The Church at Sterchi Hills is enhancing its spiritual mission with immersive worship experiences, delivered by Avolites and its fully integrated Synergy package. The growing ministry in Knoxville, TN has continually upgraded its A/V infrastructure since splitting off from Second Baptist Church in neighbouring Clinton, TN in 2019.
The church believes that effectively communicating a message begins with embracing new technologies to create a high-energy, highly engaging worship environment. For its latest growth project — building a new worship center — the church turned to Andre Huff, a veteran lighting designer with national touring experience and also the architect of Second Baptist Church’s lighting system.
The Sterchi Hills team had a vision for converting its stage area’s back wall, 55 feet wide and 20 feet high, into a giant video surface. Realizing the possibilities, Huff immediately signed on to be lighting designer and to manage the control of this blank canvas. He had previous experience with the Avolites Ai media server and Avolites consoles on his last tour and recommended the technologies for controlling video outputs and lighting seamlessly in the new Sterchi Hills facility.
“The Avolites server with Synergy and Avolites consoles were the perfect fit for this installation project,” said Huff, who is also the founder and owner of Limelite Design Service, a lighting design, sales and consulting firm specializing in worship, live events and television. “Using a proper media server gives the church media department the video computing power they needed to implement the technology they use in a seamless manner between lighting and video.”
After deciding against LED video wall technology due to installation and operating costs for a space of that size, the team settled on projection. They evaluated several projection layout and resolution options, ultimately choosing to hang five 13,000-lumen laser projectors in portrait mode. This allowed them to use HD projectors at 1920×1200 resolution to blend the wall and achieve an overall 4K image by pixel count.
This system configuration closely complements the Ai server’s ability to control the mapping of the five projectors and create a blend over the entire wall. Huff found the server’s auto blend feature streamlined the blending of each projector by pulling color information from the video to use for back-lighting and video sync.
The Sterchi Hills team is running its new system across three independent networks: a sACN lighting network distributed to all lighting positions and the floor, a Titan Network carrying Synergy between the server and the console, and an NDI network with plug-in locations to transport NDI streams from NDI sources into the server.
The Sterchi Hills is also using Avolites Tiger Touch II consoles, Black Magic URSA cameras and ATEM switcher, Mega Lite MB1 and Spotbot 300 lighting fixtures and Blizzard Flurry Z fixtures.
