Illuminating Hope

The Hope in Taipei has rapidly established itself as one of Taiwan’s most influential churches, with a congregation that extends well beyond the island through a significant online following. As demand for high-quality broadcasts has grown, the church has continued investing in production technology to match its international reach.

Having partnered with The Hope for several years, Illuminate has played a key role in that journey. The company initially helped improve the church’s livestream production before completing a major broadcast infrastructure upgrade late last year. That project included a new SDI and fibre backbone designed to support increasingly sophisticated productions, alongside new cameras and lighting. As part of this ongoing partnership, Illuminate also helped build The Hope’s Taichung campus in 2024.

“Our relationship with The Hope is built on trust amassed over the years,” explains Illuminate’s director, Timothy Huang. “We’ve helped them improve the quality of their livestreams by upgrading their audio, video and lighting equipment so they can create high-quality productions. This is where our strength lies – integrating all three disciplines together rather than just focusing on one element.”

The 2026 edition of the conference marked another milestone in the partnership. Having provided lighting and production design in 2025, Illuminate’s remit was extended in 2026 to include supplying the complete technical production package, deploying lighting, audio, networking, broadcast and communications systems from its growing Taiwan inventory.

Huang describes the project as an important step for the company following the establishment of a Taipei office: “It was a privilege to provide the full technical production for this year’s conference and a testimony of the strength of our relationship that they selected a Singaporean company for this role. We had a team of six people travel over from Singapore plus local staff from our office in Taipei and some hired help.”

Taking place over three-and-a-half days, the conference included workshops and keynote sessions featuring international speakers from Australia, Canada and beyond, while thousands more participated remotely through paid online access.

“With the entire conference streamed online, broadcast quality was a big part of the project,” says Huang. “The Hope has a very large online following with people streaming from Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, the US and further afield as they can’t be there in-person.”

To support simultaneous live production and streaming, Illuminate deployed three Yamaha DM7 digital mixing consoles covering front of house, monitor and broadcast duties, along with six Rio3224-D3 I/O racks. Lighting control was handled via a grandMA3 Compact XT console and four onPC 4Port Node 4k PoE driving LumiPro and EK fixtures. The integrator specified a Luminex network comprising one Gigacore 30i and two Gigacore 10i switches to tie up front of house, back of house and the core production room over the same fibre ring, along with a Riedel setup consisting of 10 beltpacks and two antennas across the entire space, in addition to traditional 2-wire partyline systems for fixed positions.

“We chose Riedel’s MediorNet as the backbone because each run between the hall and the control room was about 200m, so it only made sense to use fibre,” continues Huang. “When we calculated the difference in cost between normal fibre transport and a MediorNet system, it made more sense for us to choose MediorNet, plus we have recently become a Riedel partner in Singapore.” Riedel’s Bolero also served as the main intercom system for the event.

Illuminate’s systems solutions engineer, Matthew Han, was able to set up the MediorNet system in as little as an hour and continued making adjustments throughout the event to ensure that everyone’s multiview and audio metering were correct. “It was incredibly easy to run and very user-friendly for anyone who knows the system,” explains Han.

For the production side of the event, Illuminate selected a Shure inventory consisting of wireless mics, IEMs and Wireless Workbench software, comprising PSM 1000 in-ear personal monitoring systems and ULX-D digital microphone systems. “Because the RF spectrum in Taiwan is so congested, having a reliable system like Shure’s ULX-D made a real difference – lower-tier RF systems tend to struggle with interference and dropouts in that kind of environment, and that’s exactly where ULX-D held up,” continues Huang

The main PA system consisted of an eight-per-side L-Acoustics Kudo line array, eight SB218 subwoofers, along with four 12XT and four stacks of two dV-DOSC speakers for front fill.

The venue itself presented another significant challenge. Unlike a purpose-built performance space, the conference took place inside a university sports hall with difficult acoustics and limited rigging positions. Illuminate addressed these issues through detailed pre-production planning using Vectorworks. The complete production was modelled in 3D before arriving onsite, allowing loudspeaker positions, lighting trusses and LED screens to be coordinated well in advance. The lighting team then imported the Vectorworks model directly into the grandMA3 console, allowing the whole lighting setup to be patched on the spot.

“This saved us so much time,” adds Huang. “We were able to pre-patch and reduce our on-the-ground time significantly. We built all our show files early – everything was pre-loaded, so we could just hang the fixtures and go.”

That preparation proved essential given the compressed schedule. Illuminate’s Singapore team arrived onsite Monday, with rehearsals beginning on Wednesday and the conference opening shortly after. The Taiwan office had already spent several days preparing lighting equipment, colour-coding cables and pre-configuring systems before the Singapore crew arrived.

Huang uses a similar approach at his home church in Singapore: “I’ve custom-built everything and now the setup time is less than 25 minutes,” he explains. “Red to red, green to green – if you haven’t had your coffee yet you just follow the colouring and off you go! It significantly reduces the risk of errors. We try and build our show workflows in the same way so we can minimise time onsite.”

Creative design also evolved compared with the inaugural conference. This year’s stage featured an Absen Lura V2 transparent mesh LED screen with lighting fixtures positioned behind it, allowing beams and video content to interact for greater visual depth. Illuminate also supplied eight Sony FX3 cameras and a Blackmagic Design ATEM 4 M/E Constellation switcher.

Despite the increase in workload, Huang believes that this allowed Illuminate to have more control over the event. “Last year, we simply approved the location of the PA system but this year we took our time to actually design the sound system and make sure that everything was correctly placed.”

As The Hope continues expanding both its physical congregation and international online audience, the partnership with Illuminate appears set to grow, with Taiwan increasingly becoming a strategic base for the company’s wider ambitions across Asia. Huang reports that the success of previous projects at The Hope has generated interest from other Taiwanese churches, many of which have looked to the conference as a benchmark for modern worship production. As a result, Illuminate hopes to secure additional systems integration and production work across the country.