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Fairhaven Church, Centerpoint, OH.
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Fairhaven Church, Centerpoint, OH.
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Fairhaven Church, Centerpoint, OH.
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Fairhaven Church, Centerpoint, OH.
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"People were driving up to an hour to attend church at Fairhaven. And we really want to be a community church, not a commuter church."
"I never realized until college that churches hired people to work full-time in media ministry,” says Director of Video and Technology Arts Mike Rall of Fairhaven Church in Centerville, Ohio. Passionate from an early age about media and technology, he spent his time making PowerPoint presentations from mission trips and serving in other ways at his church.
At 16, he participated in a mission trip to Honduras and the experience caused a spiritual awakening in him. “Until then I was more under the umbrella of my parent's faith,” Rall explains. “This trip really drove it home and I developed my own faith.”
His initial major at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio, was MIS, but he switched to electronic media after his sophomore year to follow that passion. And in his senior year, he had the opportunity to do an internship at Fairhaven Church. On graduation, Rall took a position with a local church where he worked in broadcast ministry. “It was a great educational experience, and I learned a lot,” he says. After a few years, he had the opportunity to take a position at Fairhaven, and chose to take it. And he's been there ever since. Also attending Cedarville University, although a few years earlier, was Jon Lough, Fairhaven's director of audio and lighting.
“I started touring when I was in my first [few] years of college as the FOH engineer for Word of Life,” Lough recounts. “Before that, I was involved in radio broadcast and recording, which is how I got my start in technology.” Out of college, Lough took a position doing marketing, but before long Cedarville invited him back to be the campus technical director in 1998. After a time, Lough felt God calling him into a deeper involvement in local church tech ministry, and in 2004 he took a position at Fairhaven Church as technical director.
Evolution of Worship
Fairhaven Church is now 50 years old, and both Lough and Rall have seen significant change in just the time they’ve been there.
“Fairhaven is a church that’s always been on the leading edge for technology,” states Lough. “We usually replace gear every four to five years. We’ve even been approached by people outside the church asking if we need any help with sound.”
While they hope to do a major renovation of their auditorium (originally built in 1986), Fairhaven isn’t waiting for that to improve what they can along the way. When built, the auditorium was designed for a very traditional service with pipe organ and choir. The service style is now very contemporary, with a blended service combining a praise band with orchestra and choir. Through this time period the technology of the church was upgraded to support the worship style.
“It’s a theme with our leadership,” Rall reports, “renovating in smaller pieces as we go along. It’s performed steadily over time, which results in lower debt and enables us to continually follow a vision for growth.”
Audio Systems
"Fairhaven is a church that’s always been on the leading edge for technology. We usually replace gear every four to five years."
Jon Lough
Director of Audio & Lighting, Fairhaven Church, Centerville, OH.
“We installed a McCauley line array into Fairhaven in 2007,” states Mike Hausfeld, audio-video designer at Sound Force Inc. in Dayton, Ohio. “At that time, the McCauley system was the only line array option that offered a variety of horizontal dispersion patterns in a smaller format box. This enabled us to get good coverage on the floor without bouncing sound off the walls, as well.”
Crown amplifiers power the array, and McCauley has a DSP system designed specifically for its speaker systems.
Fairhaven has been a fan of Yamaha mixers for a long time. “When I arrived at Fairhaven, the church was using an Allen & Heath GL4000 analog console,” Lough reports. “We upgraded to the PM5D at the same time the line array system was installed, and used that until recently when we upgraded to two Yamaha CL5s—one for FOH, and one for monitors.”
Sennheiser wireless in-ear systems are used for monitoring with one CL5 used as a monitor console, and Shure wireless is used for vocal microphones.
Video & Streaming
Fairhaven has experienced significant growth, and one way of supporting that growth was planting two multisite campuses as video venues, one 30 minutes northwest in Northmont, and one 16 minutes southwest in Springboro. Worship is performed live, but the message is streamed from the Centerville campus.
“People were driving up to an hour to attend church at Fairhaven,” notes Rall. “And we really want to be a community church, not a commuter church.”
