to go,” says Ryan Schaub, a technical volunteer at City Church. "The flexible scalability that an AV-over-IP network system offers is light-years beyond analogue cabling. The more we learned about the Dante ecosystem, the more we realised that this is what we needed.”
The Dante platform is a complete AV-over-IP solution that allows audio, video and control data to be transported over standard 1GB ethernet networks.
City Church Technical Director Macky Mikunda and his team converted their entire workflow over to an IP-based Dante AV network. Instead of unplugging and plugging cables into patch bays, they now route all signals using Dante Controller software. What previously took a lot of time to set up, is now done quickly with direct digital network connectivity, rather than chaining systems together and losing signal quality at each step.
Dante-AV Patton encoders are used with all of the church's SDI cameras and sanctuary projection screens. The video is distributed over the network with Dante Controller perfectly routing synchronized video and audio. Mikunda is now adding decoders for multiple screens throughout the facility so they can deliver live sound, video and graphics simultaneously to multiple areas throughout the church.
All stage box and snake cabling has been eliminated and replaced with a single Cat6 network cable. The church was able to keep their existing front-of-house board by simply adding a Dante card to the console, and they kept their existing amplifiers and speakers by using a set of Dante AVIO adapters to distribute audio signals over the network.
Sarah Karlen, the arts and communications pastor for City Church, added that Dante technology and its improvements to productions help make the church more relevant to younger generations. Having a logical and easy-to-use system has been helpful for the church’s many volunteers and students too.
