Missions Emphasis

Recently my church focused all our energies  emphasizing our missions work in the church, in the community, and in the World.  As a part of that emphasis, we decided to take a wall outside our sanctuary and make it a three display video feature, along with a touch screen attached to a computer for online sign ups and to collect email addresses, etc.

Challenges

• We wanted the wall to be a plain wall the week before, then totally changed for Missions Sunday.  So all the installation work had to be done in one week.
• There was only about a 6 inch space behind the wall for running cables a good distance to the DVD players.
• There was no blocking in the wall for hanging LCD’s

Prep Work

• Our graphic artist designed a large scale image that would eventually become wallpaper, giving a context to our wall.
• I got dimensions of the wall and mocked it up using Google Sketchup.  As you can see, we went through a couple of versions of the graphics before we settled on one.

• I purchased the three televisions, (42″), and the mounts, three high quality HDMI cables, and three Panasonic Blue Ray players.  We considered using ProPresenter, or ProVideoPlayer, but ended up going with the Blue Rays to keep our costs down.
• We got our church electrician on our schedule for helping us during the installation week.
• I used a video monitor we had in storage and bought a source selector at radio shack for monitoring the DVD players without having to look at the televisions, since they are around a corner from the players.

Installation

• The Wallpaper was delivered and installed on a Monday, and the installer told us we would need to wait until Wednesday before mounting any televisions.
• Our electrician got our power and video cables tun on Wednesday.
• We hung televisions on the wall, connected power and video cabling. Note – We measured everything several times, and checked each other for accurate measurements.  Inaccurate measurements would mean nasty holes in the wallpaper.

• On Friday, we got our cables run for the computer to capture data, and got the touch screen powered up and working.

• Our process is fairly low tech.  We’re feeding the televisions with three Blue Ray players.
• Our video editor developed content and burned it to Blue Ray for us.  None of the videos have sound, since they would compete with each other.

Results

• The Missions wall made quite a buzz around the church and helped  to make Missions Sunday a huge success.
• Something that important to us, is that projects like this are scalable both in technology and in purpose.  The cables are run so that in the future we can deliver videos from a computer rather than the Blue Ray players.  Right now the plan is for this to be a missions wall only, but in the future, we could re-purpose the wall simply by changing the wallpaper and changing the content of the videos.
• Here’s some video of the wall I shot with my Flip camera.