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Stream Like a Pro: Why the BZBGear BG-Adamo Jr PTZ Camera is a Game-Changer for Church Services

Joel Cruz • July 4, 2024

“What surprised me the most was the image quality,” says Joseph Cottle, the AVL Director at Life Mission Church in Olathe, KS

The convenience of a PTZ camera with the image quality of a larger Sony camera? Yes, please! For this Church Production User Experience, we’re looking at the BZBGear Adamo-JR with Sony’s CMOS Sensor and 30x optical zoom.

“What surprised me the most was the image quality,” says Joseph Cottle, the AVL Director at Life Mission Church in Olathe, KS. “The other PTZ setup we have, doesn't have optical zoom, so once you start to push in, it gets a little grainy and that just doesn't happen with these BZB cameras,” he reports. “I even played around with it and just pushed in tight on just some random objects. I think it was I pushed in tight on a jacket and I could see the thread count on my coat.”

He liked that set up was easy. The camera is plug-and-play. If you plug in the SDI or the HDMI to a switcher, as long as everything's set to the same frame rate, he says you get an image right away. It also comes with a remote control that allows you to adjust focus in zoom and it's already paired with the camera, and so you can start dialing in your shot right away from there.

Cottle and his team tried the camera at one of the church’s smaller satellite campuses to capture and auto-track the pastor while he was preaching. They also used it in their main sanctuary as an extra static shot on stage.

“It really knocked that out of the park because that image quality is so crisp and there's a lot of ways you can also dial in the camera, and so even though we were in two completely different broadcast situations, different frame rates, different lighting situations, you're able to get in and especially if you have one of their controllers like the BZBGear Commander Pro, you're able to get in really easily and dial in exactly what you want to see from the camera, and I was really glad to have it here,” Cottle enthuses.

He says at their satellite campus they need a PTZ to be very reliable. “Having it up in KCK [Kansas City, KS] where I don't really have camera operators up there knowing that that camera is just going to do its job, which is we press record when the sermon starts and it's going to follow the pastor without failure until he is done preaching. It's basically like having another camera operator up there, but it's a robot and I don't have to worry about it.”

Cottle says he can see the Adamo-JR fitting in at any size church, depending on the need. “Whether you're a small church, 50 to 100 people, and you are just getting into streaming your services,” he says. “If you are kind of more mid-size church and you're wanting to build out a broadcast setup, but you don't have a ton of people, this is a very affordable all-in-one camera that paired with a couple of its brothers and a controller can do that for you as well. And then if you're a bigger multi-site church, kind of like us, where you have a dedicated broadcast team, a dedicated live stream, a dedicated online congregation, it's still good even for that because the image quality is so good.”

To learn more about the Adamo-JR road test at Life Mission Church and see the footage, watch this video!

Original article written by Deidra Blackmore for Church Production.