To both support the other campuses as well as provide IMAG capability at the Centerville campus, JVC GY-HD250U 720p video cameras on tripods with camera operators plus three Sony BRC-H900 PTZ cameras are used to capture video. “The Sony cameras are dome-style cameras,” states Bill Gaetz, sales rep at Duncan Video in Carmel, Ind. “Mike wanted HD cameras with a smaller footprint—and for them to be almost invisible. They are also very quiet in their movement.”
A Panasonic AV-HS450 video switcher, also spec’d and provided by Duncan Video, is used to control the video. The switcher is all HD/SD-SDI for inputs and outputs, and incorporates a multiviewer for monitoring inputs, preview and output. A Panasonic TH-50PF20 50-inch plasma television is used as the multiviewer monitor. Video is captured on an Imagine Communications (formerly Harris Broadcast) Nexio AMP server, providing simultaneous two-channel recording and playback. A Haivision KulaByte encoder/Transcoder HD server transmits a 3.2Mbps video stream through a 50 Mbps fiber connection to the Internet to the multisite campuses, and is played back through an Adobe Air app.
"Our streaming system provides a DVR capability that allows the multisite campuses to pause the stream."
Mark Rall
Director of Video & Technology Arts, Fairhaven Church, Centerville, OH.
“Our streaming system provides a DVR capability that allows the multisite campuses to pause the stream,” states Rall. “We make sure that the Centerville campus starts the message portion of the service first, and the other campuses begin playback when they are ready. We try to keep the campuses within three minutes of each other.”
Video Display & Lighting
The “crown jewel” of their installation, however, is a recent replacement for their aging video projectors. “We knew that we needed to replace the projectors,” says Rall, “but we were hesitant to invest in new projectors that might not last us for the next ten years. Dan McLaughlin of Scenic Solutions in West Carrollton, OH suggested we look at Elation’s LED panels instead of projectors. We demo’d a system and were just blown away.”
“The church really wanted something that would last into the future and provide lower maintenance issues over time,” states McLaughlin. “We settled on creating a three screen system that can be configured as one triple-wide display or three independent screens.” McLaughlin reports that 135 Elation EPV6 panels form a 52-foot wall for the church, using 45 panels per screen. “Each screen weights just shy of one ton,” he adds. “Most of the installation work was in the rigging. Above the ceiling we rigged truss to the structural steel in the roof to provide a mounting mechanism for the chain hoists that would raise and support the screens. The chains pass through the ceiling of the auditorium, and connect to more truss that supports the LED screens.”
Video content can come from the switcher for IMAG, ProPresenter, or an Elation Zeus server running an ArKaos MediaMaster Pro media server software, enabling lighting consoles to control media playback and tightly time the video content with lighting cues. “The LED panels are so bright, we actually have them set to about 10% of their potential output to keep from overpowering the room and stage lighting,” McLaughlin says. “The light from the panels actually provides most of the backlighting for the stage,” adds Rall. “We end up programming our lighting to work with the video colors that wash across the platform.” McLaughlin was also quick to give kudos to Elation’s field service staff, who provided excellent support on sight to make sure that everything was proceeding according to manufacturer’s specifications.
For lighting, Cross Light Inc. based in Sunman, Ind., upgraded the facility from Strand dimming and fixtures to an ETC dimming and theatrical package that provides front lighting with an ETC Ion console running the system. A variety of LED fixtures from High End Systems and Elation provide color wash for the platform. House lighting is a Vietnamese brand of LED lighting. An ETC Paradigm architectural lighting controller provides touch-panel control of preset lighting scenes, enabling anyone to pick from a variety of lighting options without having to use the lighting console.
When Scenic Solutions installed the LED video walls, they also installed eight Elation Platinum Spot 15R Pro intelligent fixtures that are hung on a truss over the platform area to provide backlighting and lighting effects.
Sharing the Knowledge
Fairhaven’s expertise in the technical ministries field has been widely recognized in the church’s area, and they do what they can to share what they have learned. They have run small tech seminars for area churches to provide some training for those interested. And they are frequently asked if a church can visit and observe what they do to produce a service.
In addition, Fairhaven’s tech team will offer to help small churches that can’t afford an AVL contractor, and assist with a system design and installation of audio, video and lighting systems on a pro bono basis. “We’re always out there trying to encourage and help with installation for churches that can’t afford outside contractors,” Lough closes.
