CASE STUDY: Duke Chapel

Q: What do you do when the experts tell you a half-million-dollar renovation is required to give your lighting system the boost it needs to keep up with your video ministry mission, but your CFO says you need to value engineer about 95% of that away?
A: Call Enttec.

Introduction:

I received a call from Theater Operations Director Doug Martelon in late 2009 about some renovations that were being planned for Duke University's historic landmark chapel. He asked if we could help solve some very specific problems in DMX distribution for them. It turned out to be an interesting technological challenge, one that I was proud as a Duke alumnus to help solve.

When the project was explained in slightly greater detail, it turned out that Enttec was able to make other contributions to the finished bill of materials. (For further details about what was used, see the drawings at the bottom of the page.) After the job was completed, it emerged that we had helped Doug bring the job in about 95% under the budget that the university's outside consultants had established would be needed to do this project.

To be fair, the upgrade that was approved isn't the same thing as the original proposal which was described as being comprehensive but impractical for 2009 adoption. The grander facelift had substantially more lighting instruments, many more dimmers, a custom Crestron user interface and much more. This approach would clearly have been a great improvement to their lighting but it wasn't something that fit into the short term budget. Doug had been asked by former Theater Studies Chair and now VP of the University Richard Riddell (whose lighting design for Big River won a Tony in 1985) to think more practically and find a way to get most of the job done with a smaller commitment of time and money. So they stripped away some of the bells and whistles asked for in the big plan, and managed to give the Chapel a series of measurable improvements. The results might not have been as optimal, but they worked and they fit within the realm of the possible.

Project Details:

GOALS:

• Video coverage of services, events and concerts would improve because of better lighting. This would include a bump in overall illumination levels through the use of more efficient lighting instruments, better modeling because of the use of new backlighting positions, and better control of the mixture between them.
• Before, they had 4 relays, which turned off or on the stage lights aimed at the pulpit and choir areas. It was all or nothing. By adding the ability to dim them, they could get the room more evenly lit, so their video cameras would benefit.
• Those on the pulpit or adjacent areas could become the center of attention in the room without having to be blinded by too much light in their eyes.
• A two-tiered approach to lighting control: For special occasions allow very fine control of the lighting, but for weekly events that were fairly predictable, one switch could be thrown and an appropriate lighting scene would come up.

When Doug Martelon's scaled-down proposal was adopted, it was already nearly Thanksgiving. In order to avoid a costly rental lighting package, the deadline was to have it finished in time for Christmas. This meant that installation logistics and labor were an additional dimension to the challenges this project represented. With this goal in mind they found a way to save time and money on the project: use standard Cat-5 network cabling to carry the lighting control data over Ethernet to the distributed dimming packs. Enttec's ODE became the method of translation between the two protocols.

The objective was to get DMX control to 4 different locations where lights could be mounted and controlled. Two were placed in a triforium, a part of the architecture at the top of the inner walls that looms high over the main section of pews. The other two, intended for backlighting purposes, were in the chancel. This is also high up, but behind the pulpit. In these four locations a dimmer pack would be located that could be controlled from the front of house video and sound mixing station. The trick was how to get signal to it.

Cat5 instead of traditional DMX cabling allowed them to use some existing conduits instead of pulling all new DMX cables into some of the hardest to reach places in the building. A 3'-0" thick concrete wall would have had to be drilled through, to run some of the wiring in the early proposal, and this wasn't going to be cheap or easy. On top of that, there are hollow chambers in the building whose function is to house part of one of the three different organs used for the services. Each is an example of the height of craftmanship for the era in which it was designed, and nobody wanted to see holes drilled into those walls to pass cable through them, at the risk of changing the acoustic properties of a resonance chamber.

