Jands Vista L5 Provides Powerful Control for Elevation Church Arena Concert

	Elevation Church in North Carolina used Jands' Vista L5 console to provide control for a major concert show held at the nearby Time Warner Cable Arena.

Elevation Church in North Carolina has used Jands' flagship Vista L5 console to provide powerful control for a major concert show held at the nearby Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte -- attended by nearly 13,000 people.

The multi-site Elevation Church's locations include Charlotte, North Carolina, and Greater Toronto in Canada, as well as several extension sites across the US. It has been named one of the fastest growing churches in America by Outreach magazine for the past six years.

Elevation's in-house lighting designer, Andy Bentley, specified the Jands Vista L5 for the concert show, which was a live album/DVD recording for the worship team's new album, Wake Up the Wonder.

"We started with the Jands Vista platform more than five years ago, and now we are running seven Vista systems simultaneously across our church locations -- including three S1s with 1,024 dongles, two I3s, and two T2s," says Bentley. "When I came to specify the fixtures for the arena concert -- which included Clay Paky Sharpys, B-EYEs, and lots of pixels -- I knew I'd need to process 2,336 channels for the B-EYEs alone, along with the rest of the lighting rig. I therefore realized that I would need the processing power of the L5 to keep things running smoothly, and to keep up with my fast programming pace."

The powerful L5 utilizes an Intel Quad-Core i7-2600 (3.4GHz) processor and 8GB of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The state-of-the-art desk also features a massive 21" High-Definition TFT screen, backlit keyboard, and Linux operating system. This combination is ideal for big shows where using lots of fixtures, LEDs, and media servers can place significant demands on the console's processor.

"The Vista (v2) software allowed us to do things in just minutes that would've taken hours on other desks," Bentley continues. "The effects engine was awesome to work with. The ability to stack multiple parameters in the same effect helped us create some really unique and energetic moments. The interface also made working with the almost 600 pixels of the B-EYEs painless."

"The timeline interface was also hugely helpful, allowing me to quickly offset things like intensity or color fades, so my fixtures could fade in waves rather than all at once, which added a very organic feel to transitions. Another helpful feature of the timeline was being able to change the waveform of events. This helped make working with the snappy motion of the Sharpy Washes easier, as I could just change the waveform of a position event to an ease in or out, rather than a straight, linear fade."

Bentley worked with Fred Mikeska of Jands' North American distributor, A.C. Lighting Inc., to supply the Vista L5 in super quick time -- continuing the longstanding relationship between Elevation Church and the distributor.

The lighting rig also included 40 Chroma-Q Color Force 72", 48", and 12" LED fixtures to the Charlotte site, using them as cyc lights and audience blinders.

"I have yet to see anything that matches the output of the Color Force units while maintaining the richness and vibrance of the colors the fixture produces," says Bentley. "We run most of our Color Forces in mode 4, which allows us to control each individual bank of LEDs. We love to leverage this freedom to create some really organic intensity effects, and to create color gradients across our cyc and crowd fixtures for some really unique looks. Thankfully, the Vista platform makes programming these things remarkably easy."

The Vista range includes a choice of portable, flexible control surfaces and self-contained consoles all running the same Vista v2 software.

Equally at home on tour or as a venue's house console, Jands' award-winning Vista lighting and media control system has been embraced by leading designers, companies, and venues all over the world on a wide range of shows. Covering entertainment, education and drama, installations, corporate, events and worship, the company says there's a Vista system to suit all levels of user and almost any scale of show.

Recent shows featuring lighting or media control by Vista include international concert tours by Kylie Minogue, Queen + Adam Lambert, Peter Gabriel, Dierks Bentley, Fall Out Boy, Bloc Party, Deftones, and Little Big Town.

See the Jands Vista range at NAB in Las Vegas, April 13 - 16, in A.C. Lighting's booth C8439, or, Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt, Germany, April 15 - 18, in AC-ET's booth 9.0-D47.