Calvary Baptist Church

About Calvary Baptist Church

Founded in 1847, New York City’s Calvary Baptist Church is located in an historic 130 year-old building in the heart of Manhattan. The church’s congregants represent more than 20 countries of origin and over a dozen languages. Worshipers hail from the five New York City boroughs, upstate NY, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Challenge

Calvary Baptist Church needed an AV system that would make sure the preacher and choir were seen and heard from different angles all throughout the building. The church is also used for presentations and other events, so the system had to be versatile and user friendly. They needed a cutting-edge system that would add high-quality video to their elaborate, already existing sound system.

Solution

PanAVid, the AV integrator, created a system with three dramatic video walls that surround the congregation each with four 55-inch LED monitors in a 2x2 pattern. The walls display video from three HD pan-tilt-zoom cameras placed around the church, a remote camera, computer-based graphics from desktop and laptop computers, and a DVD player.

PanAVid used a large variety of Kramer products for the project. The system’s primary switching unit is the VP-747 ProScale™ In-CTRL™ dual scaler seamless switcher with the VP-747T remote control console to preview video. Eight VM-2Hxl 1:2 HDMI distribution amplifiers and a VS-88H matrix switcher handle routing. Four VM-114H4C combination switcher and distribution amplifiers select input signals of either HDMI or CAT 5 over DGKat™ twisted pair cabling. PT-571 and PT-572+ DGKat twisted pair transmitters and receivers and a TP-50 twisted pair receiver and TP-121EDID twisted pair transmitter handle computer graphics video signals. The VM-92 and VP-434 HDMI ProScale™ digital scalers scale computer graphics to HDMI. Kramer racks and rack adapters house all switching and scaling products.

Results

“Calvary Baptist Church is delighted with both the equipment and the excellent service received in this renovation. The quality of our worship has been greatly enhanced,” said Michael Toombs, Executive Administrator at Calvary Baptist Church.

 “The Kramer switchers do a great job of managing all of the connectivity for this system,” said Dennis Mitchell, Client Relations Manager for PanAVid. “With Kramer products, we designed something that could add a whole new dimension to their services. The church has never had technology like this before, and Kramer helped us to make it seamless for them,” he added.