Photo courtesy of Oaks Church, McKinney, Tex.
Most churches are streaming now, which means they likely have two cameras that capture sermons. If that’s your church, I’d guess someone has asked you about IMAG. If not, and you’re wondering what that is, it’s pronounced EYE-mag, short for Image Magnification, and it’s what you see in large auditoriums, usually on two projectors above and to each side of front-of-house, where the speaker or emcee is magnified with a medium shot. It’s often paired with a wider head-to-toe shot and the director switches back and forth at will.
The question is—does IMAG make sense for your room?
Well, let’s find out.
Congregation Size vs. Room Size
Dennis Choy was the global production director at Saddleback Church for a number of years. A while back, Church Production asked him what he used as a guideline for needing IMAG, and he felt that an attendance threshold was a good mark—”Usually about 800 or more people jumps into IMAG territory. Some churches do it for a look and a feel, but for need, it's really like 800 or more people.”
Photo by Saulo Leite, courtesy of pexels.com.
Using IMAG in small rooms like the one pictured here usually isn't necessary. "Usually about 800 or more people jumps into IMAG territory. Some churches do it for a look and a feel, but for need, it's really like 800 or more people,” shares Dennis Choy, former global production director at Saddleback Church.
To start, that’s a great guideline. A room that can fit 800 people is most likely long enough that people will have trouble seeing the speaker on stage, but not always. IMAG might be a good idea in that case to help people engage with the speaker, especially if they’re using a lot of body language.
An exception to the rule is my own church, LifeMission Church here in Kansas City. Our seating capacity is just a tick under 1500, but the room is fan-shaped, so no one in the room is too far from center stage. While we have IMAG, I’ve concluded that we don’t need it. There’s nothing I can do about that now because it was integrated before my tenure as our production director, but everyone in the room can clearly see our pastor when he speaks without IMAG. In fact, I find that our IMAG is more distracting than helpful. Personally, it distracts me from truly focusing on what our pastor is doing on stage. But that’s just me. I’m sure for some people it’s helpful.
So, if you’re congregation has grown, but your room isn’t deep, my personal suggestion is to eschew IMAG so that the attention in the room is centered.
Consider The Equipment
Like I said, you probably already have the cameras and switcher capable of sending signal to IMAG, but churches need to consider the IMAG itself. Three variables come into play—lighting, rigging, and budget.
Lighting
If your room can be blacked out, this isn’t an issue, but in rooms that let in natural light, IMAG can be problematic because you need an image that’s bright enough to be seen, which will require some powerful equipment.
An LED video wall under construction, designed to deliver vivid, high-clarity visuals in naturally lit spaces, offers a versatile alternative to high-lumen projectors. Its modular design supports varied shapes and sizes, enabling creative possibilities for tech and design teams crafting dynamic worship experiences.
The easiest option is flying or mounting LED panels. LED visuals are super bright, so bright that most auditoriums keep their overall brightness pretty low. For instance, here at LifeMission, we keep the brightness down around 40%—anything brighter than that starts to feel like that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where all the Nazis get their faces burnt off. What I’m saying is that a room with filtered natural light will benefit from LED panels as opposed to big projectors throwing 20k+ lumens.
Those two options are much closer in price than they used to be. Projectors were always the budget option, but the LED manufacturer market is increasingly flooded, and prices are coming down. A projector bright enough to be present in a room with natural light will run you $15,000 to $25,000 a piece. For that money or a touch more, you can get into some LED panels that will be brighter, do not require a screen and will last just as long if not longer.
That being said, if your throw distance from your projector to its screen will factor on the brightness of their projected image. If your screens aren’t that big and your projectors are close, then you can get away with lower lumens which translates to lower cost. Calculators exist for determining actual brightness as opposed to the brightness listed in the manufacturer's specifications, but the only real way to tell is by having a manufacturer rep swing by with the projector you want and seeing how bright the image is.
Again, LED panels make all that easier. They are bright enough in essentially every house of worship, regardless of the lighting situation.
Rigging
Don’t forget—you gotta mount your IMAG to something, which requires mounting to a wall or flying from the ceiling. Projector screens are heavy, but not too heavy, so a quick stop from an engineer should ensure your screens won’t fall. On the other hand, LED panels are very heavy, so mounting or flying will require a thorough inspection of your rigging plans by someone who knows what they’re doing.
You’ll also need to fly your projectors if you decide to go the traditional route, and that will require some delicate planning based on another calculator that helps you determine the right throw distance for your particular projector. Measure twice and cut once here—I recently fumbled a projector mount because I wasn’t thorough enough with my measurements.
Budget
Ah, yes… the money.
I’ve already thrown some numbers at you to warm you up to how quickly the IMAG bill can head to the stratosphere. I recently wrote in Outreach Magazine about how the church grew and thrived for the better part of two millennia on nothing more than decent homiletics and reasonable acoustics. The truth is, the spread of the gospel needs willing hearts and faithful leaders more than LED walls, nice cameras, or bright projectors.
I saved this part for last because it might be the most important thing to remember about moving to IMAG—your community won’t remember whether or not they could see the clearly contoured lines on your pastor’s face every Sunday; they’ll remember if your church was helpful, kind, and loving, so you and your church leadership need to ask how many lives might be changed with the kind of money needed to install an IMAG system. The church could buy a car for someone who needs to get to work, help buy groceries for needy families, or maybe even afford another staff member to make work smoother across the organization as a whole.
Big expenditures mean big things; we put our money where our priorities lie. If you’re finding IMAG and caring for your community at odds with one another, it’s probably not time for IMAG yet.
Final Thoughts
IMAG is helpful for big rooms where the stage subjects can be hard to see, but it making it happen can get expensive quickly, and it’s a lot of work to integrate. Take time to make sure it’s the right decision for your people and your team before you greenlight it.
