Lighting Infrastructure

The lighting infrastructure is currently an area of knowledge that I have the least amount of knowledge and experience in. Thus, this article/section of church worship technology will initially be a fairly short one.

Output Devices

Lighting equipment comprises the following:

• Multicoloured LED spotlights x 12, organised in a rectangular layout over the immediate stage area
• Lighting bars x 2
• Parcan lights with barn doors x 10 (5 on each lighting bar, front lighting bar lights are focused on the rear stage zone whilst the rear lighting bar lights focus on the front stage zone)
• Spot light focused on the cross, located on the far right rear lighting bar
• Cyc lights x 6, laid out in pairs against the 3 rear stage walls where the 3 projectors are output to, facing upwards.
• All lighting is wired to a LSC 4RU Redback Wallmount Dimmer with ?12 x 10A outlets and DMX connectivity to the AV desk area in the chapel.
• A LSC Redback Patch Bay is physically mounted alongside the dimmer with multiple double power points providing source power to the individual light/channels.
• An ultraDMX RDM Pro unit is positioned at the AV desk, providing connectivity from the dimmer downstream via USB to the control PC.
  This USB connection can easily be made to the new Mac Mini.

Lighting Control Software

Since the first day of operations in the new building, the lighting control PC has been an older generation desktop computer running on Windows XP. Free DMX software FreeStyler is used to control operations of all lighting.

With the acquisition of a Mac Mini unit in April 2014, full deployment and connectivity to the lighting DMX is subject to determining the suitable Apple Mac replacement to FreeStyler. To date, the various Mac Apps reviewed offer very sophisticated user interfaces, and the level of re-training required continually leads to a delay in adoption.

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