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Jands Flagship Vista L5 Console Controls Demanding Lighting & Media Shows for US Megachurch

Jands Flagship Vista L5 Console Controls Demanding Lighting & Media Shows for US Megachurch

March 20, 2014 05:21

Florida’s fast-growing Celebration Church is utilizing Jands’ flagship Vista L5 console to control state of the art lighting and video productions during worship services for its 12,000-strong congregation

The services held at the Jacksonville-based Church’s newly constructed worship Arena are often broadcast internationally via web stream. They are renowned for being an energetic, immersive next generation praise and worship experience that infuses diverse genres and styles.

Celebration Church’s Lead Lighting Designer and AVL Technician, Trey Smith, specified the Jands Vista L5.

“The Jands Vista L5 is so user-friendly and easy to grasp that it’s a hit not only with us tech guys, but also with the church’s volunteers, who often operate the lighting and media during shows,” says Trey. “The L5’s Timeline feature was a key factor in us specifying it, making it easy to control media via timecode, and to make changes on the fly.”

In the Arena alone, around 700 fixtures are controlled by the Vista L5. For the entire building, there are 2,200 fixtures, including 93 Chroma-Q® Inspire™ LED house lights. Only 140 of these 2,200 are not LED, and all the fixtures are controlled by the L5 via Pathway’s Pathport Connectivity system, which we use to link together the lighting throughout our building.

“Currently, our L5 is connected via Ethernet and Fiber to our Pathport nodes onstage and in the catwalk – two nodes for onstage, and two for catwalk that run all of the house lighting and wall lights around the seating,” says Trey. “We also have Pathport throughout the rest of the building, to control lobby lighting, kids’ lighting, nursery hallways, and the Loft Café.

“Everything is on one large network, but data is managed using VLANS so that lighting data doesn’t cross into the Arena. However, we have made it possible for the L5 to control the rest of the building if the situation calls for it.”

Trey and his team are currently using more than 30 universes for the entire building.

In addition to the L5, the Church uses 2x Jands Vista M1s in the Kids’ Ministry rooms, 1x Jands Vista S1 at its nearby Orange Park Campus, 1x Jands Vista I3 for tracking backup in the Main Arena, 2x M1s at the Midtown Location, and 2x M1s at its nearby St. Johns Campus.

In the Main Arena, the L5 is used to trigger media content as well as lighting, which is designed in-house and loaded onto a Coolux Pandora’s Box media server. The Vista range is also compatible with other media server solutions.

“The L5 is able to send Art-Net data to the Pandora’s Box Media Manager,” says Trey. “Pandora controls our stage 60’ x 20’ projection wall (15x 8,000 lumen Titan Projectors edge blended) as well as our 32x Sony LCD TVs that surround the projection wall.

“We set up Jands to be able to control 6 video layers in Pandora through Art-Net. During regular Sunday services, Jands triggers almost all graphics and videos that go up on the projection wall and TVs. During special events and video elements, Pandora runs the visuals and sends LTC Timecode back to Jands Vista to trigger lighting cues.”

Trey adds that the Celebration Church had been using their Vista I3, M1 and S1 consoles for four years before upgrading to the L5 for the new Arena. “Vista has always worked well for us, and moving up to the L5 meant more power and features – but without a steep learning curve, as it uses exactly the same v2 software as our other Vista consoles.”

The L5 comes with the world-renowned Vista v2 software, a program that has been embraced by its growing number of users for being innovative, intuitive, powerful and easy to use, all at once.

The Church’s show planning is very precise. Songs are often planned a month in advance, with lighting and media programming happening weeks before the service.

“Using the L5 to control so many fixtures and demanding media, we are putting a lot of responsibilities on the console, but it works beautifully,” says Trey. “And due to the L5’s integration with Pathport, it’s a seamless operation.”

Featuring a massive 21-inch High-Definition TFT screen, the L5 offers a lot of space to add and re-arrange windows, making data easy to view and respond to.

The Jands Vista was supplied to the Celebration Church by design firm WAVE, which was contracted to design, supervise and install the new lighting and sound system.

The Vista range includes a choice of portable, flexible control surfaces and self contained consoles all running the same Vista v2 software.

Jands’ award-winning Vista lighting & media control system has been embraced by leading designers, companies and venues all over the world on a wide range of shows. Covering entertainment, education & drama, installations, corporate, events and worship, there’s a Vista system to suit all levels of user and almost any scale of show.

Recent shows featuring lighting or media control by Vista include international concert tours by Fall Out Boy, Bloc Party, Deftones, Dierks Bentley and Little Big Town.

To arrange a Jands Vista demo or discuss your requirements, contact A.C. Lighting Inc. on:
001 (416) 255 9494
northamerica@aclighting.com

Or for more information and a list of international Vista users, visit www.jands.com/vista/users.

The rights and ownership of all trademarks are recognised. The information contained herein is correct at the time of printing, however as we are constantly refining our product range we reserve the right to change the specification without notice. E&OE.