Hope springs eternal
Published: WORSHIP
Hope Church Singapore has moved to a new premises with an impressive audio, video and lighting installation. Caroline Moss finds out more.
Singapore’s Hope Church is settling into a brand new premises in the Textile Centre on Jalan Sultan. The move dramatically emphasises what Hope Singapore has achieved since it was founded just over 20 years ago by five people in a small Telok Kurau apartment. The new church consists of several spacious units including the Axis auditorium which can accommodate 1,400 people, and two smaller multi-purpose halls, each of which can accommodate 200 people, or 400 when the acoustically treated operable walls between the mirror-image halls are slid back to create one space.
The move is a timely one. With 5,000 members and counting, Hope is in the process of growing into one of Singapore’s strongest houses of worship, and is a member church of the Hope International Ministries, represented in 35 countries. Hope Singapore needed a larger space in which to grow its congregation, and sold its previous 600-capacity church next to Orchard Road to fund the move.
The auditorium had been a cinema and then a nightclub in previous incarnations. ‘Everything had to be redone from the shell of the unit and all internal surfaces; new acoustically treated walls, ceilings and floors, and that was our starting point,’ explains Hope Singapore’s senior technical director Steven Yeoh.
Mr Yeoh worked closely with acoustic and AVL consultants Mr Lim Kheong Sen and Mr Gary Low from Australia’s AcousticKeys (formerly known as Sigma Integration). The architect Mr Simeon Lim from Netec, working in a joint venture with CS Architects, put everything together. Meanwhile, Electronics and Engineering Pte Ltd (E&E) was contracted as systems integrator for all audio, video, lighting, rigging and projection throughout the church. Stage lighting luminaires were provided and installed by Total Solution, while Tubeflexl (Asia) Co supplied the house lightings and main LED Wall.
As the building was being stripped back to its very core, Mr Yeoh took the opportunity to create his own designs to suit Hope’s requirements rather than having someone else impose their own ideas on the building. High on his wish list was a large control room with a clear view of the stage and plenty of room in which to work. ‘In a commercial venue this wouldn’t have been so easy as it would have taken out too many seats,’ he says.
The resulting space is the nerve centre of the operation, housing everything required to transmit any and every aspect of the sermon taking place in the auditorium around the building and beyond. A large window affords perfect sightlines across the entire auditorium and stage. The console is a 64 channel Soundcraft Vi1 used for mixing, routing, recording, live broadcasting and virtual soundchecks. At the moment the broadcasts are limited to narrowcasts around the facility, but live broadcast streaming via high speed internet is also possible.
Next to the control room, with another large window overlooking the auditorium, is a standard feature of modern-day churches: the cry room. Here parents can take restless babies and children, and the service’s audio can be streamed from the Vi1 into this room and other parts of the building as required. The audio is digitally embedded to the video as an HD-SDI signal, which is transmitted via a coaxial cable to various locations around the facility up to 100m without signal loss. The signal is then digitally converted to HDMI to be displayed on LED TVs or projectors. The audio content of the services is streamed through Hope’s own server every week and the entire year of sermon archive is also available for free download. The video content is housed on online web video streaming facility Vimeo.com.
Also taking pride of place in the control room is a Blackmagic Design Compact Videohub featuring 40x40 HD-SDI routing capabilities. ‘We use this to distribute HD-SDI video throughout the whole facility,’ says Mr Yeoh. ‘We use more than 30 inputs, so all the cameras, computers etc are connected to the video hub, and we can patch any of the inputs to the outputs. The video hub sends signals to the Lighthouse Rn6-S LED wall above the stage, which is converted back into HDMI through the Blackmagic mini converters.’
Video can also be displayed at various locations throughout the church on Dell U3011 and U2411 LCD displays and Samsung UA46D5000 LED screens. ‘We try to run everything off digital so it’s an HDSDI signal throughout,’ he continues. ‘If we convert the source to digital then the transport will be cleaner in the long run. We preferred a progressive scan instead of an interlaced signal, so we opted for the 1280 x 720 50P signal as our current video default. This is more compatible for integration with many different devices such as cameras, switchers, routers, converters, recorders and displays.’
Alesis M-Active nearfields and Audio Technica ATH‐M50 headphones are on hand for audio monitoring, and a PC running Adobe Audition 3.0, can record 64 audio channels simultaneously via an RME HDSPe Madi audio interface. Live production graphic feeds are handled by four 21.5 inch Apple iMacs, converted via an adaptor connected to the mini display port into HDMI, then to HD-SDI via a Blackmagic mini converter to be sent to the Videohub. One of the iMacs is used to control a Blackmagic Design Atem 1 M/E switcher via the software panel. This iMac can also generate clock and countdown timer message feeds created in Pro Presenter for the confidence screen.
