RYGID Reinvents House of Worship Lighting Integration at Pearl Baptist Church With Visual Productions' CueCore3
Pearl Baptist Church in Iron Station, North Carolina, was recently looking to update its lighting and control systems with tools that would refine the atmosphere and support the flow of each service. That transformation began with RYGID, a North Carolina-based audio, video and lighting integration firm. Founded by
ACT Entertainment's President Ryan Gilbert a decade ago, RYGID was born from a desire to bridge technical expertise with real-world applications and is redefining what it means to serve houses of worship and other AV applications.
When Pearl Baptist Church approached the company about modernizing their house lighting and control infrastructure, Gilbert and Carter knew exactly what solution the church needed. The team deployed Visual Productions' CueCore3, a compact, yet robust control platform that is simple enough for volunteers, perfectly flexible for services and with sufficient robustness to anchor the entire building's lighting logic.
Though modest in size, the project was ambitious in vision — integrating architectural lighting, house lighting and emergency systems into a single, intuitive interface. "The entire building runs off Q-SYS," says Carter, referencing the popular AV control platform. "CueCore allowed us to tie everything together in one spot; it became the linchpin."
For Gilbert, this is a solution that the AV integration industry has long needed. "We'd been searching for a product like this for years," he explains. "We hadn't really found a reliable solution until now. We were either writing custom scripts or hacking together alternate ways. This product changed everything we were doing."
RYGID's work at Pearl wasn't just about technology, it was about making that technology invisible. Additionally, for volunteers and staff unfamiliar with AV systems, the setup needed to be simple. "We created an 'easy mode' on an iPad that allows them to control the entire system — audio, lighting, everything — with just a few taps," says Gilbert. "No matter if they're holding a wedding or hosting a funeral, or any other community event, they don't have to have a professional technician available to help." Carter adds: "They figured it out immediately."
"This is the architectural lighting control we didn't know we needed," adds Gilbert. "It controls standard fluorescent lights as well as LED fixtures and integrates cleanly with Q-SYS. We don't even need a separate console. The flexibility to handle multi-universe DMX, Art-Net and sACN protocols, all within that Q-SYS-native framework, makes the product kind of a Swiss Army Knife for modern AV integration. Honestly, this product (and Visual Productions) finally gave us a real solution. It's clean, it's powerful and it makes sense for how people actually use these systems."
Gilbert and Carter credit ACT Entertainment, Visual Productions' North American distributor, not just for delivering the right products, but for supporting RYGID in helping bring those products to life. "The confidence we have in the product, the brand and ACT is through the roof," says Gilbert.
"We work a lot in the smaller church market," says Carter. "They don't have massive budgets, so they need systems that are intuitive, reliable and don't require full-time AV techs to run them. That's what we bring, and that's what ACT and Visual Productions have delivered."
Visual Productions product in use:
CueCore3
Client: Pearl Baptist Church
Contractor: RYGID
Location: Iron Station, North Carolina
Year: 2025
