A few weeks ago, our Senior Pastor asked for some assistance with setting up a skype video conference so that Adam could participate in a meeting being held in Texas. The alternative was to have him fly down to Dallas for a 1-hour meeting, effectively blowing out an entire day of productive hours.

We don’t currently have a dedicated video conference system, so we had to improvise.

We scheduled the meeting in our studio and coordinated with the other end to make the conference happen via Skype.

On our end, we took Adam’s MacBook Pro, and hooked up a Canon XL2 via FireWire for the video, a Shure wired lapel mic hooked to the camera (for phantom power) and then the audio output from the camera into the MacBook’s line-level audio input (because it appears that Skype doesn’t recognize the audio device on the XL2). We then connected the audio and display output from the mac into a 40″ LCD TV.

Here’s what it looked like:

The end result is a conference that looks and sounds excellent.