Another iMac mini display port is attached to a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go Digital Edition to send a 2 x 1280 x 720 image to the two environmental projectors. The image is projected onto the sidewalls of the auditorium and a custom layer of black geometric shapes created in Pro Presenter masks out the area not used for projection. These walls cleverly conceal the staircases used to access the upper balcony, while also providing flat yet angled surfaces to project onto during services.
‘We thought of this right at the beginning of the design process, before building work started,’ says Mr Yeoh. ‘We wanted the surface to be acoustic, to hide the staircase and to function as a projection screen, and we met all three criteria with this design. The walls have been designed with angled surfaces for acoustic reasons. We created a mask with more than 40 edges to map the image onto the wall. We wanted the image to appear as if it is painted onto the wall, and it has turned out quite well.’
The control room also houses a Blackmagic H.264 Pro Recorder encoder and another Atem 1 M/E switcher. One of these mixes content from four JVC GY-HM790CHE and two Panasonic AW-HE50 pan/tilt/zoom 1/3-inch sensor HD cameras. The JVC cameras are also controlled via a rack mounted camera control unit which can independently adjust the iris and colour. The tally signal, bi-directional intercom and camera power supply are also transmitted from the CCU to these four cameras via eight 100m, 26-pin multi-core CCU cables throughout the auditorium and stage, allowing more cameras to be added as required. An Atem 1 M/E switcher distributes the signal out to the 400-inch Lighthouse Rn6-S LED wall, two 200-inch rear projection screens and two 100-inch rear projection confidence screens. Additional displays can be added on and off stage for more complex graphics switching.
A Kramer VP730 seamless switcher is used to convert and upscale analogue devices into digital signals to be routed to the Videohub. This includes laptops with VGA connections and RGB component devices such as DVD players.
‘We want to be able to take in analogue signals in the midst of all the digital technology used here,’ explains Mr Yeoh. ‘The VP730 allows up to two composite/component, four UXGA and two HDMI input sources to be scaled and switched seamlessly. We can receive analogue signals like laptops with VGA outputs from the stage, FOH and the control room.’
Two Dell S500 DLP projectors with ultra wide-angle lens and high brightness are used for the confidence screens located within the balcony front wall, which is acoustically treated and angled to create an enclosure for the projectors and screens. Two Eiki LC-HDT2000 LCD projectors are enclosed within the balcony wall to hide them from audiences’ view and isolate the fan noise. These shoot onto the angled sidewalls. Two further Eiki LC-HDT2000 LCD projectors with wide angle lenses project to two 200-inch rear projection screens on either side of the main stage. ‘We’ve created a cantilevered projection room to house the projector and rear projection screens,’ says Mr Yeoh. ‘Cool air is ducted into the rooms to cool the projectors.’
Two services are currently held in the Axis on Saturday and three on Sunday. ‘We’re currently running at around 60 per cent occupancy for each service, so there’s room for growth,’ Mr Yeoh enthuses. ‘We designed it to be like that, starting with fewer services and putting on more as they started filling up, as we don’t want it to feel too congested.’ The auditorium and multi purpose halls are also available for hire during the week for commercial corporate events, performing arts shows and educational seminars.
A volunteer-based worship team comprising a five to seven piece band and a choir of around the same size serve at each of the church services. Two foldable mobile choir risers can accommodate up to 40 singers when necessary. It therefore follows that Hope’s FOH live sound reinforcement and monitor system should be worthy of any professional concert.
Accordingly, a 96-channel Soundcraft Vi6 takes pride of place in the centre of the auditorium, with a left/right and aux fed subwoofer system of two EAW QX566s three way loudspeakers per side and two QX596 enclosures per side for the first delay system; two EAW JF29 two way units for the second delay on the upper balcony and a central subwoofer system of four BH822e horn loaded subs that are coupled together and sunk into the ceiling.
The under-balcony delay system consists of five JF8s, with six JF60s for front-fill delay and two JF29s as side-fill delay. The system is powered by Powersoft K2, K3, K8, M14D, M20D, M28Q and M50Q amplifiers while DSP control is via four EAW UX8800 processors with Gunness Focusing technology. The system provides a very respectable 115dBA SPL throughout the auditorium, plus or minus 2dB seat to seat.
