ROGUE RH1 HYBRID FROM CHAUVET PROFESSIONAL

In Audio, Product Reviewsby admin

4e0b0b67-8157-4b95-9dd7-ad7f69b9616c-5By Bobby Dennis

The Heights Church in Richardson, TX, believes that our unique mission is to take personal risks to bring the gospel to every relationship we have by engaging our community and the world. To further that goal, we not only have a strong focus on global missions through our Engage program (heightsengage.org), but also through worship, where we encourage established members and visitors to help us create a community of front-yard missionaries. We offer multiple worship opportunities around our campus, including a Spanish service every Sunday at 10:50am in our Chapel and Hearing Loss Support via CART (Computer Aided Real Time Transcription) at our first service at 9:15am from our main sanctuary. Our 9:15am service is a blended-service, meaning more traditional worship with a choir and orchestra, followed by our contemporary worship service at 10:50am, also held in the main sanctuary, which features a worship band, and is much more dynamic in nature.

I was recently given the budget to purchase some new moving lights to replace some older moving fixtures that we had, and was able to travel to the LDI Show to research potential new fixtures. While I was there, I managed to see Chauvet’s Rogue RH1 Hybrids, and knew I had found the perfect fixture for our needs. The Heights Church has a very strong ‘bang for the buck mentality’, meaning we are results oriented, and don’t care so much about brands, and the RH1s were a great fit right from the start. It helped that we already have static Chauvet fixtures in use, and were familiar with the quality and longevity of the brand. The fixture itself is a hybrid beam, spot, & wash with an optical system that includes 8-facet and 6-facet prism sets that are completely layerable and controllable. It’s powered by a 330X8 Osram Sirius Reflector lamp and delivers an output of 111,000 LUX at 15m with tight beam angles of 1-4.5° in Beam Mode and a zoom range of 5-19° in Spot Mode. It also has indexing and static scrolling gobo wheels and a 13-hue color wheel which allows us to create innumerable visual effects.

Once we made the decision to purchase, installation was easy. Our six new Rogue RH1s replaced our old movers on the catwalks above our stage. We started the process after church one Sunday, completely reconfiguring and installing all-new cabling and getting the lights up and running within about six hours, and had them fully incorporated into our next worship service the following Sunday. We run all our stage lighting via an ETC Ion series console. At the time, the RH1s were so new we had to create a fixture profile, but that was relatively easy to do, and we were able to start playing with the different features immediately. Because of the flexibility of color & gobos, I was able to create a variety of depth and scenes that we could easily incorporate into our regular worship.

Also, because most of our local high schools also use the ETC Ion lighting board, we have several students on our tech team familiar with the board who can use it easily. I really appreciate the fact that I can turn the lighting over to our volunteers, and they can easily use the equipment, without having to worry about the lighting design falling apart during service. At least three times a year – Christmas, Easter & Patriotic Service– we run very large, special-effects concerts, and also bring in touring worship bands at least once a year as well. The RH1s are great here as well, because they also include prism effects and strobes on top of built-in gobos, and can also provide tight beam angles for when we want to use our hazers to create a beam effect. The color saturation of the fixture is crisp and bright, and with a beam Richies reportangle of 3 – 10 degrees in Spot mode and 1 to 4.5 degrees in beam mode, offers lots of movement. Even the touring acts have embraced them; they’ve really had an impact.

We’re very comfortable with what we can do with the Rogue RH1s – and we want more. I’ve already got positions picked for the new Rogues RH1s we planning on getting.

Bobby Dennis is the Technical Director at The Heights www.theheights.org