Photo courtesy of Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
While there are still plenty of valid use cases where churches are better served using projection or TVs for display, many ministries have been increasingly turning to LED wall usage in recent years.
LED Wall Considerations
Whether as an option for a stage backdrop, an IMAG display, or even for digital signage in an indoor or outdoor gathering space, there are several common applications where churches tend to consider installing LED walls.
Many reasons for wanting to consider a wall install can be valid (like needing something brighter than a projector to overcome natural lighting in a sanctuary with lots of windows, for example), but there still may be organizations that want to dive into that world of ownership for the “cool” factor, or because everyone else around them has one and they feel the pressure to keep pace.
Unfortunately, it can be easy to back into the purchase process: “My pastor wants an LED wall, so what can we get for our limited budget of $13.17?”
That can then force a ministry to shoehorn a potentially subpar product into a limited budget instead of beginning with a clear vision of an end goal, then shaping project expectations and budgets around the desired end product.
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Image courtesy of The Father's House, Vacaville, California, with a Roe CB3 LED wall configuration.
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Image courtesy of The Father's House, Vacaville, California, with a Roe CB3 LED wall configuration.
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Image courtesy of The Father's House, Vacaville, California.
Tips for a Successful LED Wall Installation
What other lessons can be learned from those who have undertaken this journey? What things, both good and bad, should be considered up front by any organization hoping to install an LED wall?
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“It is surprising how much power is needed,” admits Tim Patterson, audio director at south Florida’s Cape Christian Fellowship
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For starters, the first big thing to consider is that the project cost likely isn’t going to just include a wall. There’s plenty more infrastructure that must be considered.
“If LED is anywhere in your future, make sure that you have adequate capacity to hang the weight from your walls or ceiling,” says Rudy Gonzalez, the production manager at The Father’s House, a multi-site ministry based in northern California. “When we installed our side screens, we had to close our midweek events down so that we could hire a construction company to beef up structural capacity to accommodate the extra weight from LED.
“When that room was under construction, it was discussed that we ‘should’ plan for capacity in case we’d like to add screens. Ultimately, we decided not to move forward when it was easy, making it more costly, and a hassle to change course later,” he adds.
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Image courtesy of Living World Community Church, Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and TaylorLED.
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Image courtesy of Living World Community Church, Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and TaylorLED.
Structural requirements are a key component that must be considered before flying an LED wall. Older buildings may have wooden joists that need to be reinforced with steel. Also, even in newer construction, steel is often manufactured specifically towards a certain load requirement to ensure that it’s being done in a cost-efficient way for the project. So even if a wall isn’t being flown as part of the project, having some weight numbers taken into account during steel fabrication is a crucial part of “future-proofing” the structure to ensure it can support the future flown mass.
Similarly, walls can’t just be mounted to an existing studded wall (as opposed to flown from the ceiling) without that wall being reinforced as well, and even floor stacking a wall on a stage could be problematic if it’s a framed stage (not poured concrete) and doesn’t have enough support under the stage to handle a highly concentrated amount of weight.
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Cheaper overseas walls may not come with an UL listing, which is a critical rating for fire safety.
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And if a wall is on the floor, the footprint will likely require an additional 3-4 feet of clearance behind the wall for floor supports and counter-balance weights to anchor the wall in place and provide a low center of gravity. For ministries with a shallow stage to work with, cutting into critical floor space could cause some issues with spacing of the worship team and band.
Electrical and HVAC requirements must be considered before installing a wall as well. While the individual LEDs themselves don’t seem to create much heat, condensing thousands of them into a wall and adding all of the components of the wall’s cabinets on stage, in an area that might already seem warm due to stage lighting, can increase the pull on a room’s air conditioning system. Plus, the wall itself would likely need regular air flow to eliminate heat build-up, unless it’s a product specifically designed for, say, a wall-mounted application (like digital signage) that has a special way to heat-sink (or vent) hot air from the panels and allow cool air to cycle though.
