As you can imagine life here at NewSpring has gotten real interesting and exciting! With James Chavez joining the team and becoming he new Worship Pastor it has been a bit of a roller coaster to get him up to speed and hit the ground running with all tech items…

James is going to oversee all things that have to do with the Worship Center on the weekend, therefore he will oversee Audio, Video, and Lights. I’m excited to what he will be bringing to the table and keep your eyes open for an email invite to an all tech meeting we will be having with James =) It will be a time where James can cast his vision for NewSpring Church Worship and NewSpring Studios. We are still trying to nail down a good date but once we know I’ll make sure to let everyone know as soon as possible and as early as possible that hopefully everyone will make it. This will be a mandatory meeting since a lot of things from this meeting will affect the entire Studios team.

One thing I’m definitely pumped about is LIGHTS! Now that we have a worhsip pastor here we can move forward and decide what direction we will be going with on Lights. In fact tomorrow James and myself are getting together to do some short-term and long-term tech equipment planning! I’m so so so excited!

If you have any questions now, feel free to email me at luis.alicea@newspring.org and I’d be happy to respond =)

One last thing…it’s going to be quite the ride this year 2012 and I’m prepared and excited to see what God has in store for NewSpring…this past weekend we had over 6100 people…mind blowing! When I was first hired we were averaging 800–900.…so buckle up this year is going to be awesome!!

We are starting off with a Jands Vista S1 controller. I say starting off because the goal is to have this guy be our starter controller and learn from it and then eventually upgrade to a bigger Vista console. The bigger ones use the exact same software just more capabilities, so no real need for training when we upgrade to the bigger one later on down the road.

The S1 is basically a small controller that hooks into a PC. It is a PC based software that we will still be using for now.

The software is very powerful and we will be able to do a lot of timing easier and faster! You can check out the software here. My favorite screen shot of the software has to do with timing. It looks very much like a linear video editing type software when it comes to timing. No longer do you need to calculate timing based on beats per minute or anything like that. You can simply drop a cue into the timeline and either expand it to last longer or shorten it to make fire for a short period of time. A bar appears and slides across as you initiate the cue and it shows you when a cue is about to fire, if your timing is off by a second or half a second then simply grab your cue with a mouse and drag it over a bit on the timeline so it lines up properly…

This kind of gives you an idea. I know it looks confusing right now but trust me it’s light years better than what we have to deal with now!

A note on lights…

We have purchased a new lighting controller! It will not be in until probably late next week and I will not install it until the following week (December 12th). So if you come for light training know that there will be quite a bit of re-training on the new system once it’s in place!

What a weekend! Or I should say what a week! Steve Shewlakow (from MGA), Tyler Gottschalk, Billy Poore, Corey Poore, Jesse Mahannah, and myself worked on the sound system this week.

Monday while Billy and his crew started hanging the speakers, Steve, Tyler, and I worked on the amp rack in the projector room. Removing all of our old amps, which we had about 15 of them and replaced them all with 5 Lab Gruppen C Series amps!

These are the old Crown Amps…

Our new Lab Gruppen Amps

New Amp Rack wiring…doesn’t it look so clean? You can tell I didn’t touch this =)
Tuesday was spent moving some of the speakers in place and pitching them properly.

Using Block and Tackle to move speakers

Holding the line while Steve adjusts Pitch

More moving of speakers with block and tackle

Wednesday we wired the back of all the speakers and triple checked our wiring before kicking on the system.

Old speaker wiring that’s no longer needed

Wednesday afternoon we kicked the system on and after a heart stopping moment of no sound (Steve had the DSP’s muted!) everytime came on and we produced some sound. We then spent most of Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday tuning, timing, equing, and listening to the entire system.

I had an amazing time during this whole project and I learned quite about about sound especially in the lower frequencies! I’m really excited for some new software we will be getting to continually check our system and other systems across our campus! (It’s called Smaart)

This would give us quite a bit of capabilities…

We can multi-track record to any computer on campus
We can send the audio to multiple locations on campus
We can also send audio from any computer on campus directly to the soundboard

Picture this…We have some event that Kidzworld is featured in the main auditorium, take a mac and have it capture their audio and send it via the network and then we can pull it up on our soundboard like it was a regular input. The possibilities and capabilities are pretty awesome! Of course this is only one side of the puzzle, the other being video…

Unfortunately I keep running into an issue…essentially every time I plug in the Dante card, the network comes crashing down and locks up. Sometimes I have to even restart the main servers to get DHCP back up and running.

So that’s why I’m having the Dante Blues…but hopefully I can figure out the cause soon so we can start multi-track recording digitally and that way our sound quality will improve on DVDs and broadcast!

Here is the RSVP link!

RSVP as soon as you can so we know what to get for food. Thanks

We’ve successfully replace all four subs that are in the catwalk, but only the Dual 18’s are currently operational. We’ve hit a wiring snag that more than likely will not be resolved until November 7th!

We are going to continue putting up new speakers this week and next week but they will probably not be activated since we are not installing the new amps until November 7th. Mainly we just want to get them hung up in the catwalk and then we don’t need an entire crew working on speakers at the same time.

On the video side expect to hear some exciting news as we near Thanksgiving Weekend! We are in the process of trying out some new technology and if everything goes according to plans (please pray lol) then one of our Pro Presenter machines will have some added capabilities of playing stretched videos or multiple video simultaneously, if you don’t know why we would want that…well wait for the announcement =)

We do have a major video project that we will be undertaking once Judgement House is over. We are completely re-wiring the control room, projectors, clear com stations, everything. The wiring that was used last year for the HD upgrade, although great wire, I made most of the crimps and they are a handful that are falling apart =(

So we’ve ordered professionally made HD wiring, with station Plates! Essentially each station will have a custom plate that everything plugs into so we can unplug or plug things in quickly and in their proper location instead of labeling a wire with tape =)

Very exciting stuff! Sorry I’ve been quiet as a mouse but you know NewSpring there’s always some project going on at any given point in time. We also like to add 3–4 projects on top of each other…ever notice that? =D

Oh and by the way those of you who showed concern…they are not staying outside just had to move some things around until we could un pallet them and get them in a temp controlled environment

We planned to break it into four different phases doing center speakers, stereo speakers, subs, then amps.

Due to finances and the logistics of following those phases we’ve decided that phase two will be the last one and we are doing all speakers and subs and amps in this phase.

November 7th we begin this upgrade and please pray for this upgrade. It’s essentially a logistical nightmare on how we are going to remove the old subs, since they were installed before the catwalk was fully completed 11 years ago!

The upgrade once done is going to be amazing!

I’m very excited for this to be done it’s definitely going to change how we mix and the quality of sound and intelligibility is going to be outstading!

This change, changes how we start the livestream!! So those of you in charge of starting the livestream please come find me so I can give you the quick run down. It will be faster and easier and almost completely hands off.

The new way of doing the stream though enables dynamic streaming so that the user experience will be better in the sense that it automatically detects their bandwidth and adjusts the quality accordingly, then they have the option to choose between low, medium, and high quality. It will also load a mobile version when a mobile device is detected!

We will not be providing an HD feed yet because our Internet is not capable of handling all those feeds at one time. Once we spend some time working bugs out of this new system we will look at upgrading our Internet to allow for HD streaming!

Fun times!!