When Our Savior Lutheran Church (OSLC) in Tacoma, Washington, experienced an arson attack shortly after Thanksgiving of last year, the fire and smoke damage was extensive enough to have destroyed its entire AVL setup along with the building.
With the help of Todd Gathany and the rest of the team at CCI Solutions, Our Savior Lutheran Church was able to restore its sanctuary to an even more immersive experience than it had before.
With four new Hitachi projectors in place, along with audio, stage and house lighting and display systems, the Our Savior Lutheran congregation is experiencing services like never before.
After the arson attack last year, OSLC had to move its weekly services to a local high school, because the fire and smoke damage to the sanctuary was too severe for guests.
Then, Matt Kees, Our Savior Lutheran Church’s minister of media and technology, and Todd Gathany from CCI Solutions began conversations of how to restore the church.
Before the fire, the two had been talking about ways to upgrade the church AV system to offer an immersive experience with environmental projection, but hadn’t taken any steps to begin the project.
“Our objective was to create an immersive experience for the congregation,” says Gathany. “This includes audio, lighting, and video. With the new house lights, we’re able to step up the lighting to influence the entire sanctuary and use the front walls as a platform for the four video projectors. There are no screens — we’re painting the walls with video.”
Our Savior Lutheran uses four Hitachi CP-X9111 projectors to help create this experience for its congregation.
As part of the 9000 series, the CP-X9111 projector features 10,000 ANSI lumen brightness, HDBaseT and two HDMI inputs, along with dual lamps and edge blending function. For the church, brightness was the largest consideration for making the purchase.
“When selecting a projector, we decided that brightness was going to be the most important feature,” says Gathany. “There are no screens in the room, so we are using the new lighting, edge blending and Dataton’s Watchout processor to blend the projectors together and project across the entire front wall.”
CCI Solutions is a long-time user of Hitachi, and after its project with Our Savior Lutheran Church, it will continue to work with them on future projects.
“Hitachi has been a good partner for us. We have a lot of confidence in them,” says Gathany. “It was a really easy decision for us to use their projectors at Our Savior Lutheran. The features lined up with exactly what we were looking for, and it’s easy for the team at OSLC to work with the projectors. I’m in contact with them quite a bit, and they are extremely happy with the entire installation. The congregation is really enjoying the creative environment that we’ve created.”
For more information on CCI Solutions, visit www.ccisolutions.com.
For more information on Hitachi America, visit www.hitachi-america.us.
