Tech Forum

I wish we could keep the choir a bit darker than the speaker like they do for general conference. There are two podium lights but they are at the wrong angle and not bright enough. None of the other lights are configured such that you can dim the choir and still see the speaker well. Would it be considered too outrageous to mount a couple stage lights on the sides for this purpose?

They wouldn't be too visible to the audience, but I guess they might blind the speaker.

We also have a terrible problem with back lighting. The walls behind the choir loft are white and overpower the speaker when framed to a wide shot. In addition, if we could dim the choir during speaker's talks, distractions of unaware choir members would not be so noticable.

We have considered using PAR lights on the speaker also, so I'd be interested if anyone else has had success doing this. Is the additional lighting too much for the speaker and/or viewers? What wattage would be recommended?

I think there's probably as many different lighting setups in chapels as there are chapel designs.

The wattage you need is the wattage that does the job. Dimming is not a good idea as it causes a red shift in the color. You also might want to find out what kinds of light are on the speaker. Otherwise you might introduce yet another color (incandescent, halogen, fluorescent) in the mix.

They don't make the area behind the speakers darker in General Conference. They have lights that are a different frequency that are made to look darker just by changing the frequencies which he cameras capture. It gives the effect of the rear lights being dimmed down, but its simply a setting change with cool equipment that we will never be able to afford on the Stake level,

heyring wrote:They don't make the area behind the speakers darker in General Conference. They have lights that are a different frequency that are made to look darker just by changing the frequencies which he cameras capture. It gives the effect of the rear lights being dimmed down, but its simply a setting change with cool equipment that we will never be able to afford on the Stake level,

I went hunting and found still photos at a resolution too high to be video capture that seems to dispel that theory.

However the photos seem to suggest a very strong difference in lighting. You're not going to do that easily. You'd probably going to have to stage light the entire stage to to do it.

Instead, you might want to consider cheaper alternatives like repositioning the camera or making changes to what's behind the podium.

We had our first webcast this past weekend. Lighting was also an issue for us. We have lights on the back wall behind the choir. there is a row of lights that points down on that back wall. Also above those lights is a row of lights that points up at the ceiling. These looked really bad on camera so we turned them off. Unfortunetly these lights on stage are on the same light switch that controls some indirect lighting for the rest of the chapel. So, turning those off left the whole chapel a bit darker.

Of course everything is being switched to fluorescent also. Fluorescent doesn't look so hot on camera either.

miken2av wrote:Fluorescent doesn't look so hot on camera either.

The key is to do a white balance. But if the lights on the speaker are halogen and the back lights are fluorescent, yeah, that's not going to look so good. You might want to talk to the FM group about finding a different color of fluorescent lighting. Or at least putting those lights on a separate switch.

Thanks everyone. I tried to get our FM group to change what lights were on what switches but they said that was impossible.

I have some stage lights, but I'd have to play with them. And the color temperature is not ideal for video. But maybe adjusting the white balance will help. We have primarily fluorescent in the chapel with a few halogens.

craiggsmith wrote:Thanks everyone. I tried to get our FM group to change what lights were on what switches but they said that was impossible.

Poor choice of words on their part. What they really are saying is that they would have to submit a building configuration change request and incur an unplanned budget expense if approved. For some buildings this would deviate from the building plan standard which is quite hard to get approval to do.

You might want to check the breaker panel. I'm fortunate that in our chapel (not standard by any means) the breakers offer better control then the switches do.