Filming church service for web
 

Here is the situation:

I was approached by a pasture to film his services on Sunday and put it on the web. The church is very new and very small. His needs seem very basic (I.E. put it on youtube). The church is down the street from my house, and the service is about 30 minuets.

What would be the simplest, easiest way to accomplish this? What would you charge? And could you also please comment on my workflow idea below.

I would use my Sony Z5 and record to the MRC1 flash drive only to save wear and tear on my camera heads. I would record in SD, drag and drop, and export the footage in a web format and put on Youtube. It would be a 30 minuet service, and I estimate it would take another 30 minuets to put it on the web.

Would this be the best workflow for this? And what would you charge?

Thank you very much for your help and insights.

-William

First workflow thoughts:
Record in HD rather than SD. Youtube supports both. Upload HD and it'll also have and SD version too (both 16:9).

YouTube has a max of 10 minutes (actually 10:59). You'd have to break it in three parts. You'll generally find the viewership for part 3 will be significantly lower than part 1.
You could put it on Vimeo which has no duration limit.
You could edit it into a 10 minute highlight video (lots of extra work).

It'll take a lot more than 30 minutes to put it on the web if you care about quality. You'd likely want to do an H.264 MOV or MP4 encode at a high data rate. How long that takes depends on how fast your computer is. 30 minutes can easily take more than 2 hours to encode on some computers. Not a lot of work since you make settings and go off and have lunch. Uploading time depends on the file size of your encode and the speed of your internet upload. A typical fast cable modem will be about 250KB (kiloBYTES) a second. That's about 2000kbps (kiloBITS)a second.

Of course you need to keep your target and goal in mind. YouTube videos have a slim chance of being discovered (and slimmer on Vimeo) but if he's got email address for the members (especially ones who couldn't attend) he can email the links out. If he can get some local organizational interest he can email it to their lists. Maybe he can even setup a blog and include the service as part of his post of the week.

If the town or church has a wifi connection you could actually stream it live to Mogulus or Ustream. You'd need camera, firewire to laptop, wifi connection. Stream live and set Mogulus or Ustream to record. That means people can view live and the full recording can be stored and played back as well.

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How much to charge?
Normally I'd charge a minimum like 4 hours but since there's not much travel time and it's Sunday and maybe you feel it's for a good cause, you can charge for setup and shoot time which might be 1 or 2 hours. Then you need to charge for the encode and posting to the web. You can discount that too if you'd like since the encode doesn't tie you up and you can still do other things for the computer.

The rate depends on your cost of living and your skills as a shooter and compressionist. The simplest way to come up with a base hourly rate for someone new to it might be:

Figure how much you'd need to make if you worked 20 hours a week to pay all your bills at the end of the months. Then you can figure out what you need per hour. This is your very base "survival rate."

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Here's a very high end multicamera service on Vimeo
Elements of Salvation: Final Sacrifice on Vimeo

Here's a service that was live streamed and then runs recorded on Mogulus. Click on the "On Demand" link to see their other recordings.
Heart of Worship Church of God 7th Day - Mogulus Live Broadcast

there's another site alternative that might be better for church stuff, tangle.com (formerly GodTube).

IIRC, their clip limit it longer than YouTube, but no HD quality and they seem to re-compress everything (poorly). However, unless it's really a festival of dynamism on disply during the sermon, the quality will be adequate. Another downside is that every video has to be approved by a moderator, which sometimes takes up to 2 days.

There are options to set up personal and church accounts. Just a tought.

Other than that, that's pretty much the way I've taped sermons for our church (albeit w/ P2, since I less-than-3 overkill).