DukeDeJong

In our first 3 weeks of discussing Lighting 101, we dove into the less glamorous topics of DMX, lighting control and dimming. While these maybe aren’t the coolest parts of your lighting system, they are the most critical if you want any control over how much light your fixtures put out. But, now that we’ve got the basics of lighting infrastructure covered, let’s dive into the more fun aspect of lighting: fixtures! This week we’re going to look at conventional lighting fixtures, meaning fixtures that use a conventional-styled lamp. They require more power than LED lights and must be controlled with a dimmer of some kind as described in our last article.

PAR Fixtures
Parabolic aluminized reflector fixtures, or PAR for short, have probably been the most widely used fixture in theatrical and concert lighting over the years. PAR fixtures, often referred to as PAR cans, are essentially metal hoods which hold sealed beam lamps, very much like old school car headlights. They produce a circular or ovalular, soft edged pool of light, using various types of lamps that produce the different beam sizes and shapes. Newer, ETC Source 4 PAR fixtures are the exception to this as they have separated the lamp and lens to make your beam shaping interchangeable separate from the lamp. PAR fixtures are one of the most cost efficient lighting fixtures in terms of functionality with few features such as focus or shuttering. It is a pretty simple point and shoot fixture, providing a fairly even beam of light with softer edges. In conventional lighting settings, I highly recommend PAR fixtures anywhere a softer white or colored light wash is needed.

Ellipsoidal Fixtures
Ellipsoidal Fixtures are generally fixed-beam sized spotlights that produce a round, focusable beam of light. The ellipsoidal shaped reflector establish the various focal lengths, with smaller barrels being used to provide a wider coverage and larger, longer barrels used to provide tighter coverage. In addition to being relatively focusable, this type of fixture incorporates the use of shutters that can shape the beam of light or cut off any over throw onto unwanted surfaces. Ellipsoidal fixtures can also be used for pattern or gobo projection. I am a big fan of using primarily ellipsoidal fixtures as front lighting on stages as I can control where I do and don’t want light better than I can with PAR fixtures, allowing me to light people strategically without washing out up stage walls and/or lighted sets.

Border/Strip Lighting Fixtures
Border/Strip lights have two main functions: to light up large surfaces evenly and to provide discrete front light from below. A strip light is a multi-lamp fixture, normally wired in 3 or 4 circuits and free standing on the floor. In venues with live video, especially HD video, strip/border lights can provide and effective up light to help distinguish details on people and because they are fairly low profile, they sit low to the ground. When used to light large surfaces with color, they’ll generally use glass color filters called roundels as opposed to gels. Cyc Lights are the modern improvement of the strip light for lighting large surfaces such as a wall or cyc. The cyc light has a special shaped reflector, which produces a smooth field of light from top to bottom of the surface. Cyc lights are available in one, two, three or four “cell” units designed to be installed overhead or free standing on the stage floor.

Fresnel Fixtures
Fresnel fixtures provide a high power, soft-edged beam of light. With a variable focus from “Spot” to “Flood”, fresnel fixtures are often found in video studio environments because of the very bright, extremely smooth and even light they provide. You’ll also often see fresnel fixtures on stages where video, maybe for TV production, has a high value. Fresnel fixtures can produce a nicer, more even light than PAR fixtures but tend to be less energy efficient.

Wrap Up
As we wrap up our discussion on the most commonly used conventional lighting fixtures, I want to again point out that all of these fixtures require dimmable power fed to them if you want to control their intensity. Now, what fixtures are right for you? As with most things tech, the answer is, “it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.” I can tell you in the majority of my lighting designs, I prefer ellipsoidal fixtures as front light as they give me good lighting coverage with a high degree of control. If a critical component of a ministry is video (such as multi-site churches), I may look at incorporating more PAR or fresnel fixtures in for front, side and top light. As for top/back light, I’ll generally stick with PAR style fixtures, regardless of whether they are conventional or LED PAR style fixtures. And that’s where we’ll pick up next Worship Tools newsletter, with LED and other multi-function (or intelligent) fixtures.

As posted on CCI Solutions’ Worship Tools Newsletter

Last year, I was visiting a small, awesome church we work with on the East Coast and while I was there our conversation turned to their lighting for the video camera. In some places, the Pastor would appear pretty bright on camera, and in others he would appear to be dark. The lighting was not consistent across the stage, and when I looked up at the lights it was easy to see why. The lighting positions they had didn’t allow their fixtures to all be roughly the same distance away from the stage, so some were closer and some were farther. We discussed a simple solution: dimming the lights that were closer to the stage in order to match the ones that were farther away. The problem? Every par can was controlled by an on/off switch on the back wall. We needed dimmers.

