Many of you have been using Zoom for your worship. But you may be going back into your sanctuary soon, and wondering how to keep the Zoom aspect of worship going – which includes having people at a distance participating in leadership.
If you have a large screen, you may be thinking of using it. The issue is that the computer that is being used to do worship on Zoom is often hopping from one thing to another – a regular Zoom screen, to PowerPoint, to a video…. Searching for files, checking stuff… You probably don’t want all that activity up on your big screen as it will be distracting! You want it to enhance the worship.
The answer: have a second “dummy” computer that is connected to your big screen in the sanctuary. Have it connected to Zoom just like your congregational member who is on the other side of town.
If you happen to have an extra person, then the second person can sit at the second computer – but just to monitor and respond to chat.
By the way – all the sound connections are made from the FIRST computer. If you are lucky, you have a sound board with USB input/output. If not, you can use the headphone and microphone jacks. But you’ll need to test that out as computers have varying levels of balkiness using those connections. (And if you change computers….. test it out again.) With these connections, people can participate in leadership from in the Sanctuary, or elsewhere.
p.s. It is really worthwhile to hardwire the two computers using CAT5 cable directly to the router. If your router is at a distance – then you can have a secondary router. Dealing with a secondary router can sometimes be funny, depending on your adapters and routers. You can e-mail me if you have issues there.
ATTACHED – an illustration of how I set things up at the Regional Council meetings. Note that the first time the mixer did not have USB – thus the use of the microphone/headphone plugs.