How a Church Production System Works: Audio, Video, Lights, Stream

You said yes to helping with tech, and now you’re standing in a booth full of faders, screens, cables and a Stream Deck nobody explained. It looks like one giant machine. It’s really about six small systems that pass signals to each other, plus a network holding it all together.

This guide is the map. You won’t be an expert in any one system when you finish, but you’ll know what each piece does, where its signal comes from, and where it goes. That’s what makes troubleshooting possible.

One Idea Explains the Whole Booth

In my X32 routing training, I describe routing as being “a lot about choosing a source and sending it to an output.” The same idea works for every system in the building:

Find the sources, find the device in the middle, find the destinations, and the whole booth makes sense.

System	Sources	The device in the middle	Destinations
Audio	Mics, instruments, playback	Mixing console	Speakers, monitors, stream
Presentation	Lyrics, sermon slides, videos	ProPresenter computer	Projectors or LED, stage display, stream graphics
Video	Cameras, graphics	Video switcher	Stream, recorder, screens
Lighting	Cues for each part of the service	Lighting console or software	Fixtures on stage
Streaming	Switcher program + broadcast audio	Encoder	YouTube, Facebook, website
Control	Button presses	Companion computer	Almost every device above

Every one of those arrows is a cable or a network connection. Let’s walk through them.

Audio: Where Everyone Should Start

In my analog sound system video, I start with a simple analog signal chain before getting to digital, because digital consoles make more sense once you understand it.

A mic on stage plugs into a snake, a bundle of numbered wires with a box on the stage end, or into floor and wall plates that are wired back to it. The snake runs to front of house, where each channel plugs into the mixer. Each channel strip reads top to bottom: gain, EQ, aux sends for monitor mixes, pan, and the fader.

The mixer’s main output goes back down the snake to the speakers. Active speakers have their own amplifier, so they need power plus an XLR signal. Passive speakers need a separate amplifier to drive them. The aux mixes go to stage monitors so the band can hear themselves.

A digital console like the X32 does the same job with two differences. The snake is often a stage box connected by a single Ethernet cable, and every connection is an assignment on a routing screen instead of a fixed wire. Plugging a mic into input 1 doesn’t guarantee it shows up on channel 1. That depends on the routing.

Larger churches often split the same inputs to more than one console. When I ran production at a church in Canton, Ohio, the stage boxes sat on a Dante audio network. Front of house mixed the room, and a separate broadcast console in the control room pulled the same inputs over the network to build the livestream mix.

Presentation: ProPresenter Feeds More Than the Projector

ProPresenter runs lyrics, sermon slides, videos and announcements. What surprises new volunteers is how many outputs one computer can drive.

At that church, ProPresenter ran at front of house with volunteer operators. A Blackmagic DeckLink Duo 2 card gave it four video outputs:

• Key and fill for livestream lower thirds. These two signals let the video switcher lay lyrics over a camera shot with clean transparency, with no green-screen chroma key.
• Stage display so the band and speaker could see what’s next.
• A full-screen output for the projector.

That full-screen output went to the control room first, then out to the projector through one of the switcher’s auxiliary outputs. That let us send either ProPresenter or the switcher’s program to the projector. I’ll be honest that the setup was a little backwards. With one more SDI cable run, I’d have kept lower-third and full-screen graphics fully separate.

If you’re setting up screens for the first time, start with ProPresenter screen setup.

Video: Cameras, Switcher, Recorder

Cameras are sources, and the video switcher is the device in the middle. At the church I served, four PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras each had two cables: an SDI cable carrying video to the switcher, and an Ethernet cable carrying both power over Ethernet and remote control. Two small POV cameras clamped on stage gave close-up angles of the keys player and the drummer.

In the control room, an ATEM switcher cut between the cameras and ProPresenter’s graphics. The switcher’s multiview, one screen showing every source at once, went to a screen for the broadcast audio operator and to the lighting position. That let the lighting operator see how their lights looked on camera. A HyperDeck recorded the program output to an SSD, and a quad multiview box put all four camera feeds on one HDMI monitor.

For the cabling side, see HDMI vs SDI vs fiber. For switchers, see the ATEM switchers guide.

Lighting: Cues for Each Moment

Lighting follows the same pattern: a console or software sends control data to the fixtures. At the church I served, the lighting operator clicked through cues built for each part of the service. They could still make fine adjustments, like color changes, when a moment needed it.

That control data is usually DMX, with each fixture listening to a set of channels, or Art-Net, which carries DMX over the network. Smaller setups often run lights from software on a computer. In one of my videos, a lighting app’s scenes were triggered from Stream Deck buttons, and ProPresenter macros can fire lighting scenes so the lights change when the song does. For the details, read the DMX and Art-Net practical guide.

Streaming: Where Everything Meets

The livestream is where every system comes together. The switcher’s program output combines cameras and ProPresenter graphics. The broadcast audio mix goes into the switcher too, and at that church we watched the audio levels on the multiview.

