New Media, Sound

Live streaming audio for free

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spkrStreaming live audio of your worship service can be a great service to people who can’t physically make it to church on Sunday.  Missionaries, shut-ins or even members who have to stay home with sick kids.

Here are 3 simple steps to free audio streaming at your church.

1. Audio source
You need a way to feed audio in to a computer that is internet connected.  You could probably use the built in sound card, but I’d recommend using an external USB audio device for better sound quality.  You may already have these kinds of things laying around your church.

2. Encoding Software
You need to download the free Windows Media Encoder.   This program will take your source audio and encode it to an mp3 stream that can be sent to a streaming server.

3. Streaming Server
You need a streaming server for people to connect to and listen to your audio.  You can obtain this service, free for churches, from www.netbroadcasting.tv.  By sending them an email with your church website, they will setup an account for you.  Its quick and easy and once your account is setup, they will send you an email with simple step by step instructions on how to configure Windows Media Encoder, and also how to get the streaming content placed on your church website.

Thats it!  Happy streaming.

Free Worship Backgrounds

How to make a simple worship background

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Since the number one reason people visit my blog is for free worship backgrounds, I thought I’d offer a simple step by step guide to how I made my latest background.  This should show you how you can take a few freely available resources and turn it in to something that can work as a worship background.

This is the background I’m going to create.  You can download it here: [download id=”10″ #nohits]

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1. Find Inspiration

The first step is to come up with a concept or idea for your background.   I like to look through stock photography sites like http://www.sxc.hu.  Or you can even take a look at what people have made over at www.worshiphousemedia.com (Be warned, you may just decide to purchase a background for a couple bucks rather then make it yourself if you come across one you really like!)  I also like to visit sites like cgtextures.com to find interesting textures.

I found the following image at cgtextures.com and it became my source of inspiration for this background.

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I knew that it wouldn’t suffice on it’s own, so I also found this bare cement texture to go along with it.

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2. Create the initial concept.

In Photoshop I put these together two images together and came up with this:

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3. Change the color

To make the background the color you want, use Hue and Saturation to color the image.  Don’t make it too dark yet initially as we still have a ways to go.  Leave the final brightness tweaking until the end.

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4. Add a little something for interest

I found this image of christmas lights on http://www.sxc.hu

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Add it to the original image using a blending mode, in this case Add.  I used hue and saturation in colorize mode on this layer to make the color brownish-orange and a bit de-saturated.

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5. Keep the center area clean for words.

Since this is a worship background, its important to keep the center area clear of too many distractions for the words.  Using a faded mask I removed some of the lights from the center.

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6. Final color correction

Finally I added a vignette to darken the edges and used a curves adjustment to create the final look of the image.

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Thats it!  Just a few simple steps and you have something that could be used as a worship background.

Projection

Managing Installed Codecs

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InstalledCodec Interface
InstalledCodec Interface

Have you ever wanted to know what codecs you have installed on your system?  Have you ever wanted to disable a codec?  I came across a great little utility recently that will let you do this.  It’s called InstalledCodec and you can download it free here.

I’ve been having lots of problems recently in Premiere Pro with the program crashing as soon as I attempt to import or export anything.  As soon as I would select either option from the menu, I would instantly be presented with the desktop.  PP was just gone.  This only happened in projects where I was using HDV mpeg files so I began to suspect a codec issue.  I could reproduce this crash consistantly every time.

Using InstalledCodec I found LOTS of mpeg codecs hanging around on my system from other software, even lots of software that I’ve since un-installed.  For instance, I’d installed a trial version of Avid and subsequently un-installed it, but I still had over 20 codecs that were listed as being from Avid.

Since most software, and your computer decide to use one codec over another based on something called “merit” many of these additional codecs that had been installed more recently then Adobe or even Microsoft’s codecs may be being utilized now instead of the original codecs that PP configured/verified when it was installed.

I used InstalledCodec to disable LOTS of codecs on my system and magically PP no longer crashes.  I completed the project I was working on without any further crashing issues.  In the image at the beginning of this post you can see the user interface with a bunch of the Avid codecs disabled.  Disabling a codec is as simple as selecting any codec you want from the list and selecting disable.

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