Need help with church-stage lighting
 

I run cameras for my church, and it's VERY dark in there. The ceiling is about 30' up, and we've got an existing light rig with 16 cans.

Main problems I have:

The stage doesn't have much for light to hit. When the choir leaves, it's barren. Our cams are way in the back, so with full zoom, the preacher is in focus but the bg is BLACK. Yuck.

The stage was built forward an extra eight feet, so the lights are shooting OVER everybody.

The lights are some kind of DMX-500 thing. We have a control board with sliders, but they don't dim, just go on and off. The guy who donated the system to us can't be reached.

We need more light, but can'afford the$22k everybody is quoting us. We'd be happy to ditch the 'dj lights' and go with something brighter and easier to use...

What can we use to maximize our existing cans? they're black with lights sunk way in...we can't find any extenders to push them forward, either.

Chances are, you can upgrade the cans you already up there to something with more wattage. Par cans come in all sorts of sizes, the biggest being 1000 watt PAR64s. If you're describing it as a "DJ" setup, a lot of DJ setups have much smaller PAR cans (par56 or smaller), with wattages of 500 or less. You can get 1K par64s for about $120/pc.

The good news is that since your "dimmer packs" are in fact relay boxes, you probably won't have to upgrade those to support the additional current draw.

The other thing I'd do is work on what's in front of the camera...a backdrop of some sort sounds like it'd be helpful.