Portable Churches

[Esoteric]

Hey guys, so we are opening a new campus....

I was out on the road for parts of 4 years, so I have some experience in one day in and out events. But I am always gathering more and more info.

We are having a meeting next week to put together as much info as we can to prepare for launch in September. Here are the questions he asked.

Would anyone like to share your thoughts on your experiences to add to our base of knowledge?

1. What did you do well that should be incorporated into our new campus?
2. What sucked? What were the stupid things that you should have fixed looking back?
3. Are there some key purchases that need to be made to be successful? What?
4. Are there special projects/training/recruiting that you feel is mandatory to be successful? List those things.

Thank you guys!!

Mike

[prochlea]

my thoughts from an earlier thread -

We've been mobile for the last two years... my thoughts:

I agree with Ted that the order you load the trailer is important, but I disagree with him on the order. Well - at least in regards to loading a full church into a trailer. The AV system should be at the back of the trailer so that it is the first thing off. In our case - it's the back half of the trailer, and it's a bunch of carts, but it comes off first so we can get started setting it up. The AV system will take longer to set up than anything else, so it comes off first, and goes back on last. Also, in regards to the trailer - I'm not sure how big your church is, and how much gear you're going to have, but that trailer seems WAY too small. Our trailer is 10'x25' and we barely get everything in it.

I also agree with Joe about being organized. In our set up, every thing has a place, and if it's not in that place, it doesn't fit. We have everything(including the kids stuff) on big carts so that we can roll in and roll out efficiently.

As for the AV system in particular... Biggest piece of advice - everything is in a case of some sort... amps are in rolling equipment racks, projector is in a case, drums, FOH and Video stuff each have their own carts, etc. This protects the gear, and helps with the second piece of advice - Keep everything as "connected" as you can. For instance - we moved to a digital snake so that we can keep the FOH cart completely wired up, and all we have to do is plug in two cat5's for the snake and one for the Aviom system. We keep the speaker cables and input cables for the amps connected to the amps, and we roll them up and hang them in the back of the amp rack. This way all we have to do to get the amps hooked up is pull out the 4-channel snake cable and plug it into the snake and plug in the speaker cables. (everything is labeled so that its easy to plug into the right place.)

Get reels for everything you can. We have all of our mic cables plugged in end to end on one big reel, all of the extension cords are in buckets that reel up, and all of the snake-aviom-projector-etc cables have their own reels. Also - have lots of extension cords... you'll need them - heavy gauge ones - 10awg would be best because you'll likely need long ones.

You'll learn quickly that you need to eliminate anything that is unnecessary. It's really all about planning and processes. With practice, everything will go really fast. We've been doing it for two years now, and we do the job with half the amount of people in half of the time from when we started.

[prochlea]

link to that thread...

[Gracetech]

1. Keep it light, keep setup simple, make it as bullet proof as possible.
2. Don't buy big heavy speakers, Try multiple speakers instead if you need alot of sound.
3. EDAC and ELCO connectors are nice but will be the first source of failure in the hands of a volunteer crew.
4. Digital boards are built for portable churches. You can really keep your weight down here as well as in most cases use cheap/replaceable Ethernet instead of multi-pair with mass connectors.
5. I'm sure you already know this, "wheels are your friend" use them judiciously.
6. Keep staging to a minimum, Staging is heavy and slows down setup.
7. If you can afford it go with LED lighting. It can be put directly into boxes right off of truss/stands without cool down time. Not to mention that they are light. The also don't need dimmer packs.
8. If you use acoustic drums get an enclosure, chances are you will be in less than ideal acoustic environment.
9. Rear project to save on setup headaches with projectors.
10. Bring donuts and coffee!

crt

[Steve G.]

