Photo courtesy of Hope Community Church, Raleigh, NC
Make your services shine both on and off line
ADJ is a global manufacturer of entertainment lighting, LED video and atmospheric effects equipment.
When the COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary halt on public worship, churches of all sizes had to quickly take their services online. This threw up a number of challenges for tech teams, including the need to switch their lighting focus from making a service look good for the congregation in the building to ensuring that it looked good on camera for an online audience. While the rapid transition to streaming involved a steep learning curve, many churches found it to be an unexpected blessing. They realized that their streaming services were able to connect with a wider audience than would normally attend in person. This means that, even as social distancing starts to be relaxed and physical meetings can resume, streamed services are set to become a much bigger part of the church landscape for the long term.
1. Keylight
Ensuring the pastors and worship team on stage can be seen clearly is the most important role of any church lighting system, and this becomes even more important when it comes to streaming. Cameras aren’t as forgiving as our eyes, and someone viewing at home will find it hard to connect to a message if they can’t see the preacher’s face clearly. Ensure that everyone on stage is fully illuminated, both from directly in front and from the sides to remove harsh, unnatural shadows. Using warm white wash fixtures will help to create natural skin tones on camera and give an inviting feel to your streams.
2. Background wash
Although lighting the people on stage clearly is essentially important, if you simply leave it at that your live streams will look one-dimensional and plain. Adding background color washing will increase the visual appeal of your broadcasts and also cause the people on stage to ‘pop’ in front of it. Switching the colors during worship to match the mood of each song will also significantly enhance the aesthetics, while at other times colors can be matched to your church’s branding or even a color scheme linked to your current sermon series.
3. Beams and patterns
When attending a physical church service, a person has the freedom of looking around and soaking in the atmosphere of the sanctuary. On the other hand, viewers of a streamed service are limited to what the camera shows them. This is often a small area, especially during the message, as it is important for the audience to see the preacher clearly. This means that it is particularly important to pay attention to areas of your stage or set that will appear in the background of live stream shots. If they look plain, consider adding interest with GOBO projections of break apart patterns behind the preacher or mid-air beam effects behind a worship band.
4. Pixel mapping
Another way to add interest to the background of a worship space is pixel-mapped RGB LED lighting fixtures. Through the use of protocols such as Art-Net, Kling-Net or sACN, these can be used for low-resolution video playback. This means that animated background patterns and visuals from a projection screen or LED video wall can be expanded across a larger area of the stage to provide a backdrop to preaching and worship sets.
5. House lighting
If you are live-streaming a worship service that also has a congregation in attendance, including shots of them worshiping will help to convey a sense of the atmosphere to online viewers. However, this is very difficult to do if the people are in complete darkness. That is why many modern churches are replacing traditional on/off white house lights with DMX-controlled LED lighting. This not only allows for colorful house lighting to set the mood before and after a service, but it also means the congregation can be illuminated (at lower levels) during worship. Matching the house lighting colors with those used on stage will not only enhance the mood in the room, but allow congregation shots to be combined more seamlessly with footage from the stage to make for a truly engaging live-streamed experience.
Encore Profile Pro WW
- $1,049.99
- LED-powered ellipsoidal
The new Encore Profile Pro WW from ADJ is an LED-powered ellipsoidal with an industry-standard body design and interchangeable lens system. It features a powerful 260W warm white (3200K) LED engine and boasts a host of useful features including a 4-blade manual framing shutter system, B-size GOBO slot, digital dimming and strobing, as well as quiet fan cooling.
Vizi Wash Z19
- $1739.99
- Versatile moving head wash
ADJ’s Vizi Wash Z19 is moving head wash fixture that harnesses the power of 19 x 20W 4-in-1 RGBW LEDs. It features variable motorized zoom for a beam angle of 10 – 60-degrees, which means that it can do double duty generating both wide washes for stage and backdrop illumination as well as tight beams for aerial effects.
Focus Spot 5Z
- $1,299.99
- 200W LED-powered moving head spot
Designed specifically with churches in mind, ADJ’s Focus Spot 5Z is a feature-packed moving head spot fixture powered by a potent 200W white LED light source. It features both light and heavy frost filters, two rotating prisms (5-facet linear and 6-facet circular), two color wheels and a 6-position wheel for replaceable, rotating GOBOs that is supplied fitted with 6 patterns specifically selected for creating appealing break apart patterns.
Pixie Strip Series
- $124.99 - $249.99
A versatile collection of pixel-mappable LED bars The Pixie Strip Series features 0.5 meter, 1 meter and 2 meter tri-color RGB LED strip fixtures that can be pixel-mapped using Art-Net, Kling-Net or sACN. Each Pixie Strip is housed in a lightweight aluminum enclosure featuring magnetic end caps, which allow seamless end-to-end pixel spacing, and includes square and rounded frosted lens attachments.
COB Cannon Wash ST
- $489.99
- Powerful wide-angle wash
Utilizing a 150W COB 4-in-1 RGBA LED, the ADJ COB Cannon Wash ST offers a rich palette of colors with smooth mixing between different hues and shades. Ideal for either stage washing or house lighting, it features a compact design and offers a massive 80-degree beam angle but is supplied with easily replaceable 40-degree and 50-degree lenses for added flexibility.
