Streamline Your Church Services with Stream Decks
If you’ve ever been in a service where someone’s scrambling to find the right lighting cue, or the audio engineer is frantically trying to change the autotune key between songs, you know how valuable instant control can be. When you’re trying to do a lot with just a little bit on Sunday mornings, having the right tools at your fingertips makes all the difference.
Stream Decks have become one of our go-to solutions for simplifying complex workflows and making services run more smoothly. In this walkthrough, I’m going to show you how we use them to control everything from lighting and ProPresenter to Waves Tune key changes, PTZ camera presets, and video switching. The goal is always the same: speed up your workflows and make things easier for your volunteers.
The Basics: Lighting and Emergency Control
Let’s start with a basic lighting and ProPresenter setup. In this particular installation, the church didn’t want a lot of ProPresenter control, so we’re primarily using the Stream Deck for lighting. But because they have a lot of lights, we wanted to give them plenty of options.
The first things we set up are the essential controls. They can turn their hazer on and off with a single button. They have instant access to house lights, which brings me to something really important: in the case of an emergency, you need to be able to get your house lights on very quickly.
Your house lights should be wired into your emergency system through your local fire department or alarm company so they turn on automatically when your alarm goes off. But you also need manual control. If someone has a medical emergency during your service, you want to be able to flood that room with light immediately to get help to the people who need it.
We also gave them a quick-access sermon lighting button. This is your “oh shoot, I need that to happen now” button. Something doesn’t work, someone forgot to trigger a cue, whatever the issue is, you can grab your sermon lighting instantly. Same thing with pre-service lighting. These aren’t fancy controls, but they’re the ones that will save you when things go sideways.
Adding Texture with Eye Candy Settings
Frank from pro church lights, who helped setup our lightkey show file, gave them some basic eye candy settings for their lights. They’re not running tracks yet, and they want the ability to utilize their lights a little more in depth on Sunday mornings without overwhelming their volunteers.
The way he set this up is really smart. During a worship setting, they have several buttons that create subtle effects with their Portman lights. Basic fading, different color transitions, nothing extreme. He gave them multiple options so they can add a little texture to the stage without making things complicated.
On top of that, they can use their moving lights differently. There’s a button for basic pan and tilt to get some movement on stage. Another button for random dims with those moving lights. Again, just adding some basic texture to the stage design.
And here’s the key part: at the end of a worship set, they have one button that clears every single one of those eye candy settings. You don’t want lights blinking and moving when your pastor’s on stage. One button press, and everything goes back to whatever’s live in their service cue presets.
Two Approaches to Waves Tune Control
For the front of house position, we did something I think is really cool. I gave them a couple of different ways to manage Waves Tune on their Waves system, which is connected to their Avantis console.
The first method is for people who like to be ready to go on the fly and change to whatever key they need. We set up every single major key that’s available on Waves Tune. This covers 99% of the music out there. A Major, A# Major, B Major, C Major, and so on. If for some reason you don’t want key-specific tuning on a song, you just click it to off and it goes back to chromatic.
The second method is for teams that want to plan things out ahead of time and have song-specific settings. You can load a song setting that’s pre-configured to a specific key. So Song 1 might be C Major and Song 2 might be A Major. But here’s where it gets flexible: you can change Song 1 to D Major, store that scene, and now you’ve got it saved for next time. You can recall songs one by one, or you can just fire the key you need for that week’s service.
Both approaches work. It just depends on how your team operates and what kind of planning you do before Sunday morning.
Solving the Sound Booth Volume Problem
This next solution might be one of the cooler things we came up with for this install. We tied into the AHM 16 processor they have, and we were thinking about how the sound person mixes in this booth.
Here’s the issue: they’re mixing on delay speakers, and we set it up so it’s as loud in the booth as it is on the floor. That way the sound person can mix at a decibel level they know. If it’s this loud up here, it’s that loud down there. That’s great for getting a good mix dialed in.
But after a short period of time, they don’t necessarily need it that loud anymore. They just need to know that it’s that loud on the floor. So once they’ve got a good mix going, they shouldn’t have to keep blasting themselves. The people up in the booth also don’t want to be yelling over each other during the service to communicate, especially since they’re not using headsets in this already-isolated space.
The solution: we gave them a button that toggles between two different modes on the AHM processor. With one press, they can go to full volume mode where they’re hearing it at the same decibel level as the floor. Another press drops the decibels down by about 10 so they can still mix, but they’re not getting pounded. It’s a simple fix that makes a huge difference in the working environment.
Rethinking PTZ Camera Control for Four Cameras
In the broadcast setup, we had to get creative. You’ve probably seen what I typically do with a Stream Deck and three PTZ cameras, where I have one line of presets per camera. Well, here we added four cameras, so I had to rethink the layout.
Everything you do when you’re doing this type of install is a concession of one kind or another. Either you’re making concessions for cost, or just working with the equipment you have. You have to figure out the best use of what you’re installing in the space.
Instead of my normal horizontal layout where each line is its own camera, I split the Stream Deck into four sections. Camera 1 presets, Camera 2 presets, Camera 3 presets, Camera 4 presets. That’s the top three lines of buttons. So you get six presets per camera for all four cameras.
The workflow is simple: grab a preset, and it goes to preview. Then you can cut to it or fade to it just like any standard video switcher operation. You can quickly recall presets and switch between cameras without any fuss.
The bottom row of the Stream Deck is dedicated to ATEM switcher settings. We’ve got lower thirds that toggle on and off. We have Camera 1, 2, 3, and 4 preview buttons. So if you like a preset that’s already set up, maybe during the sermon, you can just go back and forth between those cameras without having to recall presets every time.
We also set up the computer graphics send, and here’s something interesting: they have multiple CG sends in this setup. They have what’s being sent to the LED wall, and they also have CG being sent to the side screens. Using a two-step process in Companion software, I can actually toggle through those different CG inputs using the same button. Then you’ve got your fade and cut buttons for switching between those sources.
The Real Goal: Making Sundays Less Stressful
All of these setups have one thing in common: they’re designed to make Sunday mornings run smoother and take pressure off your volunteers. When you can control your lighting, manage your auto-tune keys, adjust your booth volume, and switch between cameras all from a few interfaces, you’re eliminating a lot of the chaos that can happen during a service.
It’s not about having the fanciest gear. It’s about setting up your systems so that the technology gets out of the way and lets your team focus on what really matters. Whether you’re trying to simplify your lighting control, integrate better camera switching, or just make your Sunday mornings less stressful, these kinds of workflow improvements are where you see real results.
