Best Way to Store Video Recordings of Weekly Church Services?
June 4, 2017 8:47 PM Subscribe
Three years ago a church member took it upon himself to record all of our services and store them on DVD. It was never actually requested, the member just decided to do it, and now we have three years of DVDs we have to decide what to do with, plus deciding what to do with future recordings.
We mainly use a camera during the service to transmit video to another room for parents with babies. We also edit down the recording of the service to just the minister's message and put that on YouTube. So far, so easy.
One issue that I am running into is whether/why we should even keep a full recording of every single service forever, and we will be discussing that with our Board. But in the meantime, should we decide to keep doing this, how should we store it?
Extra question: do any of you have any knowledge of copyright issues? The original video person does not want to put anything but the minister's message online for fear that some of the church music or anything else used during the service is under copyright. I don't know anything about how video/music performance rights work with a church, but if any of you do, it would be good to know.
We mainly use a camera during the service to transmit video to another room for parents with babies. We also edit down the recording of the service to just the minister's message and put that on YouTube. So far, so easy.
One issue that I am running into is whether/why we should even keep a full recording of every single service forever, and we will be discussing that with our Board. But in the meantime, should we decide to keep doing this, how should we store it?
Extra question: do any of you have any knowledge of copyright issues? The original video person does not want to put anything but the minister's message online for fear that some of the church music or anything else used during the service is under copyright. I don't know anything about how video/music performance rights work with a church, but if any of you do, it would be good to know.
There's a pretty complete-seeming set of guidelines for copyright compliance for Churches available from the United Methodist Church's resource page. Amongst other things, it talks about the fact that the religious service exemption doesn't apply to recording and broadcasting the music in a service.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:29 PM on June 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 11:29 PM on June 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
As to the DVDs, your congregation must have elderly or infirm members who can't make it to services and who might appreciate viewing the service, seeing familiar faces, hearing the music etc. Popping in a DVD and watching it on a large screen tv is an easy way to do that.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:29 AM on June 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:29 AM on June 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
I'm finding this a little alarming. Have the people in the recordings consented to being filmed while engaged in something as intimate as a religious service? Did the member who "just decided to do it" ask whether anyone in the congregation objected?
If it's only live-streaming into another room for other church members, and the only part that is saved and made public is the minister's speech (hopefully showing only the minister on screen), that seems ok. But storing the recordings long-term and putting them on the cloud where they could be hacked or secretly subpoenaed (hello Patriot Act!) strikes me as being very sketchy.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:34 AM on June 5, 2017 [4 favorites]
If it's only live-streaming into another room for other church members, and the only part that is saved and made public is the minister's speech (hopefully showing only the minister on screen), that seems ok. But storing the recordings long-term and putting them on the cloud where they could be hacked or secretly subpoenaed (hello Patriot Act!) strikes me as being very sketchy.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:34 AM on June 5, 2017 [4 favorites]
It's pretty common for churches to record services at this point, if only for archival purposes. Church services are effectively public, which changes the calculus a bit -- plus, it's clear from the question that they were ALREADY being recorded (how else to get to YouTube); it sounds like the church member's real initiative is preparing a DVD archive. (emjaybee, correct me if I'm wrong.)
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church with a TV ministry; we used local access rules to get our services out on the local cable system live on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, and recorded them for rebroadcast later in the week and for distribution to shut-ins of various types. I hadn't thought of that term in years and years, and it seems awful now, but it was in common use back in the 80s. (We also had several hours a week of original programming, which was super novel at the time -- a talk show, a health panel program, a scholarly bible study hour, etc. It was a fun thing for a nerdy kid to be involved in.)
The church also kept recordings of every service ever, though at the time the storage implications of this choice hadn't yet become a big deal -- we had maybe 6 or 8 years? Just having them, though, can be super meaningful for a church over time. I'd strongly recommend you take steps to archive these. My mother recently downsized, and found a cache of DVDs of church services from that church. They'd been transferred from 3/4" video to VHS, and then to DVD, but the quality was still sufficient to take joy in seeing Mrs M -- now 20 years gone -- play the organ again. Many good churches become like enormous extended families, sometimes literally thanks to the presence of multiple generations of the same actual families. These weekly snapshots can be incredibly meaningful later, just like shoeboxes of family photographs from years or decades ago.
All of this is a long way of saying: Yes, do this, and Yes, keep it all forever, because today you CAN for almost nothing, and at a much higher quality than the services of my youth. Storing a year's worth of services on 3/4" videocassette required quite a bit of shelving; today, you could do 10x that on a storage array smaller than a shoebox, with backups offsite via Amazon for pennies a day.
posted by uberchet at 6:55 AM on June 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church with a TV ministry; we used local access rules to get our services out on the local cable system live on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, and recorded them for rebroadcast later in the week and for distribution to shut-ins of various types. I hadn't thought of that term in years and years, and it seems awful now, but it was in common use back in the 80s. (We also had several hours a week of original programming, which was super novel at the time -- a talk show, a health panel program, a scholarly bible study hour, etc. It was a fun thing for a nerdy kid to be involved in.)
The church also kept recordings of every service ever, though at the time the storage implications of this choice hadn't yet become a big deal -- we had maybe 6 or 8 years? Just having them, though, can be super meaningful for a church over time. I'd strongly recommend you take steps to archive these. My mother recently downsized, and found a cache of DVDs of church services from that church. They'd been transferred from 3/4" video to VHS, and then to DVD, but the quality was still sufficient to take joy in seeing Mrs M -- now 20 years gone -- play the organ again. Many good churches become like enormous extended families, sometimes literally thanks to the presence of multiple generations of the same actual families. These weekly snapshots can be incredibly meaningful later, just like shoeboxes of family photographs from years or decades ago.
All of this is a long way of saying: Yes, do this, and Yes, keep it all forever, because today you CAN for almost nothing, and at a much higher quality than the services of my youth. Storing a year's worth of services on 3/4" videocassette required quite a bit of shelving; today, you could do 10x that on a storage array smaller than a shoebox, with backups offsite via Amazon for pennies a day.
posted by uberchet at 6:55 AM on June 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
Our church archives the sermons only on its website.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 8:54 AM on June 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by DrAstroZoom at 8:54 AM on June 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: After much discussion, we went with storing on our Google drives (old stuff to be uploaded as we have time, new stuff once a week) for now. No one was willing to pull the plug on recording the whole service.
Per someone's question earlier, the camera is mostly zoomed in on the podium, so you only see those folks that go up on stage. When we have anyone besides our minister giving a talk, we get a release from them. And all the full-service videos are merely being archived, not dumped on the church website publicly.
Thank you all for your input!
posted by emjaybee at 12:27 PM on July 5, 2017
Per someone's question earlier, the camera is mostly zoomed in on the podium, so you only see those folks that go up on stage. When we have anyone besides our minister giving a talk, we get a release from them. And all the full-service videos are merely being archived, not dumped on the church website publicly.
Thank you all for your input!
posted by emjaybee at 12:27 PM on July 5, 2017
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by 7 Minutes of Madness at 10:44 PM on June 4, 2017