Mariners Church in Irvine, California, isn’t your typical mega-church production story. With 12 locations stretching from north San Diego to downtown LA’s Skid Row, 25,000 weekly attendees, and a purpose-built broadcast studio that took five years to design, you might expect a massive production department behind it all. The reality? Five full-time production staff members. That’s one for every 5,000 people.

We recently visited Mariners for a Worship Tech Tour episode and spent hours with Production Manager Eric Bradley, Systems Engineer Evan Woertz, and Executive Producer Russell Craine, diving deep into their systems, philosophy, and the operational discipline that makes it all work. Here’s what we learned.

A Philosophy of Simple Excellence

If there’s one phrase that captures Mariners’ approach to production, it’s “simple and excellent.” Eric Bradley uses those words repeatedly, and they show up in every decision the team makes, from lighting design to console workflows to multi-site distribution.

“We’re not necessarily trying to be at the forefront of anything in terms of production,” Eric explains. “We really want to just communicate the word, communicate scripture, and do that in a way where we’re delivering that well to 12 other locations plus online.”

That philosophy extends to their gear strategy too. Most of the core AV infrastructure in the 3,400-seat Irvine worship center dates back to a 2016 integration, and the team has no plans to rip it out. Instead, they’ve taken a deliberate approach of incremental upgrades: new consoles here, array processing there, a lighting console swap when it made sense. The PA is still D&B V Series from 2016. The broadcast cameras are still Grass Valley Focus 75s from the same era, though they added better glass and pedestals in 2019. The LED screens are still 4mm pixel pitch Eason (now Vanguard) panels.

“You can get good gear to go for a long time and not really be an issue,” Eric says. “We’re not necessarily limited by any of our 2016 gear.”

One Church, 12 Locations, All the Same Buttons

The operational challenge at Mariners isn’t the size of the Irvine campus. It’s replicating a consistent experience across 12 wildly different venues, from a second-floor mall space with 11-foot ceilings to an old movie theater with 20-foot ceilings, plus three fully portable locations that load in and out of junior high and high school gyms every weekend.

Their solution is radical standardization. Every congregation runs the same console platform (Allen & Heath SQ series at campuses, Avid S6L at Irvine), the same video switcher, the same lighting control, and the same presentation format. The stage setup follows the same template. The volunteer training is identical. Walk into any Mariners location and you should know it’s Mariners.

The centerpiece of their multi-site visual strategy is what they call the “one-to-one” or “box cam,” a fixed, life-size camera shot of the speaking pastor that feeds to a center LED screen at every congregation. It’s not switched or edited. It’s just a locked-off shot that makes the teaching pastor feel present in the room. The side screens then carry the director’s cut with switched camera angles and graphics.

“Our hope is that everybody would be able to walk into the room and know that this is a Mariners location,” Eric says. “The presentation’s the same no matter what.”

This alignment philosophy was pressure-tested when Mariners went from three congregations to seven, and then from seven to 12, adding five locations in a single calendar year. Executive Producer Russell Craine led a four-month process to centralize programming and create what the team calls “the matrix,” a master spreadsheet that drives everything from sermon series planning to worship set lists to media placement.

The tools behind it are surprisingly simple: a Google spreadsheet and Planning Center Online. As Systems Engineer Evan Woertz puts it, “You don’t need a bigger tool. You need bigger buy-in to the tools that you’re already using.”

The Audio Approach: Let the Source Do the Work

Eric Bradley has been doing church production for 23 years, and his audio philosophy reflects the wisdom of someone who’s been through the full arc of the “audio engineer IQ curve,” as we joked about during the tour. Start with faders, get deep into plugin chains and side-chain processing, and eventually come back around to realizing that getting the source right and balancing faders well is most of the job.

At Irvine, the front-of-house console is an Avid S6L-24C. Eric chose it for scalability (100+ inputs for Christmas services with full strings), reliability, and a workflow that keeps everything on the surface. He highlights the layout system, which lets him build custom fader banks for different service moments, and the function keys, which he uses to build macros for everything from recalling tuning presets to starting and stopping Pro Tools to bailing out of Waves plugins mid-service if stability becomes an issue.

The Waves integration runs through Avid’s native SoundGrid rather than a separate Super Rack setup. Eric’s discipline is to do everything he can on the console first, with EQ, compression, and gating as the foundation, and then use Waves only for tools the console doesn’t offer natively, like de-essers, dynamic EQ, or specific modeling plugins.

That same discipline cascades to the campuses. Every congregation gets an Allen & Heath SQ console with a small Waves rig, but the expectation is that if you pulled all the Waves plugins off, you’d still have a perfectly functional mix. “Waves should be the sprinkles on the cupcake,” Eric says. “The lime on the taco.”

One clever technique worth noting: Eric uses inexpensive drum triggers (about $29 from Guitar Center) not for sample replacement, but as side-chain sources for his gates. The triggers open the gate on contact rather than volume, which means ghost notes and subtle dynamics come through cleanly even with a heavy gate setting. It’s a practical, low-cost solution that delivers real results.

SPL levels run at 91 dB LAUQ over two minutes for weekend services and 95 dB for the more energetic Thursday night service. Eric describes the target as “pleasant,” a mix where people feel compelled to sing and participate without being knocked over.

Time Code Drives Everything

One of the more interesting production decisions at Mariners is their use of time code to automate worship presentation. The Ableton session on the music director’s computer generates SMPTE time code, which Eric takes as an input channel on the Avid (carefully unassigned from any buses) and distributes via direct outs to ProPresenter, Resolume, and the GrandMA Compact XT lighting console.

