A large part of my current role with Coastland is directing our Sunday morning worship gathering, which is held in the Grande Ballroom at the Crown Plaza. The Ballroom is divided into three 30′x50′ sections which, when all three put in use, would give us room to seat around 450 or so. Because we have the room from 6am-noon on Sundays, everything is setup and torn down every Sunday, causing us to have to purchase the appropriate equipment.
We decided to go with two projection screens, and I thought it prudent to get projectors and screens that would work with HD. Do a quick search and you’ll find numerous HD projectors on the market. Most in the sub-$2000 range are for home theaters, and the lumens produced by most were no more than 2500. We needed something in the 4000 range. Quality HD projectors with 4000+ lumens are not cheap, especially ones designed for auditorium projection. After a bit of research, I came across the BenQ SP831, which is a 4000 lumen projector that projects 1280×720. The replacement bulbs aren’t that expensive either, another bonus. On to the screens…
Da-Lite makes some great portable screens that are fairly cost-effective. The BenQ projectors would need around 16ft. of space from the screen (use CalculatorPro over at ProjectorCentral to figure out distances!), and since I wanted to make the most use of the space we had in the room, I ordered two Da-Lite Deluxe Fast Fold 62×108″ front projection screens from ProjectorZone. Unbeknownst to me at the time, each screen is built-to-order, and the lead time was 7 business days or so. At the time I was placing the order, we were exactly a week out from launch! I called and spoke to Nate Purscelley and explained my situation, he was able to call Da-Lite and confirm they could rush our order through to get it to us in time. Talk about customer service!
Two days after placing the projector screens were ordered, we decided that front projection was not the best plan of action and we would do much better to have rear projection. Another call was placed to Nate, and he came through big by calling Da-Lite and switching our screen type to the Dual-View at the 11th hour, allowing us to have front or rear projection with only a bit of a bump in cost.
To get those sweet projectors throwing a nice HD image on the screen, I opted for a Macbook Pro and set the secondary screen to project at 128×720. Splitting the signal to both screens is handled nicely by a Siig 2-port VGA splitter, purchased at B&H Photo/Video. Two 100ft. high quality VGA cables from CCT (ask for Brian, tell him Tom sent you) complete the setup. Yep, simple VGA cables. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.
ProPresenter running on the Macbook Pro beautifully handles the videos and lyrics for the songs. The message notes and plugs (aka announcements) are shown using Keynote, which is easily switched to while ProPresenter is running. I highly recommend ProPresenter! It’s incredibly easy to use and easy for volunteers to pick up and use. Pre and post-service music is done with iTunes on the Macbook Pro, which runs it all with ease. Each service is recorded off the board by a Roland R-09, which allows for easy audio editing the next day.
I did not work out the details of our audio equipment setup, so I’ll probably post info about that once I’m more familiar with our equipment. We’re toying with videoing the services, but we have to address our lighting situation first.
All of our equipment is neatly stored in custom made cases purchased from Portable Church Industries. These deserve a post of their own, which they’ll get soon. Let’s just say that they make setting up, tearing down, and storage a thing of beauty and that I can’t recommend them enough!
