Foothills Christian Church was founded in El Cajon, California, in 1987 with just a handful of members, a congregation of fewer than 100 people. Now, approaching its 20-year anniversary, the church is home to more than 3,000 people who attend one of three services each weekend.

With the growth of the congregation, church leaders were pressed to find a way to expand their facilities, located within a natural business park on the north side of the city. Fundraising began for a plan that would see the old church sanctuary converted into a youth building and an old office building renovated as a new sanctuary and classrooms.

The expansion of its campus and facilities will give the church 70 percent more square footage, and the expansion of the sanctuary will enable the seating of 1,800 people, so co-pastors David Hoffman and Mark Hoffman will be able to continue holding three services each week rather than adding a fourth.

The new sanctuary at Foothills is unique for a church of this size in that it features HD production and display equipment. The church worked with TV Magic, a San Diego-based video systems integrator and consulting firm, to design an installation that would provide the immediacy and quality of HD while remaining within the church's limited budget. TV Magic oversaw design and installation of Foothills' new presentation and production equipment.

"Our production team consists mainly of volunteer staff, and we don't have a big budget for video production," says Robert Chapman, multimedia director at Foothills Church. "When TV Magic first suggested that we produce in high definition, my first thought was it would be much too costly. Today, though, we've established an easy workflow that provides the high quality of HD without breaking our budget."

Chapman emphasizes that the goal in equipping the new sanctuary was not to create a show-like atmosphere, but to use lighting, sound and images to draw attention to the message or the person addressing the congregation.

All of the lighting installed within the Foothills sanctuary is from ETC. Four remote-controlled moving lights are reserved primarily for special events rather than the weekly services, though they do allow for quick scene changes when needed. Otherwise, an extensive amount of regular PAR can lighting illuminates the stage area. A fully equipped ETC Expression lighting console offers control over moving light functions, color changers and dimmers. The system features PC backup, running through software as well as the board, to enable an endless number of presets. The only limitation during production is that all lights but four are stationary, and this straightforward lighting style suits the style of Foothills church services.

The front-of-house production board at Foothills is a Soundcraft Series FIVE 56-channel mixing console, which the production team will use along with a separate Soundcraft Series FIVE Monitor mixing board that provides control over routing and output of stage sources. The Soundcraft audio board provides much greater control of the sound of the room, which is outfitted with flying speakers overhead, as well as speakers located at the stage and near the back of the room. All of these speakers are equipped with subwoofers, and additional subwoofers are embedded in the stage.

The on-stage band, part of every worship service at Foothills, will be using in-ear monitoring technology from Aviom, along with the Aviom Pro16 personal monitor mixer. An intercom system will link the stage, sound, video and lighting teams so that they no longer need call across the room to coordinate their work. This change also allows production to move from use of just one camera to multiple cameras.

When the time came to look at cameras, Foothills' team was looking at either DV camcorders or perhaps even analog robotic pan/tilt cameras. After considering the costs involved and the workflow and quality desired, TV Magic suggested that the church evaluate some of the HDV equipment new to the market. Together, Foothills and TV Magic determined that the HD cameras could fit in the budget and that the Canon XL-H1 camcorder was the best fit.

The Canon camcorder can shoot HDV as a field camera and outputs an HD-SDI signal straight out of the camera. With the added ability to genlock and output time code, the XL-H1 offered everything Foothills needed for the church production environment. Focus Enhancements' DTE (direct-to-edit) camera-mountable hard drives record the full HDV signal as a file, so the church can use a file-based workflow to take camera recordings directly to into the Apple Final Cut Pro nonlinear edit systems without the need for ingest from tape. If necessary, however, Foothills can record the whole service on tape for archive or backup purposes while still recording on the Focus Enhancements Firestore units.

Church members in the center of the sanctuary will view HD content on two screens, one inset on either side of the stage, that are fed by two Sanyo PLV-WF10 wide-screen HD projectors. Eight ceiling-mounted Samsung HP-R6372, 63-inch plasma displays are distributed throughout the back of the sanctuary, with two displays dedicated to each of the four rear seating areas. The use of cost-effective plasma screens allowed the church to double the number of displays within the sanctuary.

A Roland Edirol V-440HD production switcher will be used to process HD, SD and analog inputs and output them sending the signal in one high-resolution format to all the displays. Overall, the system delivers high-quality images to multiple displays while enabling HD recording for post-production and delivery of content to the Internet. The signal is also routed to multiple smaller LCD displays via an in-house RF system.

Pat Thompson is vice president of operations for TV Magic, www.tvmagic.tv.