During worship, time code drives lighting cues, lyrics, and motion backgrounds automatically. The lighting volunteer’s job is reduced to managing front lights and advancing into song-specific cue sets. Once they hit go, time code takes over.

This decision was driven by a desire for precision. The chain from producer to graphics operator to video director was slowing things down, and with set arrangements and service times locked down to the second, automation made more sense. It did mean eliminating a volunteer position, which the team weighed carefully since they value giving people opportunities to serve and grow. But the tradeoff was perfect execution on worship lyrics every single time.

During the message, it’s a different story. The producer manually drives slides and media because the timing needs to respond to the teaching pastor’s delivery in real time. But the same time code infrastructure means that if worship arrangements change, as long as the music director slices the time code along with the edit, all the downstream cues follow automatically without rebuilding.

A Purpose-Built Studio Five Years in the Making

Perhaps the most impressive thing we saw at Mariners was Studio A, a dedicated soundstage that opened in early 2025 after a five-year design and construction process. It exists because of a decision Russell Craine and the team made in the summer of 2020: Mariners’ online church experience would not be a “live look-in” of the in-person service. It would be filmed intentionally, with the teaching pastor speaking directly to camera for the online viewer.

Six years later, they haven’t deviated from that commitment.

The studio complex includes three purpose-built spaces. Studio A is the large-format soundstage for message captures and worship filming, with seating for up to 65 and a lighting grid on motors for quick reconfiguration. Studio B is a mid-size room with a green screen for storytelling content. Studio C is a dedicated podcast studio with PTZ cameras mounted to the walls so conversations can be filmed without any operators in the room.

Every Thursday at 3:00 PM, that week’s teaching pastor films the online message in Studio A in front of a studio audience made up of lead pastors and worship pastors from all 12 congregations. This serves double duty: the congregation leaders hear the message for the first time and can prepare for the weekend, while the production team captures a purpose-built online experience. The audience doesn’t get mic’d. No amens, no laughs. The pastor is speaking to the camera, to the online viewer, and any ambient noise would break that connection.

After the message capture, the pastor walks upstairs to Studio C and films a companion podcast called “If I Had More Time,” then grabs dinner and teaches the Thursday night service at 7:00 PM. The rhythm is intentional: teaching, podcast, teaching, all in one flow rather than scattered across the week.

Worship content is filmed even further in advance. The team recently completed a two-day production shoot that captured 10 weeks of worship content, enough to carry them through Easter. These sessions bring in the worship collective (essentially a worship choir of about 40 people) and transform Studio A into a completely different space from the message setup. The set lists align with what will be sung in person during those same weeks, maintaining the alignment philosophy across every platform.

The post-production pipeline is tight. Thursday’s message capture gets edited Friday alongside pre-edited worship content, hosting segments, and any additional story videos or calls to action. The final program edit pushes to Resi by end of day Friday for weekend delivery. Online services run at the same times as Irvine’s in-person services, with an additional 7:00 AM Sunday service for East Coast viewers.

Infrastructure That Lasts

Walking through Mariners’ engineering spaces, you see a team that takes a thoughtful, modular approach to infrastructure. In 2023, they eliminated traditional stage boxes entirely in favor of multi-pin snake systems, giving them the flexibility to reconfigure the stage without rerunning cables. Eric can move a tracks snake from one side of the stage to the other by simply unplugging and reconnecting. This also aligned their Irvine setup with what the congregations were already doing, which means congregation volunteers can come to Irvine for training and see the same systems they’ll operate at their own locations.

The video suite still runs on a Grass Valley ecosystem with Miranda routers, originally integrated by Clark in 2016 and incrementally expanded since. Comms moved to Riedel Bolero. AI-powered language translation was added recently, taking a simple left-right audio feed from the console and delivering it to an app where attendees can choose their language in real time.

Even the front-of-house position has been relocated. It used to be in the middle of the room. Now it’s further back. The LED screens used to be stacked on top of the stage. Now they’re pushed wider for better viewing angles in the wide room. The side screens were actually made smaller to create more space for lighting and visual elements. These aren’t flashy upgrades. They’re the kind of deliberate, incremental improvements that come from a team that’s paying attention and thinking critically about how their space serves their mission.

Key Takeaways

There’s a lot any church production team can learn from Mariners, regardless of size.

Standardization is a superpower. When every location runs the same gear, the same workflows, and the same presentation format, you can scale with a tiny team. You can train volunteers once and deploy them anywhere. You can troubleshoot remotely because you know exactly what’s in every rack.

Good gear lasts longer than you think. Mariners’ 2016 infrastructure is still delivering excellent results nearly a decade later. The key is maintaining it well, making targeted upgrades where they matter most, and resisting the urge to tear everything out and start over.

Process beats tools. A Google spreadsheet and Planning Center Online are running the programming pipeline for a 25,000-person, 12-location church. The tool isn’t the bottleneck. Buy-in and discipline are what make the system work.

Simplicity is harder than complexity. It’s easy to add another plugin, another fixture, another layer of production. The discipline is in asking whether each addition actually serves the mission or just adds complexity that a volunteer will struggle with.

Invest in your online experience intentionally. Mariners’ decision to film purpose-built content for online viewers rather than simulcasting the room experience has been a defining choice. It required building a studio, hiring dedicated staff, and creating an entirely separate production pipeline. But the result is an online experience that feels like it was made for the viewer, because it was.

We’re grateful to Eric, Evan, and Russell for the generous access and candid conversation. If you want to see the full tour, check out the video on our YouTube channel.

Have questions about anything you read here? Drop them in the comments or reach out to us directly. And if you’re looking for help designing, specifying, or integrating AV systems for your church, that’s exactly what we do at Churchfront.Share