by Michael Fess

Mapleview Community Church is located in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Our church has experienced incredible growth in its 18-year history and has regularly met in fi ve different venues for its worship services. The most recent of which is our current 40,000 sq. ft. facility with a 700 seat “warehouse style” worship space. Our church built its current facility during the 2008 economic downturn and as such, made modifications to the original plans for its worship space. Over the past six years, since moving in, we have been slowly adding to and updating our sound, video and lighting technologies. For Christmas 2015, Mapleview Community Church wanted to creatively display how Jesus Christ is the light and hope the world. We wanted to represent this concept with a lot light and color. When the opportunity presented itself for our church to demo LED light fixtures through AC Lighting, we were excited. We were thrilled to have access to 24 Chroma Q Color 100 LED Pars for use in our Christmas services and main Christmas production.

We had been considering purchasing LED fixtures for our worship space for some time, and this was an excellent opportunity to test out how they would look and function in our current worship space. This demo also helped us sort out all of the different components we would need to properly hang, adjust and control any future light fixtures we decide to purchase in the future. We were starting from scratch. We didn’t have any lighting bars or structure in place to hang any fixtures, we didn’t have a DMX controller and we didn’t have any of the required cabling to connect all of the fixtures. So we got to work designing, purchasing and constructing the infrastructure required to support the demo fixtures from AC Lighting and of course any fixtures we purchase in the future. We installed a 5’x5’ aluminum lighting grid that has a total width of 40’ and depth of 20’. Along with the fixtures TFWM and AC Lighting provided a Jands Vista 2 DMX Controller to demo with the Color 100 LED Pars. Out of the box, the Chroma Q Color 100 LED Par is an impressive fixture. You can tell just by its overall construction and the weight of the product itself that it is a high quality product built to put up with a lot of use and abuse.

The box included a power cable and a remote, so we were able to instantly plug one in and see what it was capable of. To say that we were impressed would be an understatement. This single fixture illuminated the dark room with bright yet deep, rich color so well, we could hardly wait to install all 24 fixtures and see what effect it would have in our worship space. Installation was a breeze. The fixtures are a great size, nice and compact, easy to put in a lift or carry up a ladder. Heavy enough to be rugged and durable but not so heavy that they were difficult to work with. The feet/brackets on the Chroma Q Color 100 LED Par quickly change from a dual bracket setup for setting up on the floor/stage to a single bracket for use with clamps to be hung from a truss. A small feature that made our setup time that much quicker and gave us the flexibility to use the fixtures in a number of different areas of the stage. Another great feature of the Chroma Q Color 100 fixtures is the powerCON connectors. These connectors allowed us to daisy chain a number of the lights together making it easier to distribute power to all of the lights. The Chroma Q Color 100 LED Par is a great fixture. Small and compact, but powerful!

The color mixing options are endless and we were absolutely blown away by how bright the fixtures were even when working with the deepest colors. The word I would use to describe the light output of these fixtures is “saturated”. As many of us may know, the brighter you push colored lights the more difficult it is to maintain the saturation of color. That was not a problem with these fixtures whatsoever. Colors like red and deep green were super bright, even when saturation was at 100%. The only drawback we found with this fixture was that it didn’t have any strobe or focusing capabilities. These functions were not necessary for us but would have been welcomed additions to the fixtures when we were programming various scenes and lighting effects for our main Christmas Production. To see photos and video of our Christmas production which used the Chroma Q Color 100 LED Par you can visit us online at mapleview.church/ thereturntochristmas.

Michael Fess is the Artistic Director of Mapleview Community Church, and is passionate about taking his experience leading in creative church ministry and his experience in the corporate creative direction world and using them to see the church rise up creatively. Follow him on Twitter @ michaelfess