Our video control room has been pretty change-free for the past few months … the only thing new that we’ve started doing lately is playing DVDs back to our center screen through Pro Presenter.

Lately I’ve been spending some time thinking about what we can do to make things a little smoother in the control room.  It was originally set up in quite a hurry, and although we’ve gotten used to the way it was set up, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved.

So after some consideration and rethinking about how to make life easy upstairs, we’re going to do three things…

1. Consolidate
2. Rearrange
3. Spread the love knowledge

Consolidating is going to be the easiest part of what we’re doing.  Since our installation, we’ve used two separate computers to handle our song lyrics and message notes using Pro Presenter and Keynote, respectively.  The more we’ve used Pro Presenter (thank you, Renewed Vision, for version 3) the more we like it, and so now we’re looking to move to a single machine running Pro Presenter for both lyrics and message notes.  Sure we would lose the cute animations and whatnot, but we’ve used them rarely at best.  Why would we do this?  Well, it’s much easier to get familiar with a single software program than it is to get familiar with two, and since we’re already using Pro Presenter around the building it makes sense to standardize on it.  We’ll still keep Keynote around, but it won’t be a primary application anymore.  At the most, we’ll use it to design slides so we can export them to PNG for Pro Presenter.

The next task will be rearranging the control room.  For those who don’t pay attention to our IMAG work (and you SHOULD, because the team does a great job at it), we’ve gotten rid of the remote camera that was mounted on the back wall, thus we now have some extra real estate on the control room desk.  Throw in the fact that we’re consolidating 2 workstations down to 1, and suddenly we’ve got room to make some changes in the layout of our equipment.  The rearrangement isn’t going to be anything monumental, but it’s going to make it easier on the computer operators, because they’ll be able to see the results of their work better.

Finally, spreading the knowledge, which is really just a nice euphemism for — you guessed it — documentation.  My goal in this area is to have a binder for each workstation in the control room that contains an outline of the machine’s vital information, software documentation, area-specific troubleshooting methods, and anything else that’s needed.  This process will take the longest by far, but the benefits will be huge for new volunteers once everything is in place.

Are there any readers to this blog that spend time in video?  I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to keep things efficient/clean/<insert positive adjective here> in your work area.