Lighting dimmers are a pretty simple concept, they are used to increase or decrease voltage to a dimmable lighting fixture in order to adjust its intensity. Typically used with incandescent halogen or specific kinds of fluorescent fixtures, dimmers give us the flexibility to set the mood and/or focus attention. By adjusting the voltage sent to the fixture, a dimmer can turn the light on, off or anywhere in between. As anyone who has house lights that only turn on or off can tell you, dimmers play a valuable role in great lighting.

Quick Power Lesson
Before we dig into the types of dimmers available, it’s important to have an idea of how much power these dimmers will need. While portable/distributed dimming generally will work with a 20 amp circuit, most dimming packs will need much more. Here’s how you can do the math. Very simply, 20 amp circuits equate to 2400 watts of power. If you break it down, that means for every 600 watts you have, you need 5 amps. A 12-channel, 1200 watt-per-channel dimmer then will need 120 amps to power it all. All in all, once you get into larger dimming set-ups, an electrician MUST be involved to ensure proper electrical distribution. Unless you are a licensed electrician, please do not take this role on yourselves.

Four Styles of Dimmer Packaging

Dimming Switch
A dimmable switch is dimming at its simplest form. While not terribly user friendly for theatrical uses, if you have a super small lighting rig (maybe 4-8 lights) and this is all you can afford, it sure beats an on/off switch. Unfortunately, your lighting console can’t control these dimmers, so you have to dim lighting “manually”. These dimmers also have inferior filtering. They are designed to fit into a small electrical box, therefore the “choke” or “filter” that helps filter out noise is also very small. That can often result in noise problems for your sound system and even your video system. Use dimming switches only as a last resort.

Portable/Distributed Dimmers
Portable dimmer packs consist of several independent dimmers packaged into one chassis. The number of channels per pack can be as low as 4 and as high as 24. 4 channel packs are very popular since they typically can plug into a 20 amp circuit, which is the standard for newer commercial building wiring. Older churches often have 15 amp circuits so you need to check your wiring and circuit breaker panel first before you decide on which dimmer to order.

For smaller venues where dedicated 20 amp circuits are readily available and for smaller portable setups, portable dimmers make a lot of sense. You can usually control 4 lights independently with load power for each light up to 600W. That means a 500W Par Can is perfect to use with this type of dimmer. If you plug in a 500W Par into each of the 4 channels, the total load is 2000W. Since each 20A circuit can supply 2400 Watts, the total load is under the total supply of the 20A circuit, even with all four fixtures at full power.

With portable or distributed dimming, the power is already near the fixtures, so wiring the fixtures to the dimmer is easy. You simply plug the fixtures into the dimmer or use a short extension cord. With the dimmer near the fixtures, you only need to run on heavy duty cable from your 20A outlet to the dimmer pack. Now you just need something to control the dimmer pack. Newer portable dimmers are generally DMX controlled, so if you address your standard portable dimmer to DMX address 1, it will receive DMX and control intensities for channels 1-4.

Portable/Distributed dimming comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and price points. A variety of manufacturers make 4 channel dimmer packs, such as Elation’s DP-DMX-20L, which you would generally hang from your lighting pipe with a standard lighting clamp. A sleeker, more elegant solution and one of my favorites is the ETC Smartbar, giving you the same function in a bar-style solution that you can also mount your lights to if you choose. Ultimately, there are various options available in different form factors (and at different price points), but they all essentially accomplish the same thing, regulating voltage to the fixtures at your control.

Dimmer Packs
When building a new or retrofitting an existing building, generally people prefer a cleaner look without portable/distributed dimmers hanging throughout the room. In this case, instead of distributing the power to where the lights and dimmers will hang, we bring all of the power into one central location where dimmers are installed, and then distribute the controlled power to their final destinations. The first option that allows us to do this is a simple Dimmer Pack, typically rack or wall mounted. The packs often come in 6 or 12 channel versions and can range all over the map on how much power they offer per channel. For example, the ETC Smartpack SL1210-W offers 12 channels of dimming per pack with 1200 watts per channel. Other models might offer 6 channels of 2400 watts per channel, and others up to 12 channels of 2400 watts per channel. You would then build a rack of dimmer packs or install a wall-mount version to give you the number of dimmable channels you need and then distribute the power from the packs to your final fixture destination.

