Learning To Live Stream Church Services - Interview with Eerde Bruining for Squares TV Last Updated 16 December 2021 by Michael Forrest

Live streamed church services and musical performances have been providing many people with much-needed community and human connection since the beginning of the pandemic. But how do you set something like this up?

What technology do you need? Can you pull off a high quality broadcast without a big crew, without spending a lot of money, and without disrupting the proceedings?

Back in early 2020, lots of people found my camera app while looking for solutions to this problem. That’s how I met Eerde Bruining from the Netherlands. When the pandemic hit, Eerde started devoting his spare time to shooting his parents’ choral performances in local churches.

He was kind enough to jump on a call with me and answer some of my questions about what he learned doing this. We talked about the technical equipment needed to shoot great looking and great sounding video, how live streams can be less work than edited videos, and the differences between shooting in an empty church to working in one with a congregation present.

Gear List

Let me know if there’s something you can’t find that was mentioned in the video.

Discord

We have a chat server on Discord where you can discuss the techniques discussed in this video and meet other people trying similar things.

Join the Discord

Links from Eerde

Evensongs:

One of the first videos we recorded:

Pretty interesting that you can hear that the choir is more used to singing with the distance between them in the later videos:

A bit later on, still a recording.

And one of the many Evensong videos which were all recorded and edited by my brother and myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmEoHczVJ1k

I think this is one of the first video’s we did with OBS:

This must be one of the first video’s where we used the Atem Mini Extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HuljRes1so

And this is how we do it now, having less stuff in church:

And this is how we record/livestream the concerts:

We started doing this really simply with OBS and a wireless Shoot integration: - Sound is pretty good in this recording, but the video.. well..

If you listen to anything in this concert, listen to the piece of music at around 1:46:00 (visions at sea by Joey Roukens) that’s pure magic.

And this is with the saxophonist, if you have time try to listen to Lotte Pen (she’s also on Apple Music, Spotify, etc.), she is amazing! She plays two pieces one at the start of the concert and one at 1:18:03. Watch on YouTube