Durham, NC (July 8, 2020)—Under the COVID-19 pandemic, many houses of worship have turned to livestreaming to continue reaching their communities. Creating a fulfilling worship experience for viewers online is no simple task, as Dave Bookhout, director of Creative Arts & Worship of Newhope Church in Durham, North Carolina, has seen in recent times. While the church has livestreamed since before the health crisis, Bookhout has been using a variety of technologies, including a Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer and Waves plug-ins, to stream the church’s services and ensure they sound as intended.
“We’ve been broadcasting our services from our six campuses (Durham, Garner, Hillsborough, Wake Forest, Sanford, Kenya, and iCampus) for a while now, but since COVID, it’s become the most important thing we do on a weekly basis,” said Bookhout. “Sometimes we broadcast live using the eMotion LV1, and at other times we pre-record and then mix and master the broadcast using Logic, with all the same Waves plug-ins that we use on the LV1. Week in and week out, we use the Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer in our broadcast suite.”
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“We are running four Dell TouchScreen monitors in our setup,” Bookhout says about the church’s system; “Our DiGiGrid MGO optical MADI interface transports 128 channels between two MADI cards in our Midas Neutron and the Waves SoundGrid network. We have a Waves SoundGrid Extreme Server to handle the plug-in processing; we have almost every Waves plug-in in our arsenal, and we are using many of them at any given time, so a powerful server is crucial. We also have a DiGiGrid IOC audio interface in our broadcast suite functioning as the LV1’s local I/O to transport audio to our studio monitors. We run 48 channels of the Waves SuperRack at front-of-house, using a Midas Pro X console, all I/Os being shared with the broadcast suite. So, we have 128 channels going on/off the Waves SoundGrid network, and the broadcast suite uses 72 channels while FOH has access to 48. We also utilize the SoundGrid Driver with a DAW for virtual sound check at both FOH and for broadcast, to get everything dialed in between our rehearsals and Sunday morning. That’s invaluable for us.”
On choosing the LV1 for streaming, Bookhout says, “We were already running SoundGrid through our Midas console at FOH, so adding LV1 for broadcast was a no-brainer. Also, the ability to run Waves plug-ins on every channel as well as on the master gives us every tool needed to create an incredible mix. When broadcasting to Facebook and YouTube, mastering is ultra-important, and we are able to achieve great results that we were only able to hear previously when mastering in a DAW.”
He sums it up: “Adding eMotion LV1 into our streaming/broadcast workflow has greatly improved our mix quality. Having the ability to drop any Waves plug-in on any channel at any time is powerful. When people tune in to our online broadcast, there is nothing more important than the mix. It doesn’t matter how good our video is; if the audio is sub-par, people will quickly leave and watch something else. Waves gives us every tool we need to build the best online streaming mix possible, which allows us to create incredible worship experiences, week in and week out.”
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