But adding up even a few panels (never mind hundreds) can still have a notable impact on a church’s power bill.
“It is surprising how much power is needed,” admits Tim Patterson, the audio director at south Florida’s Cape Christian Fellowship. It is not uncommon for ministries to have to expand an electrical panel to accommodate the higher load required, or even add additional dedicated circuits to an existing panel.
Patterson was not part of the original process of purchasing the church’s three LED walls (one on stage and two as IMAG side screens), but he has had to be quite involved, by default, in dealing with some of the collateral damage that the wall’s installation created.
“My main issues have been with RF interference,” he says. “We have had to redeploy our [wireless microphone and IEM] antennas in different positions with a loss of quality in the RF environment.”
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Some LED walls generate an excessive amount of RF “noise, ” causing problems with wireless mics and IEMs, WiFi networks, assistive listening devices, and more.
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Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon side effect of lower-cost walls also. In the “race to the bottom” of companies trying to build and sell LED walls as cheaply as possible, there can be several things sacrificed at the altar of brightness and low price.
For one, cheaper overseas walls may not come with an UL listing, which is a critical rating for fire safety. In a new construction project that has permits and inspections involved, it’s highly doubtful that a wall like this would even pass an electrical or fire inspection, but it would be unfortunate for a church to have bought a product that wouldn’t pass inspection due to non-compliance.
But in a box sale setting, with no permit and no inspection, it’s possible that a ministry may not even know or realize (due to lack of municipal oversight and inspection) that a wall wasn’t properly rated. If there were to be any resulting damage from the wall down the road, an insurance company may not pay out for damages if the wall lacked proper UL (or ETL) rating, and there could be civil penalties for negligence if people were injured.
Similarly, cheaper, ungoverned walls may not come with any sort of FCC compliance assurance, like in Patterson’s situation at Cape Christian. LED walls can be an incredible source of RF “noise”, and without an FCC rating and/or an RF survey after install to fully understand the wall’s impact on a church’s RF space, there could be notable resulting issues with wireless mics and IEMs, WiFi networks, assistive listening devices, and more.
If churches have limited experience in these areas or have limited staff and technical resources to address these or other issues, this is where it could be beneficial to partner with integrators or licensed resellers to handle a purchase or install, as opposed to just buying the product directly from a manufacturer.
Not only can those organizations help with the initial vetting and purchase process, they can provide guidance on other details of the project too. If a processor or panel needs to be fixed or replaced, they can help facilitate the repair so it doesn’t weigh on the church’s staff.
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Manufacturers tend to recommend between 3-10% of the installed panel count be purchased as spares.
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“We’re sending back modules every three months to be repaired for stuck pixels on our less expensive LED tiles (purchased in 2015),” says TFH’s Gonzalez, “while our more expensive LED tiles (purchased since 2022) need very little maintenance.” He feels fortunate to have an integration partner who’s able to facilitate those repairs for his team.
An integrator or partner can ensure that an appropriate amount of spare panels are ordered at the original time of purchase (many manufacturers tend to recommend between 3-10% of the installed panel count be purchased at the same time as spares) to make sure that LED color and brightness are all consistent. If LEDs aren’t sourced from the same batch and bin during manufacturing, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll evenly match others purchased at a different time, even if they’re the same brand.
Integrators can also help navigate the tricky dynamics of the purchase and shipping process as well. Products coming from overseas may list a certain lead time from order to manufacture to shipping, but if a wall then become freighted cargo that has to be hauled across an ocean and navigated through customs, having a full understanding of the shipping and delivery timeframe may be challenging for a church to find on their own.
But arguably the greatest benefit of having an installation partner, as opposed to buying direct: leveraging that company’s influence to get a proper demo of the LED wall prior to purchase.
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Student's theater at Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
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Photo courtesy of Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
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Photo courtesy of Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
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Kids' Commons area at Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
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Patio area at Milestone Church, Keller, Texas.
Chris Johns, the Senior Associate Pastor of Communications and Creative Arts at Dallas’ Milestone Church, has seen the benefit of using an integrator firsthand.