Having been second in line responsible for having all of the A/V setup every sunday morning... some of my advice would be:

1) Use trailers, not trucks. (we had one 24' trailer and an old u-haul truck) We had all the A/V in the u-haul so it would always arrive before the trailer. One of the problems with the truck is that it took like 5 guys to get each cabinet off. with the trailer, one guy could do a cabinet by himself.

2) have the A/V system off first.

3) if your in the city (atleast NYC), don't use long trailer (we should have had 2 20' trailers instead of one 24' and a 17' uhaul)

4) use reals (as stated above)

5) use a digital board ( we used a 48 channel analog)

6) have spare VGA, CAT 5 (for aviom), mic, speaker and any other kind of cable that you can think of... the abuse these wires get is thousands times more than being at a static location. Having said that, the only thing that ever broke was a few 1/4" and one vga.

Develop a good team.

[cmchamp]

Only recommendation regarding multiple speakers from me would be to make sure they are designed to do what you want. Every cabinet that has a trapezoidal design doesn't necessarily couple like an arrayable cabinet does.
If looking for that "more sound" out of lighter components, look for either neodynium (sp?) magnet structures, OR individual components - LF, MF, HF. The individual component route costs more money however.

[D.R.HADDOCK]

Originally Posted by prochlea

my thoughts from an earlier thread -

Dont forget when loading a trailer or a truck that correct weight distribution
is also very important or a rollover is a real possabilitiy.

As some one who drove loaded band trucks for many years I know the importance of this.

[D.R.HADDOCK]

I think the most important thing is communication,
After all functions a quick debreif to find out what worked well and what didnt.
Most dedicated techies are always looking to be better,
But they dont always realise that different people have different perspectives,
so what one person thinks is good, might be seen differently by others,
So learning what the others are looking for helps a lot!!!

[Ryanrhinkle]

One of the best purchases we've made is the Bose L1 speakers. We wanted something portable that also sounded great, and I feel like we did both.

[waynehoskins]

We were portable in the gym of a rec center for a few years. I came on in the last few months of that, so I'm sure there are some things (disasters) I didn't get to experience.

We were able to store stuff at the rec center: chairs here and there, AV gear in a closet upstairs, and other stuff in a storage trailer outside. The elevator broke twice in our time there (once in my time), and that was just miserable.

Much of it can be treated as recurring road gigs, so you can use what you already know. Scope out power, plan the truck pack, build the rigs to both fit the use and pack well, etc. Label things clearly, probably both with where they should be unloaded to and something that matches the drawing of the truck pack, since you'll likely have willing but clueless volunteers serving as loaders and box-pushers.

Definitely agree with Chad that Elco connectors are fragile. We had one of those on the main snake in another recurring portable setup (high school ministry setting up a portable rig in the church gym), and the male Elco got banged around enough after a year that I had to do some pretty extensive repair on it. The pins on the Whirlwind hermaphroditic MASS connectors (W3 or W4) are fragile too. The most durable I've seen are the LK multipins.

For amplifiers, even though I'm generally a Crown guy, the QSC Powerlight series are fabulous for portable use since they're super lightweight. As much as I love the old iron Marcos, I unlove lifting a rack of several of them.

For console, I got a tour of the A&H iLive last year at Infocomm, and I liked it. Intuitive coming from an analog background, and a bonus for portable use is that the console surface connects to the stage box (where all the processing happens) over a single cable. I forget whether it was cat-5 or fiber or what, but it's a single small cable rather than a big multicore. Other e-snake systems that integrate with a given console would also be great, like Roland's snake-and-console setup or Whirlwind's Cobranet E-Snake and whatever consoles it works with.

Color-code lengths of cable. I use two different systems, one for audio, one for everything else, that I picked up from the two guys at The Hall (one was lighting, one was audio, and they each had their own color codes). Doesn't matter what the system is, as long as everything that matters is marked. Most I've seen are where a given color represents a given length (red = 50 feet), but the guys at Christie use resistor color code, where 96 feet = white blue.

Not much more I can think of that you don't already know from touring and theatre.