Wycliffe Bible Translations Praises Visionary Solutions
Wycliffe Bible Translators has worked with people around the world to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible. The organization has helped provide access to Scripture for more than 3,000 languages since it was founded 75 years ago, and has set a goal of starting Bible translation in the remaining 1,600 living languages by 2025.
With its ambitious global mission, excellent audio and video capabilities have become increasingly essential for internal staff conferences and other meetings at Wycliffe’s corporate headquarters in Orlando. To ensure a quality system that is both feature-rich and easy to use, Wycliffe Media Systems Engineer Eli Garrett CTS upgraded the company’s conference room systems with AV encoders and decoders from Visionary Solutions.
“I designed the conference room as a live venue, much like you find at a mid-sized church,” relates Garrett. “We have about 300 people working here, and the room seats about 800, so we don’t fill it in staff meetings. But we have room to grow, and we can accommodate the volunteers that come down here in the winter. All of the conduit comes to our front-of-house location through the floor. Unfortunately we don’t have enough conduit there to accommodate everything we would like to do. We have one Cat5e cable for video, and in the past we have been able to send one video signal over Ethernet to our projector. But with Visionary Solutions PacketAV System, we have been able to send multiple video signals through that same Cat5e cable with no visual loss in quality.
“We currently use three Visionary Solutions encoders: a Dante-enabled PacketAV DUET 4K-Encoder onstage and two E4100 PacketAV 4K-Encoders at front-of-house,” he recounts.
The onstage PacketAV DUET feeds the Visionary network, which is routed to QSC Q-SYS DSP. An E4100 PacketAV encoder at front-of-house routes video to Q-SYS as well. Q-SYS then determines which will go to the projector. “As a result,” Garrett observes, “people can now hook up their laptop onstage, plug into the Visionary Solutions PacketAV DUET encoder, go over to the Q-SYS panel, and route the video to the projector.”
The second E4100 PacketAV encoder at front-of-house drives a stage display. “Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter worship and presentation software has stage display capability,” Garrett explains. “We’ve never had a stage display before and people have had a desire to have that functionality since it has become a common ability in churches. It’s a nice feature but because of a lack of conduit, I couldn’t route enough video signals to do a stage display. Now that we have the Visionary Solutions network, we installed an ultra-wide 21×9 monitor right above the projector, and the E4100 PacketAV encoder connects the stage display to front-of-house.”
A major reason Garrett selected Visionary Solutions products was its integration with Q-SYS DSPs and the resulting ease of use. “It’s great that I have a system that provides high quality and clarity,” he acknowledges, “but I’ve been in the AV world for 10 years; I’m an experienced user. With the integration between Visionary Solutions encoders and Q-SYS, the system is simple enough that I can show a person with a very limited understanding of how AV works how to use it.”
“Having the Thumbnail previews in Q-SYS allows you to be really confident in what the system is going to do when you tell it to switch video. The Video Matrix is no longer a dedicated piece of hardware, but now it’s more of a software thing. We are not locked in to a 4×3 video matrix since we can just add another Encoder or Decoder as we need it, but it was a huge cost savings because we did not have to buy a huge video matrix with extra channels that we may or may not use in the future.”
In addition to the three encoders, Garrett is using Visionary Solutions D4100 PacketAV decoders. “AV is not just going to our projector but also to one video switcher,” he relates. “But we also have three cameras that we set up each week, as needed, and they are routed back to the broadcast room so we can stream AV to staff members around the world. A Visionary Solutions D4100 PacketAV decoder goes to a Blackmagic ATEM switcher so that whoever is calling the camera switches can select what he wants onscreen and send a high-quality visual to our broadcast stream.”
Garrett is delighted with his new system. “The Visionary Solutions products work really well,” he praises. “I worked with our IT department to make sure the proper ports were opened, and we were able to integrate the AV system into our corporate network. All of the guidance Visionary Solutions gave us was correct, and the system does everything we hoped for.”