Trinity Fellowship Church (TFC), in Amarillo, TX, enhances its worship experience with large-screen HD video image magnification of services and sermons in the church’s new 4000-seat “in the round” sanctuary.
Essential to providing this video support are volunteer camera operators from the congregation. Confronted with the challenge of maintaining sharp focus while using amateur camera operators, TFC outfitted its four HD cameras with XJ86x9.3B AF long-zoom Auto Focus HD lenses with Image Stabilization from Canon.
Canon’s XJ86AF HD lenses met the church’s requirement to capture a tight image of the preacher from any location. This predicated long-focal-length zoom lenses and image stabilization to get tight shots. Because the church is in the round and the preacher is almost constantly moving toward or away from the cameras, keeping the picture in focus in HD presented a significant challenge to the production.
Canon developed its Auto Focus technology to assist camera operators in sustaining exact focus while simultaneously contending with normal operational considerations of lens-camera framing, panning and tilting. The situation in TFC proved particularly challenging because of a creative scene composition that was sought. The stage is totally surrounded by the audience, and it was desired to have them deeply defocused and richly colored while the preacher would always remain in sharp focus.
This entailed unusually low light levels and operation at maximum aperture of f2.0 to achieve a depth of field of about 3ft. It was essential that the sharp focus be maintained at all times while the preacher moved randomly over the stage.
This Auto Focus technology is available in three lenses in Canon’s DIGISUPER line: the XJ100x9.3B IE-D AF and XJ86x9.3B IE-D AF long-zoom HD field lenses, and the new XJ27x6.5B AF HD studio lens.
