Our present lighting is Microplex but we are wanting to add LED and intelligent fixtures so plan to change our controller to DMX. There are fixtures that are "equivalent" to 250 watt PARs but we have about a 30 foot throw and presently use 300 & 500 watt fixtures. This is in a medium sized church and would like to possibly use a wash with our existing fixtures and add LED and possibly moving fixtures to augment this. Will we be able to get a resonable intensity at this distance with these economical fixtures?
Thank you for any insight or experience you have in this area.
neighborhood tech

Well, that all depends on beam size and throw distance.

How bright something is over distance is can be determined by lumen's. How bright something is over a given area is foot candles or lux. Foot candles are lumen's/ft^2, so it is a more actuate method of how bright something will be over just lumen output which is based off of a single point instead of actually beam size. FC is considered old, but one FC equals 10.764 lux, though some just use a factor of 10 to simplify things.

Warning, math ahead . So for example, you have a light that puts out 100 lumen's at a given distance, the amount of FC it has over 1 square foot would be 100 or 1076.4 lux. That same light, same distance, but 2 square feet of area now only makes 25 fc or 269.1 lux. So you can see, as size goes up, intensity drops very quickly. Point is, don't just go off of lumen output, go by lux or fc.

Now there is all kinds of crazy math to figure out these things, best way to find out would be go to manufacturers' websites, and get the specs on the lights you have vs the lights you want. This way, you will know exactly how much you need to cover a given area with the intensity that you want. Let them do the math, most you might have to do is convert fc to lux or lux to fc.

Just be aware, get LED ratings that are full white only, since they get their strength from more LEDs on, the brighter the light. Most lamp lights, unless otherwise stated, do tests without gel, meaning pure white. It will be a better comparison between the two fixture types.

Hope this helps, anymore questions feel free to ask.