Dante AV elevates visual experience at Grace Community Church
Dante AV elevates visual experience at Grace Community Church
Grace Community Church in California has chosen a large Dante-based networked AV system throughout its campus which includes a 3,000-seat worship centre, the original 300-seat chapel, a family centre, a children’s centre, the Master’s Seminary, a tower featuring five large classrooms, and several small outbuildings. The Dante AV system provides the church with the ability to distribute video signals throughout the campus.
Recently, the church created a feature documentary slated for theatre release, but they wanted the first broadcast to premiere campus-wide. The church felt that the documentary needed to be broadcast in 4K for maximum effect, and while Grace Community Church had a pre-existing video distribution system, it could not deliver video reliably for the needs of this project.
The church leadership turned to John Mark Conaway, Sunday technology supervisor for the church, to coordinate the challenge of distributing reliable 4K video and audio to each screening space. “Our initial test in the main overflow room was a ‘set it and forget it’ trial, which worked perfectly. That’s the type of reliability we were looking for, and we didn’t need to tinker with it continuously,” he said.
The church’s AV team deployed nine Bolin D20 Dante AV Ultra transceivers throughout the campus to facilitate the live video stream from the sanctuary to overflow rooms in the satellite buildings. The transceivers can be programmed as an encoder or decoder. Bolin’s D20 Series devices are single video channel networked AV-over-IP transceivers fully compatible with Dante audio devices within a Dante ecosystem like Grace Community Church. Each transceiver supports up to 4K60 streaming over a standard gigabit network with ultra-low latency and offers embedded audio output via HDMI or SDI and PTZ camera movement control via IP or IR pass-through. Based on the pre-existing SDI infrastructure, the church installed three D20H models (HDMI) and six D20S units (SDI) across the campus.
The church’s initial Dante implementation began in 2014 with buildouts in the family centre and worship centre, and it has added additional Dante endpoints regularly, now totalling more than 150 devices. More than 100 microphones are deployed between the musicians, choir and worship leaders for the full orchestral-style performances though Dante-enabled Yamaha consoles. The church employs separate networks for IT, security and AV traffic to avoid any conflicts.
Due to the size of the existing Dante network, the church also began using Dante Domain Manager in 2022 to maintain and manage the site-wide deployment. The ability to route Dante audio between VLANs/subnets has allowed it to consolidate 10 isolated audio systems into one integrated network.