Jefferson Baptist Church's sanctuary is one of the largest worship rooms in Baton Rouge, and the stage runs nearly the full width of it. The church wanted control over the entire stage from a single rig, programmed once and run every Sunday by a volunteer. We built the rig on Elation fixtures, program the show on a Hedgehog 4, and wired the console to ProPresenter so the lighting follows the service on its own.
Wide rooms punish lighting rigs. Fixtures that cover the center leave the edges flat, and adding more of the same fixture just adds hot spots. The design here starts from the far ends of the platform and works inward.
Elation LED profiles with 17–27° zoom carry the key light across the full width. Dynamic-white LED washes with eight-leaf barn doors give even front light at a color temperature that matches the cameras, and dynamic-white pars with 10° to 60° beam angles handle backlight and texture. Every fixture is LED, so the rig runs cool, quiet, and on a fraction of the power the old system drew.
The show is designed and programmed on a Hedgehog 4 during the week. On Sunday the console is listening for MIDI notes from ProPresenter, sent through a Hog MIDI I/O box. When the ProPresenter operator advances a slide or starts a song, the lighting cue that belongs to it fires with it.
The result is a large-scale system that runs itself in service. Nobody sits at the lighting console on Sunday morning; the person running the slides runs the room, and every song and every transition stays in sync because the lighting is tied to the same cue the congregation sees on screen.
The first Christmas program on the new rig came that December. For the big numbers we added the MIDI and timecode widget so cues could run to the track, and the same volunteer-driven setup carried choir, band, and the kids' choir through every service.
Program it once, hand it to the person running the slides, and the room lights itself every Sunday.