Here they turned to KonTek Systems, a local firm specializing in custom A/V installations of a very high caliber, both small and large, to do the control system wiring. This was a serendipitous decision, as KonTek already had a group of technicians in the chapel at that month performing a video system upgrade. It was relatively simple to have them widen their project scope and tackle Ethernet runs for lighting too. Their team included Erik Benson*, another Duke alum who has worked in theatrical lighting as an electrician and in shops throughout the Northeast. Erik took Doug's vision of an Ethernet backbone for lighting control in the Duke Chapel and made it happen.

After three solid days of pulling wire, the network was completely in place. One of the team's strategies was to take advantage of existing conduit that was in place to get from the console to a control room in the basement. They also found a way to exploit existing pathways to get up into the nave. From there they could hide the Cat5 wire against stonework as they proceeded up the wall to get to the chancel positions. Conduit for audio wiring existed to help them get to the triforium, where lights were also hung. It turned out the interior of this conduit was full but it gave them a useful pathway to get the Ethernet wiring up to this set of front-lighting positions.

According to Benson, whose duties also included part of the video upgrade, "Now I can set up a grayscale chipcard and calibrate the cameras whereas before there wasn't enough light. And we did it without any major architectural complications. We used existing lighting positions that were already there. We just added a few more instruments." He later added, "it helped that they were more efficient instruments, and the ability to dim them is a major improvement too."

The primary vendor for all the new equipment was Barbizon Lighting of Charlotte. They provided ETC Source 4 Ellipsoidal fixtures (some fixed barrels and some zoom), an ETC SmartFade console, 4 Leviton dimmer packs, and all the Enttec items used on the job. This included 6 ODEs in total and some other items whose function will be described below.

Flexible Lighting In Layman's Terms

Wiring up the control network with ODEs so that the ETC console could talk to the Leviton dimmers was a great improvement over traditional DMX distribution, but it was only one part of the solution Doug proposed. Another aspect of the project which he solved was to let users without significant training or technical know-how select lighting states for day to day events. To do this on a very small budget was an even greater accomplishment. Traditional wisdom (and the comprehensive but out of reach proposal the university had obtained earlier in 2009) dictated an expensive custom programmed solution that relied on both more wires being run and lengthy install times.

After a round of brainstorming with Enttec, Doug decided to utilize a show control system made up of primarily Din-Rail mounted modules and a bank of simple toggle switches to select different scenes. This would allow staff walking in from the back of the chapel a way to turn on the lights in a way that looked good for a Sunday service, a choir rehearsal, etc. The person who might do this wouldn't be technical staff, necessarily; it might be a volunteer, a custodian, the choir director, even a preacher. The goal was to prepare the way for anyone didn't know how to turn on and operate a light board. And thus a term was coined. Somebody started to refer to this solution as the "Layman Box" and apparently the name stuck.

The box in question is a single enclosure in an access closet at the rear of the chapel, and it houses 5 Enttec devices plus their associated power supplies. Most of them are Din-Rail mounted so placing them in the box was easy, but a bit of creativity was employed to get the ODE and the DMX Playback in there, since they weren't designed with this purpose in mind the way that Din-Tec modules are. Martelon and his team from Duke Technical Services wired up the Layman Box, and placed the different devices in it. Then they installed on the front of it five toggle switches. These switches are the only thing non-technical people need to touch, to get a scene to come up on the lighting system.

Egan O'Rourke, a multimedia engineer who works in the Chapel with their Video Ministry program, helps fill in the gap between Martelon and the Chapel's everyday users. He commented that it did take a few times for him to go back after Doug was finished and tweak what the scenes stored in the Enttec DMX Playback Mk2 contained. "Now though, we have a really solid command of what the lighting for a typical Sunday service will look like, and it makes capturing that service on camera a lot easier."

Diagrams

* Erik's time at Duke was a little later than mine but our paths crossed in New York City and in Boston through the 90's. It was coincidence that we both wound up back in Durham and didn't even know it until we bumped into each other on the install at the Chapel. This isn't relevant to the main story but it adds a nice dimension to the human interest side of it that I wanted to tell.