I'm finished! Well, sort of. 

I did complete the updates that I wanted. I'm happy with the updates and it does reflect the changes that were needed. But as with everything, now I will move onto other aspects that will bring me more clients - marketing!  I know that's a whole other subject and I don't think I ever concentrated on my marketing. Most of my work was through word of mouth and yes, you do want work through that avenue, it's an easier sale when someone refers you.  So as I move to this area, I will also share my findings, trials and errors.

The other project I was working on was the live streaming setup for my church. We wanted to go from one iPhone and an audio recorder to a full blown two camera setup with a live switcher with lower thirds graphics. This would allow our small church to look a little more professional in the Facebook and YouTube world. 

The setup with I chose to go with comprises of the following:

ATEM Mini Pro switcher

Apple Mac Mini computer

two (2) LG 27in Monitors

Behringer Xenyx 8 channel Mixer 

Worship Tools (formerly Presenter) software

OBS

ATEM Software Control

After hooking up everything I found one (major) issue. While researching how to connect three (3) monitors, I knew you could use USB ports and USB to HDMI converters to connect multiple monitors, and the Mac Mini had 2 lighting, 4 USB and 1 HDMI port so I thought I would be good. The issue I later realized was that the Mac mini - no matter how many ports you have - only allows you to connect two video sources straight out of the box. Now you may say, "what's the problem then, you have two monitors and you can connect two". Well initially I wanted to connect three monitors. Worship tools has an output monitor that uses the whole second monitor so that you can't use it with anything else, and the ATEM  needs  dedicated monitor, and the last monitor was for accessing anything I needed from website or other programs on my computer - hence my need for three monitors. I tried everything that I knew to try to figure out something but I just couldn't work it out. Also, being that I live in other state from where my church is, I had also scheduled training that evening. I could still do the training but the setup would look a little different and we wouldn't be able to use the setup I had designed. I still had another day to return to see it I could figure out a solution, but not another day for training. So we went ahead and did the training. The remainder of the night I kept researching and searching YouTube for answers to my issue. Then I remembered I had previously tried working with NDI Tools. NDI Tools has a NDI monitor feature that you can install and your system thinks the NDI monitor is a separate monitor installed on your computer. I was thinking that this may be the answer! I couldn't wait to get back to the church to try it out the next day.

After installing the NDI software and opening up the NDI Monitor  - the system did recognize the NDI monitor and we were good to go! Thank you Jesus! If you want to check out our live stream you can watch us on Facebook - FUMC Pacoima or on YouTube at First United Methodist Church of Pacoima

Next up, live streaming and marketing challenges

Darrell