Hope’s monitor system is no less impressive, with a second 96-channel Soundcraft Vi6 onstage, myMix personal monitoring systems giving 16 channel control for up to 12 musicians, three pairs of EAW JF8 monitor wedges sunk below the stage for the singers and a further one for the engineer. Amplification is via Ashly KLR3200s while a dbx DriveRack 480 provides system DSP. Meanwhile, staff can keep in contact via two intercom systems: a Clear-Com Encore partyline system comprising an MS704 four-channel main station, RS601 beltpacks and CC95 headsets, and a Clear-Com HME DX210 wireless intercom system including a BS210 two-channel base station, BP210 wireless beltpacks and HS15 headsets with noise cancelling microphones.
The church uses a Shure UR4D+ wireless mic system with 12 UR2 Beta87a handheld mics and eight UR1 belt packs with DPA 4066 headset mics. Other microphones include Rode NT1A, Audio Technica AT4033A and a quantity of general purpose Shure SM57s and SM58s. Drums are served by Shure SM57s, Sennheiser e604s for toms and an AKG D112 and Yamaha SubKick mic for the kick drum, with Sennheiser e664s for hi hat and overheads. The rest of the instruments – usually piano, keyboards, bass, electric and acoustic guitars – have their own effects which go straight into Radial J48 Active DI boxes and Radial JDI Passive DI boxes, greatly reducing any onstage spill.
Lighting is handled via an Avolites Pearl Expert Titan console, and the church has a variety of lighting fixtures including 56 Selecon SPX Zoomspots and 20 ETC Source Four PARNels. Four Vari-¬Lite VL3000, eight VL2500 spots and four Vari-¬Lite VL3000 washes provide effects, and there are two Le Maitre MVS Hazer units.
A team of around 100 volunteers help Mr Yeoh runs the church services. ‘The crew has grown over time, and now there is a dedicated team of key volunteers to train up newer volunteers,’ he explains. ‘We introduce them to the technology gradually. Most of the training is hands on and we also run in-house workshops.’
Volunteers form subgroups which serve their own worship services, for example the youth volunteers run the youth services, and there are also Philippines, Indonesian and Mandarin groups which run services for the respective groups within the church.
Some of these services, including a special one for children, are held in the two Connect Rooms, boasting a capacity of 200 each or 400 when combined. Each room has been installed with six EAW JF8 speakers chosen due to the low ceiling height, with two Mackie HD1501s per hall to augment low frequencies. Smaller, specialised bands play at the services, with the youth band playing for the children’s services. Each room is equipped with Presonus Studiolive 24.4.2 and 16.4.2 mixers coupled together to form a total of 40 channels. This combo mixer handles both FOH and monitor duties, along with a myMix system for the musicians, and is also used for recording. ‘The Studiolive is easy to use, good sounding, provides sufficient control and is a cost effective solution for our needs in the smaller halls,’ prasies Mr Yeoh.
There are three Eiki LC-XB43 projectors per room, two for front left and right and one as a confidence screen for the stage ministers. Each projects onto a 150-inch motorised screen. The composite/component/VGA/HDMI signal is switched and scaled via a Kramer VP728 seamless scaler/switcher and sent to the projectors via a Kramer TP110 transmitter and Kramer TP120 receiver.
Mr Yeoh is looking forward to the challenges that working for a growing church brings. Future projects include putting on a large Christmas production, and Hope has begun to offer baptising ceremonies in the auditorium using four self-assembly baptismal pools. ‘The main challenges are time and manpower; not all our volunteers have the time to come to rehearsals as they all work as well,’ says Mr Yeoh, who is the only full time member of audiovisual staff, with responsibility for the operation and maintenance of all equipment. It is clear that such a job is exacting, and also that Mr Yeoh has gone a long way in designing and specifying the best possible systems for the job.
‘In my opinion, people usually expect a high quality, non-distracting service,’ he says. ‘The whole experience of supporting a worship service is to present the gospel to the audience in an engaging and non-distracting way. So providing A/V support is extremely important to meet this requirement. If it is done properly, the church can leverage the technology to take the gospel further.
‘We have been given the privilege and opportunity to work together with other communities and churches around us. We like to share God’s providence with others and perhaps be of help to those who need it. Setting up a good AVL system is easy in theory but making it work beautifully can be tough in practice. We didn’t just get here overnight, it was a long process and there were a lot of decisions made along the way – thank God more right than wrong. We are still learning and improving every day by the grace of God.’
Hope Singapore is now in an extremely good position to move forward, as well as to inspire other churches along the way.