Observations and lessons learned so far

I've been working as Director of Media and Communications at my church for a little over five months now, and it seems like a good time to take stock of how I'm doing and what I'm learning this far into things. It's been a great job for me, in that I feel like I was made for this stuff. I'm a nerd, I love working with technology, and I know enough about this stuff to be able to trouble-shoot and solve most of the problems I encounter day-to-day. After working in a job I really didn't enjoy for many years, this is a welcome change.

The main problem is that there just isn't enough time. My position is part-time, and although I'm only supposed to be working 25 hours per week (or thereabouts), most weeks I have to work a fair amount more than that just to get the essential stuff done for weekend services, let alone get anything else done--and there's a long list of things that need to be done that are just having to wait right now. But enough of that...on to my observations and lessons learned:

1. I really don't like EasyWorship very much. But in all fairness, it could be that the hardware I'm running it on is just too old and tired (and underpowered) to run it well. And I'm going to give EW an opportunity to redeem itself by getting it running on some newer, more powerful hardware--then we'll see. But that's not the only issue--this past Sunday, I was trying to load a video into EW, and for some reason, EW had a problem with it. (That's not an unusual occurrence, but this was a WMV file--shouldn't have been a problem.) So EW hung in a loop, complaining that there was a problem with the database, but I couldn't quit EW--couldn't even force-quit it. In the end, my only recourse was to reboot, and on this particular hardware, that's a 10-minute process (no kidding). I ended up having to reboot three or four times before I could get EW's database rebuilt and get the offending file removed. I took the video over to my Mac and converted it to MPEG-1, and after that, EW was happy. The main reason we ended up using EW was the licensing issue--EW allows you to install on as many different machines as you like in your church, while most competing products charge you a license fee for each copy. I haven't used any of the other products in my brief tenure in this job, so I have no idea whether there's something better out there, but EW just seems antiquated at times, and sometimes it just isn't very intuitive. The only similar application I've seen for the Mac is ProWorship, and it didn't seem ready for prime-time; the demo kept crashing on me. And the licensing scheme isn't very economical.

2. You can't start too early on a video production project. Two days before the "air date" is not the time to discover you're missing three key shots.

3. Volunteers are absolutely essential to our media ministry--there's just too much to do. Recruitment and training has to be an ongoing part of my job.

4. Very few people seem to understand even the most basic principles of how audio-visual gear works. No matter how detailed your instructions may be, people will still manage to operate the gear incorrectly.

5. If you make it look easy, people will think that it IS easy.

6. You're really going to want to do everything people ask you to do. It is not possible, so you have to learn how to say "no."

I'm sure I'll have more observations and more lessons learned over time--in the meantime, maybe I can learn from you!