Resurrection Life Church expands with new userfriendly control room design

Resurrection Life Church in Grandville, MI, had a rapidly growing congregation and limited seating, so it was imperative that the church build a new 4300-seat auditorium. The expansion included an auditorium, a concourse between the new and old facility, a chapel, a choir room and a TV control room with broadcast audio capability, to give both the attendees and television/Web stream viewers a high-quality experience.

Challenges to the new facility included inadequate lighting and audio design, and the need to create connectivity between the old post-production facility and the new control room, which houses an Avid Unity system. This required some creative design to include fiber-optic runs of more than 700ft. In addition, the Avid editing systems needed to connect to the two ingest AirSpeeds as well as the playback AirSpeed over the same distance.

Everything is digital in the new control room except the live audio feeds from front of house and TV audio. The television audio consists of a DiGiCo DS-00 digital mixer, two Otari 48-track hard-disk recorders/editors and a Digidesign Pro Tools HD2 workstation, TC Electronic Finalizer and other assorted items all connected to the Unity.

Making the control room and engineering area volunteer friendly required forethought. The entire production centers on the Ross Synergy 3 switcher. The switcher controls eight cameras, a Deko 3000, AirSpeed server and tape decks, as well as other graphic and video inputs. The switcher allows many of the church service elements to be prebuilt through custom controls. The switcher is easy to operate, which is especially important for the volunteers assisting with production.

Directly in front of the switcher, the technical director faces two 40in LCD Kaleido multiview displays, four 20in LCDs for broadcast/ IMAG program and preview, as well as other assorted confi dence monitors.

The real workhorse for the system is the terminal room, which houses tape decks, ingest and playback servers, camera controls and routers. This equipment helps terminate hundreds of miles of audio and video cabling.

A homegrown graphics system was used prior to the purchase of the Deko 3000 unit. The decision was to go SD for video acquisition and where it was feasible upgrade to ATO high-defi nition. The new 72x HD lenses for the two center cameras offer a big advantage. The future flex fiber installed is future proof for high-defi nition.

The facility is set up for 16:9, which has only caused a few problems with the special event performances with 4:3 requirements.

Eventually Resurrection Life Church intends to go HD. The congregation’s feedback to the new services has been positive. The facility provides an entirely new experience.