Are you looking for lighting software for your church that's budget friendly and easy
to use without compromising on power and reliability?
In this video, I'm gonna review Lightkey which is a Mac based lighting software.
I'll unpack all the reasons I love this software and why I think it might just be the best
lighting software for churches.
I'll also walk you through what you need to get this system set up at your church.
Coming up.
This video is brought to by Worship Leader School where you're gonna find all the essential
training, advice and support you need to plan and lead a worship.
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My name is Jake Gosselin, I'm the creator of Churchfront.com helping you lead gospel
centered and tech-savvy worship.
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Let's talk about lighting control for churches.
A few years ago, it was more common to use an actual hardware controller to control the
lights in your worship gathering.
I'm talking about stage lights as well as house lights so you can fade lights up or
down, or create fancy light shows.
Whatever suits your fancy at your church.
But today, the world of lighting control has evolved and rather than needing an actual
hardware controller, you can run software just on your computer.
At our church, we have a computer that runs Pro Presenter so why not put some lighting
software on there as well that can control all the lighting?
We're a portable church, and the less hardware for us, the better.
In my opinion, lighting software for churches needs to meet certain criteria.
Number one, it needs to be stable and reliable.
We can't have the software glitch in the middle of a worship service and then have all the
lighting scenes go haywire.
The next piece of criteria is that the lighting software needs to be budget friendly.
When I say "budget friendly" I mean less than a thousand dollars.
Ideally, less than 500 dollars.
I don't think software needs to be free because that means there's no development and support
actually going into it.
I'm not a big fan of open source software because often it's confusing, just takes forever
to figure out, and there's lots of weird glitched and bugs you have to deal with.
I'm willing to pay at least a couple hundred bucks if something is supported, and it's
reliable, and it's just gonna work.
Next, the lighting software needs to be user friendly and intuitive.
I don't know what it is about lighting software over the past years as I've been searching
for different pieces of software, they all seem really confusing when you look at the
software and the user interface it just seems like you're staring at the cockpit of a jumbo
jet or something like that.
It's just really, really frustrating and especially in our church context when we have volunteers
who aren't professionally trained.
We need it to just be super intuitive for them, and we don't want them to have to go
get a professional lighting degree to be able to run lights for our worship gathering.
Being user friendly is incredibly important.
Another important thing lighting software needs to be able to do is it needs to have
automation capability.
At our church, we're small, we don't have a huge tech team so we automate our lighting
changes.
This is really cool when you us Ableton Live to send cues so I can automate light changes
throughout our songs, and we can create seamless transitions in the way that our light changes
throughout the service.
Finally, this is a more personal preference piece of criteria for lighting software, and
that is it needs to be Mac based software.
I know, there's a lot of great PC based software out there, but I prefer for our context, we're
running all Macs.
It's just better to keep things all Macs all the time, and often time there's lighting
software out there that's developed for both Mac and PC and what I feel like happens is
when whenever companies try to develop for both platforms, one of them usually gets the
short end of the stick.
The other reason it's important for us to have an all Mac ecosystem is for all the mini
networking that we're doing Mac has a really powerful, stable midi network app that makes
it easy to connect any Macs to set up all this automation.
That's just another reason why it's so important for our software to be Mac based.
For those of you who are PC users, I'll link some other lighting software below that I
think could be great in a PC environment.
I just can't guarantee it's gonna give you great results.
For the past couple years the lighting software I had been using was myDMX 2.0 and then 3.0.
This is a Mac and PC based software, it's easy to use, it's budget friendly, it has
automation features, but recently over the past couple months, it has been glitching
on us like crazy.
The one main glitch that we continued to see time and time again is that when we're running
the software on our Mac, the CPU usage we were seeing in our activity monitor was just
skyrocketing.
I tried to do a ton of research to figure out how I could troubleshoot this problem.
I think it had something to do with the midi automation.
Anyways, I couldn't figure it out.
If I can't figure something out after a couple hours of research, then it's pretty hopeless.
During our rehearsals, in worship services, the computer running this software was starting
to lag like crazy, and it was really frustrating for the volunteers and for myself.
That's why I had to find a different solution.
So, I sat down at Google, I searched "lighting software for Mac," and the first result I
saw was the Light Key app.
As I browsed their website, I was super impressed with what I saw.
You can even download the software for free.
I'll put a link in the description of this video.
I was able to try it out and see what the user interface was like before even buying
a license, and I was just super impressed.
I also went to the worship ministry Facebook group's and I searched the Light Key app in
those groups to see what type of experience people were having.
Everything I read was positive.
People loved it.
So, I was sold very quickly on this app, and then I told our pastor about it, he approved
it, we purchased a license for the app, we purchased our USB to DMS dongle that's compatible
with the app to be able to plug it into our lighting system, and we were up and running.
So here's what you need to buy to get this system up and running.
First, you need the Light Key software.
I'm gonna link it in the description, and like I already said, you can download the
software for free, but you'll have a very limited version of the software, but you'll
be able to experience it enough to see whether or not you like this type of user interface.
When you're ready, you need to buy a license for the software.
They have different tier licenses and the way it works is it's an annual subscription.
So it starts at $69 for 256 channel of DMX.
That actually may work for a lot of churches with smaller lighting systems, but the more
standard favorite selection for a lot of people out there, this is one we bought, is the 512
DMX channels subscription.
So that's a $99 per year.
That may seem a little bit pricey, it's definitely not free, but in my opinion it's worth it
because you're investing into a software that's well supported, and it's actually going to
be continually updated and made better over time.
Once you purchase a license, you're gonna receive your license code.
