The Seventh-Day Adventist Church is a Protestant Christian church established in 1863 with its headquarters in Maryland. Its Middle East and North African headquarters are in Beirut, Lebanon, and its Gulf headquarters in Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates (UAE). In line with the church’s vision to serve its members across the globe, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church recently deployed the Matrox Monarch HDX streaming and recording appliance to record their live events which are streamed globally on their website and on social media including YouTube. By doing so, they are able to reach out to their audience who are unable to attend in person as well as new individuals all around the world.
Driven by the increase in demand from their fast growing community for a much-improved streaming experience and higher quality over the previous years’ videos, the church decided to upgrade their systems from analog to digital SDI. Having to contend with combining both the audio and video together manually with clapperboards for synchronization that resulted in poor audio quality, as well as a tedious, time-consuming post-production process, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church sought a simpler to use solution.
Wanting H.264-based recordings as this codec produces exceptional quality and smaller file sizes when compared to DNxHD or RAW formats, the church first tested a third-party encoder but immediately faced issues with audio drifting after about 20 minutes of recording. Looking for a better performing appliance, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church found the Matrox Monarch HDX. Easily assimilating with the church’s existing SDI AV system, the Monarch HDX dual-channel H.264 encoder for broadcast streaming and recording that supports SDI inputs, provided the perfect solution by producing synchronized audio and video, pristine quality video, smaller size MOV or MP4 files, and effortless operation.
The church brings together hundreds of people from all over the UAE for weekly services. Monarch HDX is used to livestream these services and record them at the same time to be edited and distributed as video on demand. During special events that are hosted regularly, local as well as internationally recognized preachers, speakers and singers congregate. The church’s recent four-day festival called “Campmeeting” held in Ras Al Khaimah with over 1000 attendees, an event that is growing in scale and popularity annually, was the first to be covered using Monarch HDX. This is an event which brings together diverse people from all over the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Europe and the U.S., where throughout the four days they get a chance to mingle and learn together, listen to some of the world’s best sermons and preachers, as well as prominent Christian singers from around the globe. This event was streamed at high quality and low bitrate to a worldwide audience and simultaneously recorded for archiving and future reference.
For the Campmeeting event, SDI digital video cameras were connected to a video switcher from where the SDI signal was input into the Monarch HDX.
Jozsef Kurucity, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church’s IT Technician for the last four years and a member since 1998 remarked, “The Matrox Monarch HDX is extremely easy to use with its one-touch button that can be operated by any team member or even a volunteer, without necessitating a full-time technician to take care of the arduous manual audio/video synchronization.” Kurucity also added, “The appliance saves us a lot of time during the post-production process: since the audio output from the Monarch HDX is of high quality and frame synchronized, there is no need to extract the audio and work on it separately; it can be edited in the same software used for the video.”