From the switcher, the program went to a monitor and then to a Resi encoder. Running it through a monitor first gave us one more check: if it showed up on the monitor, it was going to the encoder. The encoder was set to start 60 minutes before the stream went live, so we could confirm content was reaching the servers. Then it streamed to the website, Facebook and YouTube automatically every Sunday.

Control: One Button, Many Devices

A Stream Deck is a box of programmable LCD buttons. Bitfocus Companion is free software that makes those buttons control other gear over the network. At that church, Companion ran on a computer in the control room:

• The control-room Stream Deck gave each PTZ camera its own row of preset buttons. Feedbacks lit a camera’s buttons red when that camera was live on the switcher.
• A front-of-house Stream Deck ran through Companion Satellite. It could switch the projector between ProPresenter and program, turn the projector on and off, and start the HyperDeck recording, which we later automated.

Companion only works if the devices can reach each other. That brings us to the part most people skip.

The Network: The Nervous System

Almost every system above talks over Ethernet. When the network is wrong, everything gets flaky at once, and it looks like five different problems.

Internet vs. network

The internet is the connection to the outside world from your service provider. Your local network (LAN) is how your devices talk to each other inside the building. The chain looks like this:

1. The provider’s cable or fiber comes into a modem (for fiber, an optical network terminal).
2. A router connects to the modem’s WAN side. It creates the local network and runs DHCP, which hands every device an IP address.
3. Switches add more Ethernet ports. A main switch connects to other switches around the building in a star layout.
4. Access points broadcast Wi-Fi. You can add several broadcasting the same network name.

Only have one router handing out addresses on a network. Two DHCP servers fighting over the same devices is a classic cause of gear that works one week and not the next.

Why production gets its own network

PTZ cameras don’t need the internet, but they do need to be on the same local network as the controller. Dante audio doesn’t play well with other traffic and likes to be isolated. And mission-critical gear shouldn’t fail because someone downloads a pile of updates during the service.

Here’s how I set it up at that church. An outside IT company managed the building’s internet, Wi-Fi and help desk. I treated the building network like an internet provider: the building link plugged into the WAN port of our own production router. That router fed a main switch, which connected in a star to five more switches at the stage, the front-of-house audio cart, the front-of-house video cart, the control room and the amp room. Every production device could talk to every other one, completely separate from the rest of the building, with VLANs dividing the production network into systems.

Follow One Moment Through the System

Here’s what happens in a system like that when the worship leader starts the first song:

• Her vocal mic goes into a stage box. The front-of-house console mixes it into the room’s speakers. The same input goes over Dante to the broadcast console, which mixes it for the stream.
• The lyrics leave ProPresenter twice: full screen to the projector for the room, and key and fill to the switcher for the stream. On the stream, they appear as a lower third over the camera shot.
• The camera moves because someone pressed a preset button, and that button turns red when the camera goes live.
• The lights change because the lighting operator fired the worship cue, while watching the multiview to see how it looks on camera.
• The stream carries the switcher’s program and the broadcast mix to the encoder, and the recorder captures it for later.

One moment, six systems, one network. If any link breaks, you now know where to look.

Not Every Church Needs All of This

A small church might run a rack mixer controlled from an iPad, a laptop with ProPresenter, one or two cameras, and a single encoder. That’s a complete production system too. It’s the same map with fewer boxes.

One sensible order for growing it: reliable audio first, then clear presentation, then video and streaming, then control that makes volunteers’ jobs easier. Label everything and keep a patch sheet. The system is only simple if the next person can read it.

Quick Triage: Which System Broke?

• No sound in the room, but the stream is fine → the front-of-house console, amps or speakers.
• Sound in the room, silent stream → the broadcast mix, its output, or the switcher/encoder audio input.
• Lyrics on the projector but not the stream → ProPresenter’s key/fill outputs or the switcher’s keyer.
• A camera won’t move but still has a picture → its network connection or the controller. Video and control travel on separate cables.
• Several devices dropping at once → suspect the network first: a second router, a failed switch, or production gear sharing a busy building network.

The Whole Thing in One Picture

• Every system is sources → a device in the middle → destinations.
• Audio: mics → stage box/snake → console → speakers, monitors and stream.
• Presentation: ProPresenter → projector, stage display and stream graphics.
• Video: cameras and graphics → switcher → stream, recorder and screens.
• Lighting: console or software → DMX/Art-Net → fixtures.
• Control: Stream Deck + Companion → nearly everything.
• Network: one router, switches in a star, production separate from the building.

Related Videos

• A look at how First Friends Church in Canton, Ohio live streams
• Church Production Crashing? Your Network Architecture Is Wrong
• What makes up an Analog Sound System?

Keep Going

• Every production system we work on
• Church AV troubleshooting 101
• ProPresenter complete training guide
• Bitfocus Companion and Stream Deck for church production

More training is on the YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CrazyAmazingDesigns.