The AIM Series is a video project from Adventures in Ministry where we are releasing eight quality videos from eight outstanding speakers every year. This is our second year, and we're excited to be providing this free resource to all starting on May 1st.
But how are we doing it?
Well, the University Church of Christ in Montgomery, Alabama and the Graymere Church of Christ in Columbia, Tennessee have been gracious enough to grant us use of their equipment and space as we film these videos. Most of the video were filmed inside of the Graymere TV studio.
How it's technically put together is probably a lot less complex than you might think. High Definition video has come a long way in the past decade.
Central to everything is the Blackmagic ATEM TV Studio. It's a hub that connects all of our cameras up (we're using three) and routes one video signal to our BlackMagic Shuttle capture system. Everything is captured digitally, there's no actual film or tapes involved.
We're able to switch the views dynamically as the video is captured with the Blackmagic software. This simulates a real board that you might pay thousands of dollars for but is included the Blackmagic ATEM hub.
We're using some great cameras for the AIM series this year - two Sony HDR FX7's and a Canon Vixia HF 500 for the short black and white views you'll see on the videos this year. All three cameras are extremely high quality and professional grade.
Speaking of professional grade, we're capturing audio separately with the Zoom H5 recorder. We have a Shure lapel mic that all of out speakers will be wearing to capture really great quality audio.
After the video is captured on our solid state hard drive, we plug it up to our Mac mini and use an app called Compressor to, well, compress the footage. Our 15 minute videos are usually about 25 gigs each before we compress them down to about 3 gigs each.
After that's done, we take the compressed video files and put them into Final Cut Pro. Alongside that we we take the audio from the Zoom H5 and sync it with the video in Final Cut. We make any edits necessary to the video, and add the graphics and titles in.
Our beginning motion graphics we composed entirely in Adobe After Effects and both the paper AIM sequence and the Legit sequence took over 17 hours of work to create. They are rendered into self-contained videos and then put in front of all our videos this year.
After all the editing and adding titles is done, we'll do some audio cleanup and color correction and then export our project to one, self-contained video that you can download on theaimseries.com and view on our AIM YouTube channel.
Every video averages about five hours of work to complete, but it's well worth it to give your churches a high-quality and FREE resource to use this summer.
Head over to theaimseries.com to sign up. We can't wait to show you these videos on May 1st!