You just enter it into the software and it's ready to go.
The cool part is that that license code can be deactivated from a computer if you need
to move it to another one.
The next thing you're gonna have to purchase for this setup is a USB to DMX adapter.
This makes it so that your computer can send the DMX signal to all of your lighting fixtures.
At our church, we purchased the DMX King Ultra DMX Micro.
It's a super compact little interface with USB on one side of the end and DMX on the
other.
Of course, for our MacBook Pro because it's a newer one, I had to get the USB C to USB
adapter.
The great part about this software is it's super efficient, doesn't suck up a bunch of
CPU power, or RAM, so you could run this lighting software on the same computer you maybe have
ProPresenter on.
That's exactly how we're gonna run it at or church.
I'm gonna include links to the software and all my recommended hardware down below in
the description of this video.
Setting up the software itself is really simple and intuitive.
The first step is to set up all your DMX patching.
This is where you tell Light Key what light fixtures map to which DMX addresses.
The software already has a ton of lighting fixture profiles built into it's library so
you can just search for whatever lighting fixtures you have in your church and then
drag those on to the patch bay.
When I set this patching up at my office since our church is a setup and tear down church,
I simply just copy the patching assignments that we had from my DMX 3.0, so it's really
easy to get up and running.
The next step is to edit the visualizer that's built into this software.
This is a great feature that allows you to see your light scenes, and make edits, and
design your lighting cues at home when you're not plugged into the lighting system at church.
It took me just a couple minutes to add in these trusses and this rectangle to symbolize
our wide screen that we project our lyrics and video on, but now when I'm in my office,
because we're setup and tear down church, I can design all of our lighting cues and
know exactly what it's gonna look like when Sunday comes.
The next step is to start building your presets, or lighting scenes.
You click the little plus icon on the top right of the software and I went through and
I created lighting scenes for our house lights, our stage spotlights, our different LED kind
of backlighting, color combos that we have, also we have some truss warmers, the lights
the shoot straight up through the trusses, made some scenes for those.
Then, I also made som scenes that include some movement.
I even added some of the crazy scenes that they have built into the software.
Then once you're done building out all of your presets, you're gonna create your control
panel.
This is the interface that you or your lighting volunteers, or your tech team are actually
gonna use to control the lights during the service.
What's really cool about this control panel is that it gives you the ability to create
buttons, and faders, and it's all virtual.
Then you can assign whatever presets you want to those buttons or faders.
It's a little bit hard to describe and it is something that you're just going to want
to play with yourself, but let me show you how I have the cue set up for our church.
So, on the far left we have the master fader.
That just brings all the lights up or down.
We don't really ever touch that one.
Then we have a collection of house lighting cues.
We have our house blackout cue, our house full cue, our house pre-service cue, worship
cue, and message cue.
Next to that, we have our collection of spotlight cues.
This is just our front-lighting onstage that control two ellipsoidal lights that light
both the band members and our pastor.
We don't have many scenes for this, really just our band settings, our speaker settings,
and a blackout.
The next bank of cues is a fun one.
This is where we control all of our LED lighting that we have.
So we have eight LED wash lights that are mounted on the top of the trusses, and then
we have four of them that are truss warmers shooting light up through the trusses.
So I went through and I created all these different buttons that you simply click on,
now cue up the appropriate LED lights.
The way I have all my LED light cues set up in this software is that only one of those
cues is gonna be enabled at a time.
This prevents any weird overlapping of colors and it just makes it really, really simple
for operation whether we are operating it manually from the computer or if I'm cueing
these scenes from Ableton Live.
On the far right we have two little faders that control the fan and the amount of haze
for our haze machine.
What's cool about the different groups of lighting cues that we've created in this control
panel is that they can be layered on top of one another.
That means our house lights and then our front lighting and our LED backlighting they can
all be controlled independently, so we don't have scenes that necessarily control all of
them at once.
Instead, we send separate cues to our LED lights, or separate cues to our front lighting
or separate cues to our house lighting.
This work flow worked really well for the way that we cue lights throughout our worship
gathering.
The final step in my setup process with this lighting software is automation.
They've made it incredibly easy to set up lighting automation if you're using software
like Ableton Live to cue your lights and lyrics, and other production elements in worship.
Setting this up is really easy.
First, all you have to do is make sure Light Key is receiving midi cues from the network
session that you're sending midi cues to from your Ableton Live computer.
Then, when that midi mapping is set up, you go to the different cues you've created in
the control panel, you right click on a cue, you go down to external control, and then
you just simply click the add trigger button.
The software will then start listening for midi trigger and as soon as you send over
that midi note, it's gonna map it.
There's so much more that Light Key can do that I don't have time to cover in this video,
but I hope this gives you a really full understanding and a great look at what it could do for your
worship ministry.
If you have any questions about this setup, let me know below in the comments, and also,
head on over to the website.
I'll put a link in the description of this video where you can download the software
for free and try it yourself, and then if you do pull the trigger on the license, you
can get the USB dongle from Amazon.
I'll link that below, as well.
I really think you're gonna enjoy this software for your worship ministry, and I will let
you know if anything changes with it.
So, make sure to subscribe to the channel, but so far my experience with this is awesome,
I highly recommend it.
This gets Jake's stamp of approval.
To learn more about implementing the latest technology for your worship ministry, check
out Worship Leader School where you're gonna find in-depth, step-by-step courses to walk
you through all of this stuff that I showed you here including this software as well as,
how to use Ableton Live in worship.
Visit worshipleaderschool.com, or click the link in the description to learn more.
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