I think it may be of interest for you to hear what goes on behind the scenes here in the pacific to make sure the isles of sea are not forgotten in this world-wide event.
Of my various technical duties for the Church here, one of my most important is the semi-annual work on conference. In Micronesia there are many unique languages. Of them, we have 6 translated live, Marshallese, Pohnpeian, Chuukese, Kosraean, Palauan, and Yapese. We also have people from other islands and Asia that would like to hear conference in their language. We show live sessions in Tagalog, Japanese, Korean, Samoan, Tongan, and of course, English.
We have the largest receiving unit of the Church in the whole world.
Satellite Rack
Without seeing the spaghetti of wiring that I manage, it's hard to imagine the complexity of what I work with.
Wiring Spaghetti
Wiring Closeup
And yes, I have spent hours single handedly wiring each one of those. And that's just what it takes to get the languages into the building. Then I have to find a way to take each language of each session and get it to the islands that cannot watch conference any other way.
The old system used a bunch of DVD recorders. Each of the 5 sessions are two hours long, the same as a disc's capacity. So you'd have to be there to start recording exactly on time. I quickly changed that to DVD recorders with a hard drive so I could have some buffer and record all sessions without having to be there to change discs. Timers were also a must. Conference comes down at 2am in Guam. I don't want to be awake to record it.
HDD + DVD Recording Station
That method also proved a bit tedious. So I got approved to build a super video-making computer. I put together a system with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 terabytes of hard drive space, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a liquid cooled system, and the ability to record 8 languages with video simultaneously. Without going into too much techy detail, it's a very well performing machine.
Computer System
Using that system and some moderately expensive software, I make custom DVD's that have unique menus and multiple language tracks. One disc can now contain all 8 languages that we need to send out. That reduces the number of discs made by a factor of four or more. The computer paid for itself in one Conference. After the master disc is made, it's time to make copies.
To duplicate, we once had a device that read the master disc, and made 5 duplicates at a time. That was time consuming and impractical. To label the discs, we had printed images to stickers that needed to be pasted onto each disc one at a time. Also not ideal.
Since, I have added a duplicator that makes 11 discs simultaneously and invested in a printing system that can be fed as much as 100 discs at once and prints directly to the disc. It is controlled by a dedicated laptop.
Disc Printer, Duplicators, and Laptop
After the discs are made they are placed into mailboxes and mailed to each branch in Micronesia. The whole process takes me every working hour (and then some) for one week.
So, one might ask, why does the Church go to such great length, cost and effort to send people a copy of a few talks? Simple, because the worth of every soul is worth more than every dollar or hour it takes to send them the word of God. And for one week every six months I'll gladly spend my time to be a small pebble in the boulder of the Church rolling forth to the isles of the sea and the world at large.
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