Here's a few highlights of the project:
This is the equipment rack just after we schlepped it into the church and tipped it up thru this low arched doorway into the tiny closet that will serve as a control room.That sucked... it weighs about 300 lbs., and we had to lean it back while scooting the bottom in- without smashing ourselves or the architecture. Good to have it in there at last.
This little alcove will hold the rack; here are the various lines pulled from all over the church to this location. Looks like a confounding mess, but this ain't nothin... I've done codec farms with something like ten times this number of cables. It's no big deal as long as they're labelled properly.
The guts of the rack... we'd just started roughing in some of the lines when this was taken. Bungee cords attached to the wall of the alcove will pick up the cable looms when the rack is rolled in there.
A very nice collection of gadgets and gewgaws in this rack, including a V-Brick to connect the whole system to the church network, and if they get a host that can handle streaming A/V, they can go live on the Web from the church. Our contact Chris (who's official title is "verger", BTW) is more excited than a kid at Christmas...
This camera is mounted on a column near the aisle, about halfway down to the altar. It'll be able to follow a procession from one end to the other, and zoom in for close-ups. This little bastard provided me with my only major setback on this job- I foolishly trusted the judgement of whoever spec'd a 22-ga. cable to carry 12Vdc to this thing from a transformer in the rack(let the EC pull it instead of something heavier), and wound up crawling in the $#@# crawlspace again to cut the cable and rig the power supply down there where it would actually work (shorter cable run). Chris was nice enough to go buy a 100-ft heavy-duty extension cord and go down to run it to the rack for me, so I guess I got lucky. The cables in this shot are obviously not termed and dressed yet... looks much prettier now.
This camera's in the back; it has a longer lens for good closeups of the priests, choir, etc... I had more trouble today trying to get these things working with the funky custom-made RS232 controller... thought it was the box, 'cuz one cam was OK then I lost control of it. Turned out my terminations were not 100% good (try soldering 22ga. onto a mini 8-pin DIN atop a ladder sometime... it's lots of fun! Wound up getting some pre-made cables and splicing them on; both cams are now joystick-able. Whew.
Next: mics and speakers
