Choosing a Light Board
Choosing a light board is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in planning your church lighting system. The light board controls your dimmers, your moving lights, your color scrollers, fog machines, even you architectural lighting! It needs to be easy enough to operate for all your techinical personnel to operate, but powerful enough to do all things you need to do. Let’s take a look at several different types of light boards and what kinds of church lighting packages they’re a good fit for.

Two – Scene Preset Boards

These are the most basic of light boards. They generally are manually operated, with someone watching the action and adjusting the light levels live. They may be capable of programming submasters (a specific stage lighting look programmed onto one fader), or may even be able to program rudimentary cues, but will probably not run cues very well. These boards are best suited for simpler lighting systems with no moving lights or color scrollers. They usually have a limited number of control channels, so they simply don’t have the horsepower for those types of church lighting systems.

But many churches only need a simple light board that is also affordable, either because they are not very elaborate in their lighting needs, or as a secondary board for children’s ministry or youth ministry. I am a big fan of the Leprecon 600 series of control consoles for this type of church. They are affordable, dependable and powerful enough for a 48-channel dimming system with no problem whatsoever. These consoles, like the one pictured above, are a perfect fit for a smaller church with a less elaborate lighting rig.

Memory Lighting Consoles

As your worship service becomes more elaborate, your lighting may need to follow suit. And for any contemporary service or drama-based worship service, a computerized, or memory lighting console is crucial. It doesn’t take long when building a facility to get a stage that’s just too wide to light without having 75-100 lighting instruments, and when you get that big, it’s more than one person can keep track of with their hands and head. So we add a computer, and they can preset their stage looks beforehand and call them up using the cue stacks.

Using cues in a light board allows a designer to have more complete control of the lighting, down to the tenth of the second! Computerized light boards also allow a designer or operator to use a few moving lights or color scrollers, enhancing the stage picture and thus furthering the message. For my money, the ETC Expression and Express light boards are the best in the business. I own an ETC Express 24/48 and have loved it for years. I find them very easy to use, and very simple to train others to use. I’ve had middle school kids programming cues on an Express light board after less than half an hour of training! And ETC’s technical support is second-to-none, which is incredibly important in a field where your biggest business happens outside of normal business hours!

 

Moving Light Boards

As your programs get more elaborate, your light board will as well. Eventually you’re going to want to use a lot of moving lights and effects, and have everything timed to within an inch of its life. That’s when you need to move up to the big boys. These moving light boards are big, impressive, and expensive. Like $30,000 is not unusual kind of expensive.

But when you’re looking for a light board for your church that will run all your stage lights, your house lights, your color changers, your moving lights and your LEDs, then it takes a lot of horsepower. 18-wheelers are expensive too, because it takes a lot of muscle to do what they do. Ditto a moving light board.

Most moving light control consoles have at least one high-end computer processor in them, and sometimes more. They can handle thousands of dimmers and hundreds of moving lights, and can do it easily. My two favorites for this class of light board are the Jands Vista and the ETC EOS. Both companies have been making great light boards for decades, and both have great technical support. But don’t take my word for it – test drive one!

Before you spend that kind of money on a light board, your lighting vendor should get you a demo and let you play with the board. Preferably in your church, if it’s built. If not, make your way to one of the major trade shows and get someone to show you the board there. You wouldn’t buy a BMW without a test drive, would you? So why buy a the front end control for your entire lighting system without one?

PC based consoles/Phone apps.

An Idea that is taking the market by storm right now is the concept of PC based consoles, which are boards that can be run from a Laptop. Two of the leaders in PC based technology are the Martin light jockey which has a slightly high learning curve, and the Jands Vista which has almost no learning curve. The Grand MA, and the HOG III pc  are  not far behind, but I caution using these for church applications unless your dealing with a lot of moving lights, or are very familiar with either console. Usually PC downloads are free, but they require a DMX converter or a “widget” to let them play with your lighting system. This is great because you can test drive a board from your living room and see if it’s right for you. Something we will see more of in the next few years are Apps; that can control a console from a phone. Right now these are mostly to compliment an existing console, but in the next few years, who knows?