SAN ANTONIO, TX – Impact Youth Camp is a two-week long church retreat that attracts high school and middle school students from churches from all over Texas. Over 1200 students attend, participating in seminars, group meals and praise and worship. The organizers of the event turned to DiTech A.V. of El Campo, TX to do the lighting, audio and video design and production.
More details from Mega Systems Inc (www.megasystemsinc.com):
The production has grown substantially since Paul Guthrie, Owner of DiTech A.V. got involved with the event 10 years ago. Their participation has grown each year, from at first providing only audio to now being in charge of the entire stage production. This year they exceeded expectations and challenged themselves with a design that departed from anything they had done in the past.
Guthrie worked with his LD Dan Brunson and to brainstorm and sketch a unique design. With the stage being so large, the biggest challenge was creating an intimate feel to the space, without loosing its grandeur. They knew they didn’t want to do a standard video panel set up. And, they also knew they wanted to use truss in a functional way somehow. Together Gruthrie and Brunson came up with the solution to frame the stage with video panels and fill in the spaces with 6 pieces of 3M stick truss from PlusTruss.
A total of 30 Dicolor BAT M1-391 panels spanned the stage. 12 Dicolor U-4 LED Display Panels were set up in a 2×6 configuration above the center of the stage for lyrics. The overall look of the video walls was very impressive. “The clarity was amazing,” says Guthrie. “It looked so much better than any projection we have used in the past.”
Setting up the panels went very quickly. Both models of the Dicolor panels have locking latches are lightweight, making for quick assembly without the need for any tools.
To program the walls, Guthrie utilized two RGBlink VSP198S switcher/scalers and one RGBlink Driver. They ran three feeds to the main wall and a separate feed to the lyrics. Mapping this kind of set up was different from anything they had done before, but the RGBlink products, along with support from Mega Systems, Inc., made it easy to configure.
Lighting was equally important in the stage design. Guthrie used a total of 32 fixtures from Mega-Lite and PR Lighting combined. 8 XR 300 Beam provided very bright beam and gobo effects. Says Guthrie, “They looked incredible and allowed us to use them in several different ways.” 12 PR Lighting XLED 3007 fixtures and 6 Mega-Lite Axis QD7 fixtures provided color washing and eye candy effects with their pixel control capabilities. Additionally, Guthrie made use of the XLED 3007 infinite pan and tilt and built in WDMX. “They are so fast and super versatile; they’re a great addition to our toolkit,” says Guthrie. The Enlighten ONE Console with 4 universes provided the lighting control.
Throughout the two weeks of the camp, Guthrie received numerous compliments from the youth pastors and students. In fact, he heard many say that the lighting and video painting the picture of the gospel and helped them to focus more on worship. It was so successful for DiTech A.V. that several of the youth pastors booked them for upcoming events at their churches throughout the Texas.