Dimmer Racks
In larger installations, needing anywhere from 48 channels and up, you will often get into much larger dimmer racks, which offer much more distribution, power and flexibility. Just like our other options above, they provide varying amounts of power distributed to lighting fixtures for dimmable operation (typically either 1200 or 2400 watts per channel). Unlike our other options though, their dimmer modules, generally in pairs of channels, are swappable giving some flexibility in what you can provide power-wise. For instance, last year my church added LED fixtures to our upstage lighting pipes, and those LEDs had their own built-in dimming so they simply needed constant power, not dimmable power. I was able to purchase some constant “non-dim” modules for my ETC dimming system, swap those out with the dimmable modules for those outlets, and as simple as that those outlets are now always feeding hot power and can no longer be dimmed. You can also replace dimmer modules with relay modules, giving you the ability to turn things on and off without the danger of browning them out by feeding them a partial voltage. And when I need those outlets to be dimmable again, I will simply pull the non-dim modules out and put the dimmer modules back in.

If your church is one that still runs their lights with on and off switches, hopefully this walk through dimmers has helped alleviate fears or concerns you’ve had converting to dimmable power for your lighting. With conventional lighting, dimming is really a critical piece to making your lighting work for you in creating the mood that you want, or bringing focus where you want it. In our next Worship Tools, we’ll discuss conventional lighting fixtures and which fixtures are ideal for which uses. In the mean-time, if you’d like to discuss adding, upgrading or replacing dimmers at your church, we’d love the opportunity to serve you!

Last Worship Tools newsletter, we began our journey into Lighting 101 with a discussion on DMX and how most modern lighting equipment sends or receives lighting control using this communication protocol. We didn’t get into what sends that communication to lighting fixtures, controllers, and this is the topic for today’s Worship Tools Newsletter. Controllers come in all shapes, sizes and budgets, from simple push button preset controller to full blown moving light controllers that can handle dozens of DMX 512 universes. Whatever your lighting control needs are, there is an option that will make sense for you.

The most basic of DMX controllers, a Preset Controller, simply allows you to create a certain number of preset looks with another lighting controller and save them to preset buttons on the controller. For example, the Doug Fleenor Designs Preset 10 Controller is a super simple way to give someone 10 preset lighting looks to choose from. Particularly useful when you only use standard looks all of the time, Preset Controllers can make lighting easy for children’s or youth rooms. They also work great as a secondary controller in your main auditorium, offering a variety of looks for weddings, funerals and special events. While they offer super simple operation, the drawbacks with Preset Controllers are that they are typically limited to what is on a single universe of DMX. You need to use another controller to set it up and you are then limited to the presets you created, as you created them, unless you have another controller in line.

The old school method for controlling lights, fader-based controllers, were simple because most every light had a fader and when you pushed it up to a certain percentage, the light(s) on that fader turned on to that percentage. And many fader-based controllers also allowed you to create looks and save them to a fader preset, allowing you to fade in or out of a preset look. The ETC Smartfade is an excellent example of a fader-based controller and is still a great console to use when you have a smaller, fairly simple lighting rig. If you have 12 conventional white lights and 6 LEDs, 12 faders would most likely be taken up with the 12 conventional fixtures, while the LED’s would be grouped and then addressed into an RGB mode. In other words, for every LED addressed to 13, fader 13 would increase/decrease red, 14 would adjust green and 15 would adjust blue. It’s not necessarily the most powerful way to control multi-function lighting fixtures (like LED or moving lights), but for a small rig something like the ETC Smartfade 1248 can still be very functional and effective.

With more and more venues turning to LED lighting, some manufacturers have developed controllers that look to expand the capability of fader-based controllers without getting into the complexity of full function controllers. For example, the Jands Stage CL console offers the ability to run a large number of LED lighting fixtures in 12 groups, giving each group an intensity fader in addition to a hue and saturation knob to adjust the color. While limited in the quantity of fixtures and groups you can work with, for many churches this hybrid controller mentality will be the perfect blend of capability and simplicity.

For lighting rigs that have a lot of fixtures or a variety of types of multi-function (or intelligent) fixtures, full function lighting controllers become critical to organizing, programming and executing complex lighting looks and programs. Each featuring a built-in operating system running proprietary control software, brands like ETC, Jands Vista, High End Systems and Grand MA are just some of the major players in this category. These types of controllers are typically larger and feature-packed with the capability of controlling up to dozens of universes of lighting fixtures no matter how complex the fixtures are. You’ll find these types of full feature controllers on most tours as well as in most larger facilities, especially where complex programming is involved. Beginning in the low $10′s of thousands and going up from there, these controllers pack a punch and a hefty price tag.

For those who need full programming functionality without the high quantity of fixtures or faders, manufacturers like Jands Vista and High End Systems have a step down from the full function controller where you provide a PC or Mac running their software with a smaller fader wing hooked up for playback and/or DMX output. For example, the Jands Vista S1 gives you all of the programming power of the Jands Vista L5 with less surface faders, no touch screen and you providing your own computer at roughly 1/6th the price. If you’re church is like mine, with a 48-96 channels of dimming and a dozen or two LED’s, a Jands Vista M1 controller with a Mac Mini may meet your needs perfectly for less than half the price of a Jands Vista S1. If you’ve got a big rig or are doing a high level of programming then this intermediate step probably isn’t for you, but for most of us this newer category of lighting controller is making full function programming affordable.

