continuation in some of my on going thoughts on technology & church.. prior post linking content items & church website

it came up at our staff meeting on tuesday this great site in "surveymonkey." to this, the children’s minister, our wellness minister, and myself said "duh, yall have never heard of that." we were then, in a humorous way chastised for not sharing this information sooner. so, when another question came up about how to educate our congregation on the happenings of the upcoming general conference and annual conference. the response was, we can do a newsletter article, maybe a press release type statement. i suggested this..

why not get a simple usb video camera, put them in the hands of the people there. ask some simple interviewing questions. have set up ahead of time a "channel" on youtube and you can upload directly to youtube and then send links out or embed the videos into the church website. it’s all free, except the camera, but we already have one, so it kinda is free for us. to this we said.. "we can do that?"

so i did some prep work, here is what i’ve figured out. youtube has a great channel mechanism, is is your username at the end of youtube, super easy to remember. we are www.youtube.com/hfumc. to play with our "channel" i thought i’d upload our sermons. from what i remembered there was a ‘director’ setting that would give you abilities to longer than 10 minute videos.. what i’ve found, they still give director distinctions, but everything has to be less than 10 minutes. since no sermon is less than 10 minutes that, kinda sucks. so i split a sermon into 3 parts with some lead ins and outs for buffering issues or if someone jumped in on part 2 or 3. i used imovie to set up the movies and exported to cdrom size. the channel will still work for our purposes with the interview idea, but for sermons.. kinda stinks, or pees standing up.

another cool part of youtube is that they have a windows uploader that you can set up multiple videos to upload at a time. much like google uploader. so you can do your two or three videos, and then send them online overnight while asleep.

the thought then turned to godtube. surely with their basic premise of being for the christian faith they have to know that every preacher that films a sermon wants to put it online. sooo.. i find that they are developing a ‘church channel’ set up, but it isn’t running yet. so, for now i set up the same username that i did on youtube. the cool part, they will allow you to upload a 30 minute video, but it has to be under 100mbs, which, can be tough on the quality. still, check out our psuedo channel at www.godtube.com/hfumc and you will find our sermon video isn’t all that bad looking.

i trimmed it down using quicktime pro and exporting to a low broadband size. i probably could have snuck in a medium bandwidth file, but this worked.

i did upload videos onto google video, but if they have it, i have not been able to figure out if they have the same ‘channel’ set up. mostly they just let you search through the videos much like the web search engine. it’d be cool if google video did do the channel thing as they don’t have video requirements of size or time. at least requirements that i have come to find. to test, i uploaded a mp4 file of a whole church service that was televised, which equaled out to about 1 gig, and it is out there to view.

what are the benefits of this?

• just another place for your church to get exposure in search engines (especially if you are on youtube) which can be a good or bad thing i guess. &:~D
• another way to revisit what one heard
• a place to tell stories of your congregation
• get people excited to see themselves on video (i know our bishop is stoked to show everyone he meets that he is on youtube)
• one can embed video into their websites
• you can make video announcements that people can visit more than once on sunday
• people can show coworkers or reference sermon teachings in conversations
• using the ‘favorites’ you can introduce other ideas and concepts to a receptive audience that you just don’t have time to share otherwise

speaking of favorites, in plugging some into our godtube channel. i liked this video of a screening of an upcoming documentary. the questions asked, are great questions that those of us who rarely get out of the church circles need to know that people ask.