The First Baptist Church of Orlando, FL, has installed a Snell Kahuna SD/HD multiformat production switcher as the cornerstone of its transition to HD production. Besides providing a significant upgrade of the church's facilities from obsolete switching equipment, Kahuna can handle a wide variety of SD and HD video sources and offers a high degree of flexibility for switching complex worship services and other programs. The installation was carried out by systems integrator Technical Innovations.
In anticipation of its transition to HD production, First Baptist chose a three-M/E Kahuna switcher complete with two control panels and an auxiliary panel to replace 20-year-old equipment that had begun to fail. For a typical weekend service, Kahuna is used to cut five camera feeds, three graphics sources (two of which are keyable) and up to four video playback sources. Two M/E outputs are devoted to IMAG switching, providing output to the large presentation screens from either live camera shots of the pastor and presenters or outside video from both SD and HD sources. The third M/E is controlled by the broadcast director to produce the broadcast feed. Depending on the situation, the broadcast director and the IMAG director can access material from all three M/Es.
"We rely on volunteer labor to accomplish our weekly service production, so we especially appreciate the ease at which Kahuna allows us to perform complicated switches with the touch of a button. Recently we needed to do one switch, which previously would have required a volunteer to hit 12 buttons in the right sequence within about three seconds. Our Kahuna allowed us to preset very quickly and simply that entire switch to one button stroke," said Scott Link, pastor of media and communications for the First Baptist Church of Orlando.