“The primary reason [of using an integrator] was experience and expertise,” he notes. “Even though we had six years of experience with LED walls, we wanted to know what other options were out there. And more importantly, we wanted to know what screens to avoid. I don't know that we would have landed on [this particular] LED manufacturer without that input.
“If you are shooting straight into an LED wall, make sure you take the time to demo all the walls you are considering,” he continues. “We had invested a lot of time and money into our camera systems, so we had to make sure the wall we chose would work well with those cameras. One of the perks of working with an integrator is that they can line up those demos to make sure we make the right investment.”
For many churches, investing in an LED wall is the type of capital purchase that might just be a once-a-decade expense, so getting it right the first time is of utmost importance.
There would be few things worse than spending thousands of dollars on an unseen product, only to install it and discover that it doesn’t work well in the space.
Seeing products in the room in which they’ll be installed provides crucial firsthand experience: the ministry team can see and affirm how content looks from certain vantage points in the space, and there’s also an opportunity to see how it looks on camera (as an IMAG or photography backdrop) and with stage lighting.
“With photography and video, the LED that you are purchasing is integral with maintaining a high quality of production,” cautions Gonzalez. “With lower quality tiles, low refresh rate and higher shutter speed of photography your still images will come out looking terrible.”
Moiré can be a constant battle if you’re choosing a lower-pitch (less condensed individual LEDs, with more millimeters between the center of each) LED product and the subjects are close to the wall. There needs to be coordination from your live video and screens to make sure that live video isn’t negatively impacted by adding an LED screen.”
Each wall has an ideal viewing distance, the point at which individual LED pixels disappear as part of a seamless surface; and the closer the audience, the tighter the pixel pitch (think 2.6 millimeters instead of 3.9 millimeters) needs to be. However, the distance between a subject lit and in focus on camera (like a guitar player standing in front of the wall) must be accounted for as well, because if the subject is close to the wall, then the wall will probably be in focus as well, and a wider pixel pitch in that backdrop will lead to banding, moiré, or other visual artifacts on camera.
Again, these are things that can be seen ahead of time in an onsite demo, which may be nearly impossible to facilitate when just doing an online box sale of a product. What its brochure and cut sheet say is one thing; how it looks on your actual stage is another.
While an LED wall may help solve a variety of issues and can definitely add some pizzazz to an auditorium, it ultimately just shines a light on the quality of product being fed into it. Having a wall may not fix some issues; it may just magnify certain shortcomings. Lower-quality cameras (or poor camera work) may be more noticeable on a high-resolution IMAG screen. Poor stage lighting can become even more obvious as well, whether in an IMAG image or when an LED wall backdrop (even dimmed down to 5% brightness) dramatically outshines a presenter on stage. And a wall can’t make poor graphics magically look better either.
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Get a demo. What its brochure and cut sheet say is one thing; how it looks on your actual stage is another.
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“LED walls only emphasize the quality of content that you are putting on your screens,” remarks Milestone’s Johns. “They tend to show more detail, and they tend to have less forgiveness. If you are looking into LED walls, go ahead and start really working on your content and live video now. Work with your video teams to make sure your cameras are fully in focus and properly exposed. Work with your creative teams to pick out great, clean worship content. Work on your font sizes and font types. Work on the details now, so that when you do invest in an LED wall, it looks as great as it can from day one. The content being shown on your LED wall is more important than the LED wall itself,” he adds.
In the end, it may seem simple enough to do internet searches for products of a certain price range and just pull the trigger, but that may just end up opening up a Pandora’s Box of issues that a ministry will regret dealing with.
The best way to navigate the process, according to Gonzalez, is with others alongside you as a resource.
“Talk to as many people as you can to get wisdom,” he says. “Make connections with churches that are further along or operate in the [at a level where] you want to be. Be curious, ask questions. It’s important that we are good stewards of what God has entrusted us with, and we cannot make good decisions while isolated.”
