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Photo courtesy of Diversified.
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Photo courtesy of Diversified.
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Photo courtesy of Diversified.
First Baptist Orlando in Orlando, Fla., recently completed a $14 million renovation, which involved a major overhaul of the live and broadcast production systems in its 4,350-seat worship center. Idibri, based in Addison, Texas, headed up the design of the audio, video, and lighting systems, as well as providing theatrical consulting and acoustic design.
One of the church's goals for its worship center was to bring a sense of intimacy to an admittedly large space. This involved revisiting the seating layout: seats that didn't have good sightlines were removed, and pews were replaced by theatre seats. On the main floor, the back row is now 20 feet closer to the platform. (The previous under-balcony seating area is now part of the church's expanded lobby.) While in days of yore the worship center's ceiling was a prominent architectural presence, it is now painted black, making it seem to disappear.
Another way the new worship center design creates intimacy is with a 31-foot-by-18-foot LED wall that is mounted above the choir, allowing the congregation up-close views of the worship leaders on the platform. Idibri explains that initially, the church had opted for a large projection screen, but as the cost of LED technology decreased, integrating this display became possible. Additionally, the LED panels are more energy efficient, and don't present the same issues as projection does in environments where ambient lighting is necessary. Plus, projectors can be noisy, and require maintenance––specifically, expensive bulb replacements.
Achieving energy efficiency was also a priority for First Baptist Orlando, resulting in a house lighting upgrade to RGBW and RGB LEDs with individual control. With these systems, the church can opt to color wash the entire space to set the mood according to what is taking place in the room. Through color matching, operators can also blend the walls with the LED wall.
Technical Innovation's Blue Hat Design, which was recently acquired by Diversified, headquartered in Kenilworth, N.J., headed up the integration of the LED wall, as well as the upgrade of First Baptist Orlando's broadcast and video production facilities, which involved the replacement of the church's standard definition equipment with HD systems. Tom Larrison, account executive at Diversified, notes that as part of this, the facility's standard copper wire infrastructure was upgraded to fiber. “First of all, in Orlando, lightning storms [present] a constant possibility of getting in on a copper system, and fiber circumvents that,” he explains. “The other thing is that fiber helps them future-proof: if and when 4K, 8K––whatever it ends up being––finally becomes mature and adopted into churches, they have an infrastructure that will give them the bandwidth to be able to move forward with really any format that they want to.”
For image capture, First Baptist Orlando's video production systems feature Sony HDC-2400 Series high-definition cameras. Craig Harper, director of business development at Sony Faith, notes that the cameras produce high quality images while remaining user friendly. “We understand how important it is that the equipment works well and the picture's great and the quality is there, but it also has to be easy for a volunteer to operate,” he says. “We went through those features [with the church], where we have shading controls that are really optimal for a volunteer––there's just enough control there for them to be able to shade the camera and operate it, but not enough to get into trouble or cause problems during the service.”
Curt Contrata and Mike Tomlinson of Stage Equipment and Lighting Inc. in Orlando, Fla., worked closely with Idibri to engineer the nearly 300 Chroma-Q Inspire color-chaning LED house lights and LED architectural accent fixtures, in addition to conventional and moving lights. Contrata, who is branch manager and technical consultant at the firm, explains that they replaced all of the circuit strips and expanded the existing lighting network to accommodate the new fixtures and positions. They also upgraded sensor dimmer racks to ETC Sensor 3.
Contrata notes that one of the major challenges he and Tomlinson, who was lead technician on the project, faced involved the 285 LED house lights: “With each having a unique DMX address and requiring four control channels, it represented over two universes to control them,” he explains. Furthermore, the team had to determine how the house lights would respond in an emergency situation. “We could set them to be full on and in white when they lost DMX, but since there would always be DMX present, shutting off the control signal was a fairly big challenge.” To address this, Stage Equipment and Lighting installed 14 DMX emergency bypass units that would switch to a preset when the system went into emergency mode. “All of the house lights needed to be controlled not just from the console, but from the preset button stations [as well], so a total of five Paradigm processors were required.”
AVI-SPL, an audio, video, and lighting design and integration firm headquartered in Tampa, Fla., was charged with integrating the worship center's new sound system. “When the church approached us to do the project, their main concern was the guests weren't hearing properly anywhere in the sanctuary––it was very spotty,” Craig Dail, project manager at the firm, explains in a video that was produced by AVI-SPL in partnership with Harman and Cisco. “So they wanted to make sure wherever you were in the sanctuary, and in the narthex, everybody could hear the production equally.”
Dail and his team integrated d&b audiotechnik V-Series line arrays, combined with d&b J and B2 subwoofers, powered by D80 amplifiers. The new line array loudspeaker system is capable of accommodating tours, decreasing load-in times since visiting groups no longer have to bring their own P.A. A number of EAW SH200i's serve as stage monitors, d&b C-Series units are used by the choir, and a combination of Shure PSM900 and PSM1000 systems provide in-ear monitoring. A Digico SD5 and SD9 sit at FOH, while a Yamaha PM1D is used to mix monitors.
For the last decade, a large stained-glass panel depicting Christ's crucifixion had been hidden from view. During the renovation, church leadership and the design team decided to reincorporate it into the worship center's design as three separate backlit stained-glass windows positioned above the choir and below the LED wall. “That was one of those late additions where you get thrown for a bit of a loop, but then you kick into gear and figure out how to incorporate it,” explains David Stephens, senior consultant and vice president at Idibri. “In the end, it really helped the overall look of the baptistery area, and being able to put items like that back in is great fun.”
The church organ also presented some design challenges, many of which were solved by the clever application of LED lighting. “The addition of the LED lighting on the wall of the choir loft and the organ pipes gives them the ability to transform between their contemporary and traditional services,” Stephens says. Earlier design concepts attempted to hide the organ for the contemporary services, but that didn't allow for quick transitions into traditional services. “We had to figure out how to make that an efficient changeover and still have the two different services feel different, without having pieces from the previous service just because you don't have time to get them off the platform. We ended up celebrating the organ for both services and not trying to hide it. It was treated as a piece of the architecture rather than an instrument in the traditional service only.”
While First Baptist Orlando had been in discussions with the designers and integrators for quite some time before the renovation began, the actual project spanned six months––an ambitious timeline for an overhaul of this magnitude. David Roche, project manager at Diversified, points out that what helped all team members to meet this deadline was that First Baptist Orlando brought them into the project early. “Starting early with your AVL contractors, and the different [trades] is very important, especially when you've got a compressed timeline because you've got to work together, you're working on top of each other, and you're sharing space,” he says. “My advice to churches would be: get all of those people together as early as you can, get them in the same room together, get everybody talking, introduce everybody. You've got to build those relationships, and the earlier you do that, the smoother it goes down the road.”
Like Roche, Stephens emphasizes that for a project like this to succeed, it's important to assemble everyone involved––designers, integrators, related trades, and, of course, church leadership and technicians––early on, so that everyone is on the same page in terms of what they expect the end result to be. “The general contractor, HJ High, did such a great job in pulling in everyone early. Part of our process is to sit down and really try to find out the DNA of the church and what it is their goals are for the project, and what will make the project successful in their eyes when they open the doors for the first time,” he explains. “That sets the foundation for the project, and it's really important to have all of the stakeholders on board so that as you move forward with construction , as much as possible, everybody is moving in the same direction. You're always going to have those moments where there will be disagreement about this or that, but if you keep that goal and foundation that you laid in mind, it helps minimize the friction and refocuses everybody when needed.”
