After years of begging and pleading for money to add or replace lighting fixtures to your church's stage, you finally get the green light.
Now comes the time to determine exactly what you're going to purchase.
Before talking with an integrator, sales rep, or even checking online, you must determine your needs and the intended application for your new lighting tools. While the detail work of planning in the early phase may seem tedious and boring, it will go a long way in saving you time and money in the end.
Start by considering what your needs are from a lighting perspective. Ask questions like, "Are the primary people on the platform lit sufficiently already?" or "What type of lighting equipment do we need to match our style of service?"
You may find that you need to focus first on correcting key light (lighting the front of primary people on stage) issues. If this is the case, you can focus your energy on fixtures that produce a nice white light.
"What type of lighting equipment do we need to match our style of service?"
When looking for a fixture that produces white output that will be used as a key light, make sure you are looking at fixtures with white LEDs. If you start with a light engine that mixes red, green, and blue to achieve white, you will not be happy with the result. Most manufacturers are making fixtures with white only LEDs that give you selectable color temperature options. This is optimal for flexibility when calibrating with a camera system.
If you find yourself in need of fixtures for backlight or other effects, the field of available options just increased dramatically. There is a plethora of fixtures from basic color mixing par can replacements, to full out moving lights with LED engines, all the way to moving LED video panels. This is where planning becomes even more critical.
Consider just looking at backlight options. If you need to wash your stage with colored backlight, you might consider looking for a RGBW (red, green, blue, white) fixture. Adding the white to the color mixing gives even finer control over color richness and availability.
Another consideration might be accessibility to the lighting fixtures. A static fixture is a great option if you can easily access it to refocus when the stage layout changes. You can also get more fixtures for the money with static fixtures. However, if your stage layout changes frequently, and you have very limited access to your fixtures, you might consider getting a few less fixtures and adding some with remote pan/tilt control.
It's important to stop and think for a moment about quality versus cost. Most often in life, the old adage of "you get what you pay for" plays out. The same can be said of lighting fixtures. Just a brief internet search returns a long list of "inexpensive" fixtures that promise all the performance of higher priced fixtures from mainstream manufacturers. Unfortunately, these cheaper options often don't last as long and end up being more expensive over the life of the fixture, due to frequent repairs and down time.
Early LED lighting fixtures were notorious for causing camera flicker. Most manufacturers have improved chip technology to the point where this can be overcome, but it still must be considered when purchasing new fixtures. Camera flicker is the visual effect of the light output flashing on and off very quickly on camera, even though it isn't noticeable to the human eye. This is caused by a problem between the refresh rate of the LEDs and the camera. Virtually any fixture purchased from a mainstream manufacturer will include options for adjusting the refresh rate of the fixture to solve this flicker problem. If you are looking at buying cheaper, off-brand fixtures though, you run the risk of losing this feature and having an undesired effect when it has to work with your video system.
Whatever your current situation is with the lighting in your worship space, it is important, as you look to new technology/upgrades, that you research, plan, research again, talk to others who are doing what you want to do, and invest your time and money wisely in deciding how you can best support the ministries of your church through the use of light.