Case Studies

Convert DVI Plus at Northview Church

Northview Church
Northview services are held in our 2,100-seat auditorium, which was designed by former Disney “imagineer”, and became one of Indiana’s most advanced A/V facilities when it went up in 2010.
 
The real focal point of our installation is an 80-foot-wide and 30-foot tall rear projection screen that serves as a backdrop for the entire stage, as well as an environment with which people on stage can interact.
 
On a weekly basis, we use the full scenery machine shop just off stage to build a new set, including objects onto which we project video. We just route the output of a Mac® mini or a Mac laptop through the Matrox Convert DVI Plus, which provides the SDI output we use for projection. It’s so simple, but the impact is huge.
One week we used shipping boxes to build two 10-foot by 10-foot boxes for the stage, and we projected the worship series logo onto them for most of the service. We then shifted to video for a special song and the effect was enormous.
 
During services, we also feed a Mac mini running ProPresenter into the Convert DVI Plus and the SDI out is routed to its own input on our Ross vision video switcher. We simply pull from the Mac system whatever content we have created for that week’s service.
 
During a service focusing on the new website we created for our youth ministry, we put a 60-inch plasma screen in the middle of the stage along with an iMac®, and the youth pastor and senior pastor were able to show the congregation the site and talk about it to those in the audience. The Convert DVI Plus allowed us to take the DVI signal out of the iMac and loop it back into the plasma screen. To allow the congregation to watch and follow along, we also pulled the SDI video, ingested it into our video system, and put it up on our large house screens.
 
Right now we’re also using the Matrox unit to capture feeds from the multi-display in our control room. The unit also embeds the intercom communication from our video director into an SDI line. This video with embedded audio is then sent to a capture computer. We record all of our internal communications during services in order to train up volunteers and to improve future productions.
 
Our production infrastructure is entirely SDI and it is hard to find a box that can support that, but the Convert DVI Plus does, while also offering analog outputs (if needed). When we rent our auditorium for events such as lectures, the Convert DVI Plus has been invaluable in allowing us to hook up a laptop DVI output and get presentations on screen. We capture and project all video in HD, so it all looks better and more uniform than if we used a lower-resolution feed.