Streaming church services online with TASCAM VS-R264 at the Church of the "Quick to Hearken" Icon of the Mother of God in Tallinn, Estonia.
The construction of the Church of the "Quick to Hearken" Icon of the Mother of God was completed in June 2013, and was consecrated by the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia. It serves as a centre of Russian Orthodox religion and community for the Lasnamäe suburb of Tallinn.
Due to the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the church was closed, but all kind of regular services were still happening on daily basis.
Integrator SG Install Ltd, together with EW Sound & Light OÜ (TASCAM’s distributor in Estonia), made a proposal to the church to try a new way of holding the services through streaming technology to a YouTube channel. The project goal was to make it possible for parishioners to take part in the church services during the quarantine period and in the future.
SG Install had previously made all of the sound system equipment installations for this church and EW Sound & Light proposed the TASCAM VS-R264 as the streaming appliance. "The reason for selecting the VS-R264 was that TASCAM is well known for product quality and outsatnding reliability" commented Stanislav Sergejev of EW Sound & Light.
The audio system consists of 4 x SE4 condenser microphones for choirs, plus 2 x Shure VP83 for the background and the reader, connected to a separate mixer. Then there are a pair of Shure VP89M shotgun microphones in the altar, two more Shure wireless microphones and a Crown 31 hanging microphone near the central gates.
All signals are mixed together and routed to a BSS BLU-100 matrix DSP processor, then sent out via a Shure PSM300 monitoring system wirelesly to the audio input of the TASCAM VS-R264 video streamer, which is installed in a rack in the choir balcony. This avoided some audio cabling which would have been tricky to install.
The camera used was a Panasonic HC-V770 camcorder, but there is a plan to upgrade the video systen to add a second camera and also add a small vision mixer.
Streaming to YouTube from the VS-R264 uses the RTMP protocol and is in Full HD resolution 1920x1080p60. Although recording is not currently used, the church does plan to use the VS-R’s recording feature to record some of the most important church services, so that they can be edited and posted to the YouTube channel or the church web site later.
The project was successful and the customer was very satisfied with the quality and simplicity of use of the VS-R264. Parishioners are delighted that they can take part in church services even while seated at home.
Within couple days of the system going live they had collected more than 1,500 subscribers. This has since risen to nearly 1,900.
Link to the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeQzPya9IPCZnH3_GWuc4_A
Website: https://www.panagia.ee/index.php
Since 1991 EW Sound & Light OÜ offers complete professional sound and lighting equipment solutions, being the official distributor of the world's best-known brands such as Shure, JBL Professional, Neutrik, TASCAM, Crown and others in Estonia. We supply Estonia's largest rental and installation companies, theatres and concert halls, educational institutions and museums, factories and conference centres, etc.
In addition to the concert and studio equipment, we also offer an integrated sound system engineering and planning for the new buildings and existing venues. Thanks to state-of-the-art sound systems, we can offer complete integration solutions without competition.
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