With eight locations in the Chicago metropolitan area, Willow Creek Community
Church has a wide reach. Its new North Shore campus opened just in time to
celebrate Christmas 2016. The new campus is served by an extensive AV network
that relies on Visionary Solutions E4000 PacketAV 4K-Encoders and D4000 PacketAV
4K-Decoders, which provide ultra-high-definition video over IP, with extremely low
latency.
“We designed a huge AV-IT network that connects the audio, video, lighting, and
control equipment and provides video distribution throughout the campus,” offers
Senior Design Consultant Peter Fitton of Clark, the Alpharetta, Georgia, firm that
designed and installed the system. “This is the biggest network we’ve ever built for
a project like this. We deployed 28 Visionary Solutions D4000 decoders, each of
which feeds a television monitor, and 5 E4000 encoders. As a result, 5 channels of
content can be routed to any of 28 TVs throughout the facility.”
Latency was a major concern when planning the project. “Latency issues have kept
us away from doing IP delivery of video in the past,” Fitton remarks.
In the past, Fitton’s team would have distributed baseband video over coax to every
television because even a modulated solution is not fast enough for HD video. For
Willow Creek, though, it made more sense to create one big network that could
handle everything-if it could be done with low enough latency.
Fitton’s job was made much easier by a great relationship with the client and early
planning. “We were brought into the project early on,” he confirms. “The architect
had done his drawings but they hadn’t broken ground yet. So we were able to work
with Willow Creek throughout the process. We designed the audio, video, and
lighting systems and the AV network, including systems for the main auditorium,
student auditorium, and five children’s spaces. We used Dante distribution
throughout the entire facility, which saves money because it’s on the same network
as the Visionary Solutions gear, and we didn’t have to run individual lines for every
analogue input and output.”
The integrated AV-IT network required the Clark team to work closely with Willow
Creek Community Church’s IT department. “Normally we leave almost all of IT up to
the client’s IT team,” Fitton observes. “On this project, because we were deploying
such a substantial network, I wanted to share space with IT in the network closets.’
The new AV network has been everything hoped for. “We and the Willow Creek
Community Church people are very happy with the solution and specifically with the
Visionary Solutions gear,” Fitton reports. “Latency is extremely low, the network
delivers plenty of functionality, and the equipment is very reliable -and we did it all
within the client’s budget.”
