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HD Home :: XL H1 :: Case Studies :: Case Study #4
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Friendship Ministries Opens HDTV Video Outreach with Canon XL H1 HD Camcorder
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The Friendship Baptist Church in Rock Island, Tennessee has been a center of religious worship for more than 100 years. Now, Friendship Ministries pastor Steve Breedlove is taking this nondenominational institution into the next century with a video outreach initiative produced in high definition television (HDTV). Originating from its new thousand-seat sanctuary with a state-of-the-art lighting and sound system, Friendship Ministries plans to videotape Sunday and Wednesday services in high-quality HDTV and provide a major Nashville TV station with a weekly 30-minute standard definition edit of these services that will also be uplinked for distribution on satellite TV. Live coverage during will also be fed to video projectors for display on large screens in the Friendship Baptist Church so that even congregants in the back rows of the balcony will be able to see every detail of the service.
Leveling the Playing Field
Accomplishing this ambitious plan on a limited budget demanded innovative technology that leverages the latest in affordable digital production solutions. According to Chris Gentry, Media Director of Friendship Ministries, this meant choosing three Canon XL H1 HD camcorders for the church's HDTV video capture needs.
"We went shopping for equipment to launch our television ministry in the middle Tennessee area," Gentry relates. "We spoke to different media-service providers, and all of them were very excited about the Canon XL H1 camera. They basically told us that Canon had leveled the playing field between the big corporate-type production houses and the smaller users such as ourselves. They compared the Canon XL H1 to $30,000 to $40,000 cameras and showed how the XL H1 is more advanced and a much better value in terms of features and price. We purchased three from Custom Media Services in Nashville."
A worldwide leader in designing and manufacturing lenses for professional photography and broadcast television, Canon has outfitted the XL H1 with a 20x HD zoom lens with Super-Range Optical Image Stabilization to achieve rock-solid HD and SD video images of stunning clarity. The XL H1 employs three 1/3-inch native 16:9 CCD's with 1.67 million pixels (1440 x 1080) for each primary color. The result is outstanding resolution and picture quality, highly accurate color reproduction, and a wide dynamic range with virtually no color noise.
Friendship Ministries also chose a Sony Anycast™ Station content-creation system to interface with its three Canon XL H1 camcorders, two of which will be on tripods for long shots. External LCD's will be added to the tripod-mounted cameras for operator monitoring convenience. The third XL H1 will be shoulder-mounted to capture close-ups of the crowd from the pastor's point of view.
"We're looking to make the program interesting by being able to show more than one view and one aspect in the church," Gentry explains. "We didn't want it to be one-dimensional. We want the viewer to be able to see the service from many different angles and viewpoints."
HDTV-Ready
Gentry's eventual plan is to link the Sony Anycast™ Station production switcher to the three XL H1's using the HD-SDI output on each of the cameras. Unique among HDV format camcorders, Canon's XL H1 features four BNC connectors that provide: genlock input to synchronize a multi-camera, live-switched production environment; SMPTE time code input and output to facilitate editing and other postproduction processes; and uncompressed digital HD and digital SD output through HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M and SMPTE 259M) at 1.485 Gigabit per second.
"We like their size, compactness, and low weight," Gentry says of the Canon XL H1 camcorders. "They're not big, bulky, or hard to maneuver. This is especially important for the camera operator who'll be using the shoulder-mount version. The cameras will be manned by volunteers in the congregation so we're glad they're easy to use."
In addition to broadcasting Friendship Ministries video outreach on terrestrial and satellite TV, the church also plans to distribute its programming via the Internet as well. "The Sony Anycast™ Station has streaming capabilities so we'll eventually be streaming to our Website as well," Gentry says. He adds: "The XL H1 is an affordable, high-quality HD camcorder that meets our immediate and long-range needs. We want to be ready for the upcoming HDTV format change that's been mandated by the FCC. The XL H1 enables us to do that."
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