Needing new camera

Our stake center is quite old and was retrofitted with a older PTZ camera over 10 years ago. The Stake President has asked me to look into replacing the camera with a newer HD PTZ camera. Our stake does participate in a web cast for our stake conferences. We use two buildings. Are there any suggestions as to what I should look at? Is there a standard camera and control system that is installed in new stake centers?

The FM Group would be able to answer your question, and might even be willing to spring for a camera, but probably not an HD one, since the Church does not normally use the HD standard for webcasts. The Sony EVI-D80 is the standard camera if it will be mounted. It is available at the LDS Store. According to the Help Center article, Purchasing Webcast Products, the FM Group is not responsible for the camera, even though a newly constructed stake center gets one installed as a part of the project.

With HD, you'll have to decide what kind of output you can support. Most will output either HDMI or USB3 and with either you'll have limitations on distance without converting to some other medium first, such as, HDBaseT. If you buy a camera that outputs in SDI, then you can carry that a lot further over common coax. You'll then need an SDi-to-HDMI converter, if you wish to put the signal into the VidiU box. There are also wireless HDMI extenders, such as this one from Monoprice that operates in the 60 GHz band, but their performance is significantly reduced for each wall or ceiling passed through, so YMMV.

Once you've figured out how to get the HD signal from the camera to where you need it, you're ready to shop for an HD camera. Be prepared to have your SP spring at least $1500 for one with a smooth PTZ, good zoom range, and good sized imaging chip. Sony isn't the only game in town, but most of the PTZ controllers (both hardware and software) designed for the EVI-D80, will also work on their HD cameras.

Just some things to think about before jumping into HD.

This may be late, but I have not been frequenting the forums much since we have had no issues in over a year.

You might want to seriously consider using an IP camera. These are normally surveillance but we're getting excellent images from two 12X PTZ Dahua cameras that stream 1080P. We use vMix as broadcast software (although Wirecast and OBS work great also) which also does the stream encoding. The cameras cost less than $400 each and run directly from a POE+ switch.

You can use the church's portal system with this setup but I believe that's still a max resolution of 720p, which we found less than optimal for a 10ft projection. We have moved to an external webcaster (SundayStreams) so that we can also use Rokus on the receive end. This has been extremely reliable.

What we've found is that we do NOT need to make major investments in new PTZ cameras to get great video and audio at remote locations.

Randy,

Do you not use the video locally to other locations in the building? My experience with the IP cameras is that there is a lag that gets the picture gets behind the sound in the building. Being that the building uses real time audio the camera has to be fast.

I am very sorry for the extremely late response to this as I did not see the question until just now.

In case it's still relevant, we send the video to two other locations within the stake center (RS room and YW room). We take that feed from vMix before encoding and streaming. We use an HDMI-over-cable converter to use the existing coax to get HD 1080P in the other chapel rooms with only a very slight delay from live (400msec).

We used to do "live reinforcement" in the gym for stake conference, which required a direct HDMI signal to avoid delay. However, we found we really did not need to do this. The 400msec delay from the IP cameras through vMix is really too long for live reinforcement, but great for the satellite rooms in the chapel. Note that we use the audio in those rooms associated with the video, NOT the audio directly from the chapel amps. This has proven to be very good and the TV speakers have worked great, in some cases with better audio range than the chapel speakers.

Sorry again for the very late response.