Enhancing Visual Engagement at Grace Community Church through Dante AV Solutions
Grace Community Church Upgrades to Dante AV for Seamless Multi-Building AV Experience
Grace Community Church, a church that started as two small buildings and a chicken coop in 1956, has expanded significantly over the years, now boasting a multi-building campus with a 3,000-seat worship center, a 300-seat chapel, a family center, a children's center, the Master's Seminary, a tower with five large classrooms, and several small outbuildings.
Recently, the church created a feature documentary slated for theater release and wanted to broadcast the premiere campus-wide. To achieve this, they prepared the worship center and several overflow rooms for guests. However, the church felt the documentary needed to be broadcast in 4K for maximum effect, but their pre-existing video distribution system could not deliver video reliably.
To address this issue, the church turned to Dante AV, a platform that brings together audio, video, control, and management in a single system. The familiarity with the Dante technology and the ease of implementation were key selling points for integrating Dante AV into the church's existing system.
Grace Community Church deployed nine Bolin D20 Dante AV Ultra transceivers throughout the campus to facilitate live video streaming. These transceivers, provided by Bolin Technology, can be programmed as encoders or decoders and support up to 4K60 streaming over a standard gigabit network.
The church's AV team used Dante AV to provide a live 4K introduction across the campus and cleanly switch to a Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck for the documentary. During full orchestral performances, over 100 microphones are deployed between the musicians, choir, and worship leaders running through Dante-enabled Yamaha consoles.
One of the biggest advantages of Dante AV for the church has been the ability to route audio between VLANs/subnets, allowing them to consolidate ten isolated audio systems into one integrated network. This has been particularly useful during events like the Shepherd's conference, where Dante AV was used to distribute video streams with locally translated audio for non-English speaking attendees.
Moreover, Dante AV provides real-time translation of spoken words and music lyrics for Spanish-speaking congregants during communion. The church employs separate networks for IT, security, and AV traffic to avoid conflicts.
Grace Community Church's initial Dante implementation began in 2014 with buildouts in the family center and worship center, and they have added Dante endpoints regularly, now totaling over 150 devices. Given the size of the existing Dante network, they began using Dante Domain Manager in 2022 to manage the sitewide deployment.
The church's journey with Dante AV has not only improved their audio-visual capabilities but also enhanced their ability to connect with their diverse congregation, making worship services more accessible and engaging for all.
