Light Changes in Church
Lately I have been preparing for a two day outdoor event for the fourth of July here at Heartland. In the process I have had to look at some lighting solutions for the last few performances on both evenings. The fun part has been the limited budget that I am on. After doing some searching I became very interested in LED lighting. One of the main reasons was the potential color changing abilities of each light. Upon further research other great benefits have become apparent — low heat, low power consumption, and of course there are some fixtures with lower cost.
Chauvet LEDrain 64 – Low cost color changing
I quickly began to realize that these lights could become very beneficial to small churches who can’t afford a large electrical bill but still want to enhance their worship with simple lighting changes. They could also be very beneficial in churches where there is a high demand for lighting and effects in plays or dances. I won’t bore you in this blog with the details, I’ll do that at a later date. But think about the possibilities for your church as you review the following lights that I am currently looking at (when I get them I’ll review them for you), and the video below. Happy lighting!
We are looking at the Chauvet LEDrain 64 for front lighting and use as par cans because it can also produce white light. The Chauvet COLORpalette DMX LED Color Bank System looks like a great option for back lighting, color washes for back lighting, and wall washing and wall back lighting. Plus, they have some cool effects that may be usable in dances and plays. Finally, we are purchasing the Chauvet COLORstrip DMX LED Linear Wash Light
as an effect light, but it is also a good wash light. You can get a look at it and the overall flexibility in the video below. Finally, here is some computer controlled software that we may purchase soon to control these LED lights, it is from Innovate Show Controls and is called Bluelight.
Sweet! We actually ordered both lights for our play this last Easter. We went with a smaller LED Rain 56 though. We ordered 8 of them as well as 4 Colorstrips. Great lights!! I would say that the 56’s work really well for spotting if you dont have a lot of par cans. If your using the LED as your main white lights as well as color that is a much better option. You lose quite a bit on the mix of a bunch of bright par 64 cans. The strips are great to. The wash wasn’t quite what we thought they would be for our building. The issue with these lights is the ceiling height and what kind of background your using them on. Anyway when you get yours I would love to see some pics to see what you guys are doing. Danny Dunn was out a couple of weeks ago and saw ours. He really liked it. Anyway have fun at Crossover!!
One other comment. We are using Chauvets X-Factor software. We haven’t even touched the potential of it. (Time with the program is an issue for us right now!) Anyway it looks very similar!! Let me know how you like bluelight!!
Thanks for the comment Jason. It sounds like you might be a step ahead of me. Send me some pics of what you are doing with your lights in church and I’ll put them up in another post as a follow up.
How do you like it so far? I will look into it closer. It seemed like it had some limitations that I wasn’t comfortable with, particularly for the traveling we may do with it later, but I will certainly investigate it closer and tell you what I think. We may end up getting X-Factor instead. More to come.
Hey D,
I like Xfactor so far. Very easy to use and with a little more time i think we will utilize it much better. I will try and get some pics tomorrow at practice. We ended up getting our Xfactor 8 LEDrains and 4 colorSTRIPS for about$2800 I think. Much cheaper to check out stagelights.com and look at thier packages and then order from musicians friend.