MARINERS CHURCH
Irvine Campus
Irvine, CA
Clark Navigates Mariners Church Through An Extensive AV Upgrade
Getting a sound system and video screens to integrate perfectly was one challenge
When archaeologists discovered the hulk of a 15th-century trading ship in the mud beneath the waters of the River Usk in Great Britain’s Wales territory in 2002, local seafarers joined academics almost immediately to set about restoring it. Mariners simply cannot let a good ship go.
That same sentiment was on display at Mariners Church, a non-denominational Christian church in Orange County, California — putatively the second-largest church building in the state and one of the 20 largest in the U.S. Mariners Church averages nearly 17,000 worshippers per week attending one of its four campuses, including its 81,000-square-foot, 3,800-seat main worship center in Irvine.
“Mariners is a great church, and they’d built a wonderful congregation,” recalls Jeff Stewart, who had moved to the area from Chicago in 2014, after a stint as the Technical Director for Willow Creek Church, to perform a similar service for Mariners Church. “But the audio and video systems in the church were dated and fading. Almost none of the PA system’s speakers were working properly.”
A period of leadership turnover at the church had caused systems maintenance to become a lesser consideration for a time. But like those who discovered the ancient cargo ship in Wales, Stewart and others at the church saw what needed to be done. The church called for design ideas and bids from three leading systems integrators. In the end, it was Clark’s Los Angeles office that won their confidence.
Bundling Systems Saves
Interestingly, by the time work was scheduled to begin, in 2016, Stewart was himself working at Clark, as a Senior Consulting Engineer, and would return to Mariners to help move its AV systems into the 21st century. He recalls what made Clark’s presentation so compelling at the time.
“The difference between Clark and the other vendors was that they just gave us stuff we never asked for — Clark offered us what we wanted and actually needed,” he explains. “They listened to us. They also developed strategies that would not only get the best technology but do so at the best costs.”
For example, Stewart points out that when he suggested that the church acquire a Ross video switcher, a Grass Valley router, and Hitachi HD cameras, Clark’s sales team showed them how buying all of those components as a bundle from a single brand would result in significant costs savings, as well as assure ease of system interoperability while still being state of the art.
“They listened to what we wanted, saw what we needed, and gave us an option that was better than we had imagined,” he says.
Audio and Video In Perfect Alignment
The Mariners Church AVL systems renovation brings the house of worship solidly to the leading edge of technology. A d&b audiotechnik V Series sound system covers the main auditorium’s 3,800 seats with ease and with total intelligibility, yet packs a punch for the church’s contemporary worship style.
Three new suspended video walls are the visually stunning Vanguard Rhodium 3.9-mm-pitch LED displays, each 13-feet high X 23.1 feet long. Finally, a lighting package featuring Martin moving-head fixtures, Martin Quantum profiles, and Chauvet R2 washes provides the immersive ambience that creates a complete worship environment.
However, getting both world-class PA and LED video systems into the space above the stage was a major challenge, due to the lower-then-usual ceiling height in that part of the building. “In most venues of this size, the bottom of the [rigging] steel is around 30 feet, but here it was closer to 24 feet above the stage,” explains Bob Nahrstadt, Clark’s Senior Consultant, who supervised the design and installation/integration of the AV systems at Mariners Church. Compounding that, the line-array hangs were up tight against the HVAC ducting in that same area, and the raked seating in the rear of the auditorium meant that some of the furthest rows could be almost level with the lower parts of the line arrays and might have line-of-sight issues with the video screens.
The solution was to thoroughly measure and analyze the stage area, PA hangs and LED screens inside an array of software modeling systems. These included Revit, AutoCAD, VectorWorks and EASE. “We double- and triple-checked the sight lines and sound coverage through a number of different software solutions, to make sure that every seat had complete audio coverage and that there were no encroachments in the sight lines for the video,” says Nahrstadt.
“Issues like these can be corrected — it’s something we do every day at Clark when we’re presented with unique situations,” says Stewart. “We have the tools, such as d&b’s ArrayCalc software to re-tune the PA system. That helped us determine the best locations for the main hangs and for additional fill speakers we needed to compensate and keep the LED screen sight lines clear. The ultimate goal was for everyone to have the best video and audio experience possible.”
And they do. For instance, when then-Senior Pastor Kenton Beshore first heard the new PA system, he donned a wireless headset and roamed the stage then the first few rows of seating, Stewart recalls him repeating over and over, into the headset’s boom microphone, “I’m impressed! I’m impressed!” “He kept repeating that phrase,” says Stewart. “He said he’d never believed the room could sound so good. No echoes, no slapback. Just great, highly intelligible sound.”
The auditorium’s broadcast and online experience is just as wonderful. Four new Grass Valley Focus 75 HD cameras are run through a Grass Valley K Series 32 X 16 video switcher and an Nvision 8144 hybrid-ready video router, future-proofed with an IP Gateway card. Audio is embedded with video via a Cobalt Digital Quad MADI Embed/De-embed, 3 Analog De-Embed. A Grass Valley SPG800A with NTP and GPS provides video sync pulse and a master clock. The church’s staffers working both its live and broadcast services are connected using a Clear-Com SB-704 intercom system.
On Time
Another major challenge for this project was its timeline — its five-week window had to allow Sunday services to take place uninterrupted. “That’s where having great people makes all the difference,” says Nahrstadt. For example, for renovating the video control room and transitioning it from SD to HD, the first two weeks were used for removing the legacy systems in the room and prepping the cabling, which would reach from that control room into all three main buildings on campus. The Clark team also set up a complete temporary control room adjacent to the existing one, allowing the in-church and broadcast video of services to seamlessly continue without interruption. The next week saw the transition to the new cameras, followed by the installation of the new core systems in the renovated control room. Week 5 brought all of these complex integration stages together, as the renovated control room was commissioned in time for the Sunday services of the next week. “And on the sixth Sunday, we rested,” Nahrstadt notes happily.
Adds Jeff Stewart, “They never missed a Sunday service during the installation period, and now the Mariners Church sounds and looks fantastic. We were pleased we were able to bring them this level of technology to them and at a high level of value.”
