How often should we upgrade? When are we just throwing good money after bad? How much should we budget for upgrading our equipment?

In addition to setting initial budgets for starting a media ministry and knowing when to lease or purchase technology, ( See "How large a media budget do you need" and "Leasing vs. owning" ) you’ll need to know about equipment life cycles and the associated costs.

Video Life Cycles
As I mentioned in my last article, you’ll find that some technologies will change more rapidly than others. Signal processing and support equipment such as VTRs (Video Tape Recorder), switchers, routers, monitors and even tripods won’t change very often. But rapidly developing technologies, such as video cameras, Non Linear Editors (NLEs) and projectors will have more frequent technology leaps.

Some of your gear, such as racks (for mounting equipment), communications equipment, projection screens and CCU (Camera Control Unit) cables will last for 10-20 years. It’s also safe to say that most of the signal processing and support equipment has life cycles of seven to 10 years. But the rapidly developing technologies have a more limited useful life span ranging from three to five years.

One way to extend the life of hardware is to look for equipment that can be upgraded. For example, it may cost more money up front to buy a camera that has the option of a CCU, studio kits and aspect ratio conversion than it is to purchase a less expensive camcorder, which has no upgradeability. These types of strategic decisions will be important to point out to your church business administrator, who understands the amortization of equipment prices.

New technologies in video are happening faster than they are in audio (audio’s been around longer), meaning that some of the most expensive equipment will be video related. For example, while your church may think that HDTV will never affect them, I submit that designing any new facility without using 16:9 for projection and video is a short-sighted idea. This is where your video consultant can help your church understand how 16:9 - regardless of HDTV - makes a lot more sense for strategic, long-term planning.

Audio Life Cycles
"A solid audio system design and acoustical room design with proper planning will provide the church with a life cycle of seven to 10 years for most of their audio equipment," notes audio expert Armando Fullwood, "while a bad design will be replaced in three years!"

Even when gear isn’t to blame for audio issues, churches often spend money to replace perfectly good hardware when the room acoustics are the true culprit. "Part of the perception of gear life cycle has to do with the quality of the acoustical room design," Fullwood explains.

He goes on to note that there are definite trends when it comes to the top upgrades for audio in churches.

The first are audio mixing consoles. Simply put, as the church grows it will often physically need more inputs. He says that coinciding with this trend is the explosive growth of digital audio consoles. Many churches are moving from analog to digital consoles for a more "volunteer-proof" system of using preset scene snapshots that can be saved and tweaked easily in the console.

He also notes that personal monitor mixes have become one of the key upgrades. Most churches will upgrade their main Front of House (FOH) console before any other purchases. Fullwood advocates having identical FOH and Monitor mix consoles for churches implementing a true production model.

Other upgrades have included wireless mic systems, as the pricing of good wireless systems has come down dramatically. In addition, headworn mics have been a recent trend with pastors and musicians.

Each of these areas may not be true equipment upgrade needs as much as they are perceived needs. That is, a church’s current microphones and FOH mixing console may be perfectly adequate, but because the format of the service evolves and more production needs arise, the desire to use more flexible technology has created upgrade opportunities that may actually precede the actual need to upgrade.

"Audio gear, on the whole," explains Fullwood, "has a seven- to10-year life cycle. But when the way churches approach their services and events change, the technology might also need to be upgraded before it is actually obsolete."

Lighting Life Cycles
Greg Persinger, a renowned lighting designer in Nashville, Tenn., weighed in on the life cycle issues associated with lighting. He points out that the type of technology will make a difference in the expected life cycles.

Conventional fixtures will last the lifetime of your building - easily 20 years. These are standard incandescent fixtures, with no electronics: par-can, ellipsoidal, fresnel and ETC’s venerable Source Four. With these, it’s only necessary to replace lamps when they burn out. A safe bet is to budget for two lamp changes per year, per fixture, but your mileage may vary.

Automated fixtures, also called "intelligent lights" are moving lights. These fixtures have a shorter life span of approximately five to seven years.

When setting maintenance budgets for these expensive fixtures, Persinger offers this practical rule of thumb: estimate the number of hours per week that you’re going to use the fixture and calculate how many weeks you can use it within the rated lamp life. Take this number (cost of lamps times the quantity needed per year) add the cost of a technician to change/maintain fixtures and double that total for the annual budget per fixture.

"Eventually, you’ll burn up a logic card, and at $1,500 or so, you’ll be able to dip into an automated fixture maintenance fund that has doubled every year," explains Persinger. "It’s much easier to come up with $1,500 when you’ve had a dedicated maintenance budget that has saved money for just such an eventuality."

Unlike conventional fixture lamps, Persinger says to never extend automated fixture lamps beyond their rated lamp life because, as he puts it, "the lamps will explode. This will cause more damage to the fixture, significantly increasing the maintenance cost per fixture."

With dimming systems, you get what you pay for. But a good quality system will last 20 years, with good preventative maintenance. Infrastructure is all important.

Two things to remember when you build or remodel: hang positions and electrical work for the dimming system are much less expensive to implement during construction, while adding fixtures is easy to do at any time. The installation costs for electrical infrastructure are approximately three times more expensive after the building is built or retrofitted.

Setting the dimmer’s maximum output to a lower voltage (by a slight amount) can help you extend lamp life - but there’s a color temperature shift to a warmer color as a result. Persinger also says many manufacturers make short life and long life versions of many lamps. The short life lamps (300 hours) have higher color temperatures, better suited for video, whereas the longer life versions (up to 2,000 hours) have a lower color temperature.

Lighting consoles - Persinger points out that most churches won’t need to upgrade if they pick a good console that accomplishes their goals. He summarizes it this way: "When your console quits doing what you want it to do, it’s time to upgrade."

Persinger believes that it’s good practice for many churches to keep conventional lighting consoles even if they add automated fixture consoles for easier volunteer training.

"If your worship service is highly produced with a strict script, then a single console could work," reasons Persinger, "but most churches have changing needs that take a significant amount of programming time for automated fixtures, tying up access to the conventional fixtures."

Long Term Thinking&Preventative Maintenance
"Try to plan with the end in mind," Fullwood reminds us. Think about what you need to do, what you want to do and when you want to do it in regards to technology.

There’s no escaping this fact: Media is expensive and the costs never end.

Here’s a short list of helpful preventative maintenance ideas:

In the next article, I’ll wrap up this series on budgeting with "Planning for Growth and Adding Staff." I look forward to your e-mails about how you’ve learned from this series or ideas that you think I should include in future articles.

Anthony Coppedge provides consulting to churches for developing and growing a media ministry, building teams, casting vision and even choosing the right equipment. He lives in Bedford, Texas with his wife and two daughters and can be reached at anthony@anthonycoppedge.com or on the Web: www.anthonycoppedge.com

Copyright 2004. Reprinted with permission from the September 2004 issue of the Church Media Hotlist newsletter.