All images courtesy Mike Bennett, Discovery Church
After 15 years at the church’s original location in Orlando, Florida, Discovery Church outgrew the space’s ability to effectively support the ministry. Purchasing a former Sports Authority retail space, church leaders had the building renovated to support worship services. Headlining the new lighting rig are fixtures from ProLights and Chroma-Q, controlled by Vista by Chroma-Q, with data distribution by Luminex, all distributed by A.C. Lighting Inc.
“The ProLights fixtures are a major upgrade for Discovery Church,” says church Lighting Designer Anthony Stofflet. “We went from very simple systems that really put us in a box as far as creativity was concerned, to a lighting rig that significantly opens up the creative options for us. We weren’t that familiar with the ProLights brand of LED fixtures, but A.C. Lighting Inc. set up a lighting shoot-out for us, and the ProLights fixtures truly blew the competitors away.”
Discovery Church installed Eclipse-FS ellipsoidal static profiles for their primary front stage wash; JetSpot 3 moving head spotlights; Stark 400 moving head wash fixtures, and Ra 2000 Profile HB moving head fixtures—a full complement of ProLights fixtures for all their stage illumination.
“The Eclipse-FS ellipsoidal fixtures have a nice, crisp focus with no haloing effect at the edges of the beam,” says Stofflet. “We’ve installed 71 of them, making up all of our front wash and static specials. The ability to fine-tune the color temperature of these fixtures for video was a key feature for us.”
“The JetSpot 3 fixtures are surprisingly bright for such a small fixture,” Stofflet describes. “The colors in the color wheel are well-chosen, and the beam is punchy—it can definitely cut through our LED video wall. Their prism, gobos, frost, iris—it really blew us away.”
“The Stark 400 wash fixtures have a great honeycomb lens, with seven homogenized individually-controllable elements,” Stofflet continues. “It also has a good output to it, and the built-in wireless DMX is very helpful if you want to place one in an unusual location.”
“The Ra 2000 Profile HB fixtures were brand new at the time we looked at them,” Stofflet says. “In fact, Discovery Church was one of their first US installations. They are a great moving-head special fixture. Having a moving light, we could use as a key light was critical for me, as our stage changes all the time. The feature set is excellent: massive zoom range, shutters, animation wheel, 18,200 lumens of output, two frosts (one for soft focus and one for heavy diffusion). With a color temperature of 6200k, the video guys love them, and it means I have less work to do in getting them to match our other key lights. It also comes with a CTO wheel to provide a warm color temperature when desired.”
Curt Contrata, lighting designer with Stage Equipment and Lighting and consultant on the project, adds “The ProLights fixtures are very impressive. The color rendition is great. The profile fixtures are very bright, and all the wash units look great as well.”
For house lighting, Stofflet went with the Chroma-Q Inspire XT color-changing fixtures. “We installed 72 Inspire fixtures on a 12’ grid spacing pattern to get 59 foot-candles in the room. Our auditorium is a multi-purpose space, so we wanted the ability to get it as bright as needed for any type of event.”
Luminex network switches are used for lighting control data distribution and coms. “The Luminex switches make it easy,” says Stofflet. “Each port is assigned a color based on which VLAN it’s assigned to, so you know which port to plug your lighting, coms, video, or audio device into.” Discovery Church also utilizes the Luminex LumiNode product, to convert Ethernet-based data to DMX signals. “The variety of the nodes they provide made it easy to get the port counts we needed,” says Stofflet, “and the extra processing engines make it easy to merge the many different sources that we have.”
Bringing the entire lighting system together is the Vista by Chroma-Q lighting control system. “I’ve used Vista since version 1,” says Stofflet. “When I first saw Vista years ago, I was impressed by how easy it is to learn. Now, across three campuses, we have Vista in almost every performance equipped space. Our larger spaces have Vista control surfaces; our smaller spaces use touch screens, and our children’s ministry spaces I’ve set up with Korg Nanopad MIDI controllers to trigger cuelists. I make great use of controlling Vista from ProPresenter, firing timecoded cue lists. No matter how I’m using it, it just works. And with Vista having such a user-friendly UI, I’ve had kids as young as 8 years old ‘doing lighting.’”
“A goal I had with this installation is to limit the number of vendors providing gear, to reduce the potential for ‘finger-pointing’ if issues come up,” says Stofflet. “A.C. Lighting Inc. makes that easy and was able to be our ‘one-stop-shop’ for all of our lighting needs, so there’s only one company we need to turn to should a problem arise.”
Online streaming has now become a critical part of churches’ engagement with their congregations, and Discovery Church’s investment in their lighting rig has proved to be a significant benefit to this aspect of their ministry. “With our new gear,” states Stofflet, “our streaming quality saw a significant improvement. We would not be able to achieve our current level of production quality without it.”
