Inside Compassion Christian Church’s Production System: A Full Tech Tour
A 2,067-seat room. Seven campuses. RED cinema cameras on a live broadcast. A 50-foot LED wall. And a team that’s built systems so dialed in that most of Sunday morning runs itself.
That’s what Jake found when he pulled up to Compassion Christian Church in Henderson, Georgia for the latest episode of Worship Tech Tour.
Here’s the thing — this isn’t just a gear flex. What makes Compassion’s setup worth studying is how intentionally every piece connects. The infrastructure, the team roles, the automation. It’s a masterclass in thinking about church production as a system, not just a pile of equipment.
Audio: One Console to Rule Them All
Matt Deal, Compassion’s production systems engineer, runs everything from a DigiCo Quantum 5 — front of house, monitor mixes for the band, broadcast feeds, and even 64 channels back and forth to ClearCom intercom. That’s a lot of IO from one desk.
Why DigiCo over Avid (their previous platform)? It came down to input/output count and customer service. The Quantum 5 handles 255 mono inputs. They’re using about 150 right now across stage boxes, digital playback, CG machines, and comms.
The layout follows what Matt calls “rock and roll style” — inputs, outputs, inputs, outputs across the fader banks. Every Compassion campus runs DigiCo with a similar layout, so any staff member can walk into any location and feel at home.
One detail that stood out: Matt runs auto-tune on a completely separate Waves rack from his main processing chain. He routes vocals through dual inserts on the DigiCo channel — first insert handles the main plugin chain, second insert handles auto-tune. That lets him hit a single button to kill all auto-tune across every vocal at once. And because he double-patched the vocal channels on a separate zero-latency layer, the band’s in-ear mixes never hear tuning artifacts.
Speaking of in-ears — the team uses Klang for 3D immersive monitoring. Band members can place instruments anywhere in a 3D space around their heads using an iPad or any device. Matt expected pushback from long-time musicians, but they loved it immediately. Click on top of the head, drums behind you. It’s a big upgrade from traditional left-right mixing.
The Producer Role: Why It Matters
Kevin Tucker, associate production director, oversees the in-room experience from a four-screen producer station at front of house. He monitors everything via remote desktop — CG machines, lighting (Vista), wireless workbench, Slack for cross-campus communication — all from one Mac Mini.
But here’s the takeaway for smaller churches: Compassion’s volunteer producers are the secret weapon. These aren’t hired staff. They’re serve team members who started on CG or lighting and worked their way into the air traffic controller seat. They call the service from planning center run sheets while Kevin floats and handles anything that breaks.
Jake made the point well — in most small to medium churches, the sound person or CG operator is also the de facto producer. That’s where things get overwhelming. Even finding one more volunteer to hold the planning center list and keep everyone on the same page can make Sunday mornings dramatically less stressful.
A 50-Foot LED Wall and Cinema-Grade Cameras
The center LED wall is a UniLumin URM3 setup — 2.6mm pixel pitch, 30 panels wide by 9 high, roughly 50 feet across and 17 feet tall. It weighs about 4,500 pounds and requires three strands of fiber and 30 data connections just to feed it. The NovaStar MX 2000 Pro handles processing, receiving 4K HDMI from a Green Hippo media server that’s triggered by Vista lighting cues.
The camera system is where things get wild. All cameras are RED Komodo Xs paired with Canon broadcast lenses — a 50-1000mm on camera one, 25-250 on camera two, 17-120 on the steadicam, and an 18-80 on camera four. The two handheld cameras use Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses and transmit wirelessly via Teradek Ranger.
Colby Griner, associate production director, bridges the gap between cinema camera bodies and live production using Sienview Rio boxes — small network devices that add gen lock, tally, and remote camera control to the RED bodies. A volunteer shader in the control room can adjust ISO, iris, and color across every camera from physical RCP panels.
Everything connects over MultiDyne fiber transports. One fiber cable per camera position carries video, gen lock, data, tally, intercom, and even power — replacing what would otherwise be a massive loom of individual cables. And because the building was built with fiber in the floor pockets from day one, swapping from their old cameras to the RED system required zero new infrastructure.
The Pastor’s iPad Sermon System
One of the most practical setups in the tour: lead pastor Marcus Johnson controls his own sermon slides from an iPad running Keynote, casting wirelessly to an Air Server unit in the video racks. Colby’s video team DVE-keys only the right side of the iPad screen for broadcast — the left third stays private for Marcus’s personal notes.
The Air Server costs about $900 and has been 100% reliable. Marcus advances his own slides at his own pace, and the production team watches for visual cues (like when he picks up the Apple Pencil) to adjust their camera cuts.
For redundancy, Kevin exports every sermon slide as JPEGs into Pro Presenter. If the Air Server ever drops, Colby can swap the key source in seconds.
Automation That Saves 30 Minutes Every Sunday
Companion and QSIS work together to automate building systems on a schedule. At 6 AM Sunday, monitors power on, LED walls fire up, house lights come up, and the intercom system boots — all automatically. Stream Deck stations throughout the building give any team member access to building modes, multi-view switching, display control, and even camera frame rate changes.
Colby’s stream deck in the control room can turn on and off every confidence monitor, backstage TV, LED wall, and work light in the building. Before this automation, just powering everything up took 30 minutes of flipping switches.
What Churches Can Learn from This
You don’t need RED cameras and a 50-foot LED wall to apply the principles behind Compassion’s system. The real takeaways are:
Invest in infrastructure first. Compassion’s fiber, floor pockets, and conduit were installed 10 years ago. When they upgraded cameras, they didn’t pull a single new cable. If you’re building or renovating, put the infrastructure in now — even if you can’t fill it yet.
Standardize across locations. Every campus runs DigiCo with the same layout. Any staff member can walk into any campus and mix. That kind of consistency scales.
Separate the producer role. Even with volunteers, having one person whose only job is calling the service flow makes everything else easier.
Build redundancy where it matters most. Dual mic packs on the pastor, backup sermon slides in Pro Presenter, a kill switch for auto-tune, redundant fiber paths. They protect the moments that matter most.
Automate the boring stuff. If you’re spending 30 minutes turning on equipment every Sunday, that’s 30 minutes you could spend on sound check or team prep.
The Compassion team — Tyler Carson (production director), Matt Deal (production systems engineer), Kevin Tucker (associate production director), and Colby Griner (associate production director) — have built something worth studying. Not because of the budget, but because of how thoughtfully every piece connects.
Want to start planning your own system upgrade? Apply for a free consultation at churchfront.com/apply
