ADJ Pixie Strip enhances Lake Charles church
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With a capacity of approximately 150, Preparing the Way Ministries’ auditorium is a relatively small but modern space. Worship for Sunday services is led by a multi-piece contemporary worship band and the facility is also used for midweek prayer and worship meetings which tend to feature a more stripped-back music group.
Prior to this recent upgrade, the church’s lighting setup simply involved stage washing provided by eight ADJ 5PX HEX LED par fixtures controlled via an iPad running ADJ’s Airstream DMX app connected wirelessly to the Airstream DMX Bridge interface.
Having made the decision to invest in developing the lighting technology in their facility, the church’s leadership brought in specialist AV integration company Stevens Audio Visual to advise on potential options for the upgrade.
“I met with the church and discussed various options,” explains Greg Stevens. “They wanted to do something more creative with their lighting and the worship leader had drawn up a rough schematic for using LED strip fixtures to fill in the dead space on the very plain and uninspiring walls at the back of the stage. Initially they were thinking about just regular LED strips, but I recommended a pixel-mapped low-res video system as that seemed like the best solution to achieve their desired result.
“We installed a product that worked well at first, but after a short while it started to develop problems. Odd fixtures would lose their IP addresses and stop functioning. We switched out various fixtures and cables, but couldn’t get to the bottom of the problem, although the building has very dirty power so we think that was probably to blame.”
He decided to completely replace the original installation with ADJ’s newly launched Pixie Strip series of pixel-mappable linear LED fixtures. Unlike the original product used for this project, which utilised on-board processing and required separate power and signal cables run to each fixture, the Pixie Strip system features a separate standalone processing unit, the Pixie Driver 2000. This device requires a single power supply and data feed (either Kling-Net, Art-Net or sACN) and then outputs a combined power/signal feed via two proprietary 4-pin connections. Each of these can be daisy-chained between multiple Pixie Strip fixtures to drive up to 1020 pixels (170 using Kling-Net).
“It is a very flexible system,” enthuses Greg, “making it idea for a church setting where it’s important to strike the right balance between drawing people in to what is happening on stage but not distracting them from it. You can change the brightness levels, change the colour scheme, and have the versatility to create anything from a static look or slow-moving pattern right up to high energy effects.”
To generate this varied collection of effects, Stevens AV supplied the church with an ArKaos MediaMaster Express setup. This was configured for the Pixie Strip installation and pre-loaded with a variety of different animated effects which can be easily selected and triggered by the church’s volunteer technical team.