So, which console is right for you? I’d love to tell you console X is the right way to go but the answer truly is “it depends”. What kind of lighting rig do you have now? What kind of lighting do you plan to add over the next 3-5 years? What kind of things do you hope to accomplish with your lighting? What kind of capability and training does your team have? These are all questions that we ask as we help you find the right console to help you meet your lighting control needs. And of course we don’t stop there. Our team can help your team get the most out of your lighting controller with training from experienced lighting designers and programmers. We want your lighting rig to look and function great, and we’re ready and available to help you do so at any time.

Note: Originally published as a CCI Solutions Worship Tools Newsletter here.

By now, most creative people in the church understand that lighting is one of the greatest tools we have to create beautiful, engaging worship spaces. Using strategic lighting placement and various other techniques, we can adjust the appearance of depth in a room and make a space look bigger or smaller than it really is. To influence the mood of an audience, we can use color to paint the scenery, people and with the use of haze, even the air. We can also create texture as simply as using a gobo in an ellipsoidal fixture. But in all of our focus to create these engaging environments, I find many churches forget to put any intentionality into the main reason stage lighting exists.

What Do You Want Visitors to Focus On
A highly experienced lighting designer friend of mine likes to say it this way, “The main purpose of lighting is to keep the main thing, the main thing.” To head off any arguments, let’s all agree here that in our churches the main thing is God. That being the case, let’s redefine that statement a little to say that the main purpose of lighting is to highlight what we want people to give their attention to. I visit plenty of churches that spend more time thinking about how they want to light their walls or the air than the people who lead us in worship and teach the Word. Alternatively, many churches I visit have as many white lights as possible aimed in all directions, brightly illuminating every square inch of their room. While I won’t call either extreme wrong, they are probably not the most effective way to help people focus on what you want them to see.

Extreme 1: Too Little/Poor White Light
We’ve all been to venues that have so little white light on the people involved that it’s hard to see their faces. While this may be acceptable for some venues, it’s generally accepted that an audience has a hard time connecting with people they can’t really see through the shadows. Some will argue that it’s not about the people on stage, so why do we need to see them? The answer is it’s not about them, but it’s hard to lead a congregation in worship or Word if people can’t see you. It’s about a connection, and leaders can be much more effective when they are connected with the people they are leading. Your leaders are important, and if we’re going to light that which is important, your leaders should be lit well enough to see them.

Extreme 2: Way Too Much White Light
The alternative is found in many traditional churches as well as churches who don’t really understand the true purpose for lighting. They’ll use so many lights that there are few spaces that aren’t lit bright. Seth Godin, the famous marketer once said, “If everything is amazing, nothing is amazing.” His point is that in order for some things to be amazing, other things have to not be amazing. If everything stands out, after awhile it all blends together. This applies to lighting too. If everything is lit equally, nothing is actually highlighted. In order to be an effective highlighting tool, there must be contrast. Light is better seen when there is some darkness around it.

Balance is Best
My lighting philosophy these days is about simplicity, yet effectiveness. Nearly all of my front lights are ellipsoidal fixtures (I’m a big fan of ETC Source 4′s) and generally speaking, my preference for top and set lighting is LED. Throw in a couple of moving lights for effect and the occasional aim-able spot and I have a good set of tools that, if used intentionally, will help me effectively set the focus and mood of the room. What I am after is sufficient front white light aimed at leaders on stage, like the worship team and whomever is speaking. And I want to keep that white light strategically placed only where those people are, with an intensity that allows me to clearly see their faces. Any extra white light is bringing attention to things that I don’t want attention focused on, so I want to be sure any additional front white lights are off. Next, I want to use color to give a secondary highlight to other things like the cross (if there is one), the top of the people on stage, any interesting architecture and/or set designs. Everything is lit with purpose, drawing primary focus to what is in white and giving a secondary focus and highlight with colored light.

Over the next few months we’re going to dive into some of the topics that I believe will help you increase the effectiveness of your church’s lighting. We’re going to look at things like how to effectively use color in a worship service, how to choose the right light for your needs, how to get even lighting coverage for video and more. For this week’s Worship Tools though, there’s one key idea I hope you take away that will make your lighting effective: Whether you have a large lighting rig or a small one, lots of eye candy or none, the most important thing you can do with your lighting is to use it to intentionally bring focus to what you want your audience to see.