How We Made a Worship Leader Mash-Up Video for Streaming Worship Service

Hey guys, we have been streaming our service (like everyone else, I guess), last four Sundays from my house.  Up to now we’ve been doing live worship on the stream, but yesterday since I was speaking I thought we would pre-record a video with several worship team members and play that over the live stream.  It ended up being a bigger project than I realized and took a lot of time.  But I learned a lot and if I do it again, I think it will be faster next time.  Here were the basic steps, and this video shows a little more as you can see some of it on my computer screen:

1.  Made a scratch recording of the song(s) with rhythm all the way through for people to listen over headphones while they sing or play (must have enough harmonic content for the singers to stay on pitch).
2. Have members make cellphone videos of themselves singing or playing along to the track.
3. Export the audio out of the individual videos and use some kind of audio editing software (like Garageband, Logic, or ProTools) to make a nice mix of all the audio tracks. This will get better results than trying to mix the audio when you combine the videos.
4. Figure out the layout of the videos in some kind of layout software (I used Keynote) using screen grabs of each video (not the video itself) or even on a piece of paper. This is to see how the videos may be cropped or positioned on the screen to make everything fit. Much easier than working with the videos themselves in the editing program (at least if you have a less powerful computer, like I do).
5. Put all the videos into a video-editing program (like Premiere or I used DaVinci Resolve).  Sync each video to the final audio mix one at a time. Be sure to mute the videos you aren’t working on to save processing power.
6. Export the video!  My computer isn’t powerful enough to play all 8 videos at once, even at a lower frame rate, but it did a good job with the export –took about 3 hours or so to chew and spit it out.

This time is growing us creatively as it is making us figure out other ways to help our congregation worship.  And some of these videos we are making will have a longer lifespan of encouragement than just one Sunday service, so that’s cool.  Stay safe!  Love you all!

Here is the final video we showed on the livestream:

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