You didn't mention F Amps David. I understand you can insert them every 20 ft and hopefully be good to go. Assuming your controller has enough ports for everything you want. Granted I have not tried F Amps yet but intend to. I plan on a rather limited animated display without music using an 18 x 96 matrix and a few pixel poles and snowflakes. Maximum distance from my 16V4 controller around 60 ft. Yes I will use power injection.
I'm not a fan of it. It's basically trying to hack the protocol to do something it's not meant to do, I'd rather keep data runs short using smart receivers or smaller controllers
The exact time of year for a video on this! Nb.: I'm about to do front wash with led bars from 2005 and I hope they are good enough set to white not to look strange on video? Otherwise I'm going with 4 Chinese $50 RGB parcans. Any experience with those regarding CRI ??
I am doing my first light show this year as well. I went with the Kulp Lights 16A-B controller. Lots of people recommended it over the Falcon for learning.
Where are you finding the controllers? 'Out of Stock' is all I have found for Falcon and Kulp. I want to do a few christmas trees and arches for 2022. I'm not going to build the trees or arches without having the controller(s) in hand.
That seems kind of normal just after Christmas as every vendor has pushed everything they can out of the door for this season. I would think by mid Jan they will have fresh stock. Of course in the current environment, who knows. Agree with your thinking though..... get the controller first. Thats how I built up my show and its quite rewarding if, after spending several hours pushing in pixels to props, once your hands have stopped bleeding, you can fire up the controller and see the fruits of your labors!
Yep, as noted below by @ForestRiver , a out-of-stock from December thru Jan or Feb is normal. This year, with all the issues we're having with shipping and manufacturing/chip shortage, it might be a little longer, but we should be able to get something in the summer (my guess), if not sooner.
So one thing I do not enjoy is the "art" side of the pixel shows, are often over looked. And I wish I knew how to articulate the concern, but music isn't cool if you have a trumpet guitar and flute all playing the exact same notes at the exact same time. An orchestra uses various instruments to preform different pieces of a song. Unfortunately I seem to find too many pixel shows forget this and as a result, I find the best / most exciting light shows actually tend to be LOR shows since one must use the music as a medium to make the lights interesting. While with pixels, people tend to over rely on some fancy behavior the pixels can do, that doesn't utilize or even align with the music. Frankly if people treated pixels more like comventional ac lights and then just used their color changing and individual control to mimic having 4 layers of ac lights (w+rgb) you would really get a lot more movement in your light shows, since just changing colors means moving lights too. And it would allow you to do sneaky things like "hide" lights till a particular part of the show or song. I have a lot more thoughts on this but its impractical to type them all here. I really do enjoy your content and how approachable you're helping make this all, but part of me thinks people are losing the artistry of a show. Partly due to how pixels really benefit so much from a "prop" to hold them in place, they don't do things like, hang in trees well (I know length between power and signal concerns too). And just being limited to needing to be so close to a controller/reciever too. Those are some of my concerns. But yeah this has made things much more approachable, xlights guides have been important and knowing the "tricks" of using pixels too helps take away the " how the crap did they write/ test the code for this".
Hallo Ihre Videos sind so eigentlich ganz toll aber gibt es eine Möglichkeit die auch auf Deutsch zu bekommen oder gibt es jemanden der das auf deutsch macht?
I won a contest in 2020 for decorations, I'm totally wanting to take it to the next level, but I'm lost , someone said they have websites where people help us rookies, you have any info to help me??
Each receiver needs its own power supply. Ideally you prepare your yard with both distributed power outlets as well as dedicated network cables for the required comms between the controller and the receivers. Thats what I did for my first year of showing last year. I added more network and power outlets than I needed in the hope that I can keep expanding my show without having to dig up the garden (again).
@@JoeCrawXS Meanwell is a popular brand and its what I use. Their 12V units comes in 350W size. As for how many you'll need, that depends on 1. How many pixels you are running from that controller, and 2. What brightness you are going to run them at. Through experimenting, I found I could run my lights at 40% and visually it looked just as good as at 100%. In fact I found when I had them at 100% they kind of dazzled and I didnt like the effect. When you buy pixel strings, they will come with a power rating. This is normally the max rating, ie full white (red, green, blue per pixel on) at 100%, so you should take that into account when sizing. If you do the maths on my system, in theory I have a few controllers that on paper dont have enough power capacity, but as i only run at 40%, its fine.
![Eminem - Fuel (feat. JID) [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5H_CewqpKA/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you for another great video!!
Thanks for watching!
You didn't mention F Amps David. I understand you can insert them every 20 ft and hopefully be good to go. Assuming your controller has enough ports for everything you want. Granted I have not tried F Amps yet but intend to. I plan on a rather limited animated display without music using an 18 x 96 matrix and a few pixel poles and snowflakes. Maximum distance from my 16V4 controller around 60 ft. Yes I will use power injection.
I'm not a fan of it. It's basically trying to hack the protocol to do something it's not meant to do, I'd rather keep data runs short using smart receivers or smaller controllers
The exact time of year for a video on this! Nb.: I'm about to do front wash with led bars from 2005 and I hope they are good enough set to white not to look strange on video? Otherwise I'm going with 4 Chinese $50 RGB parcans. Any experience with those regarding CRI ??
I mean, the CRI from these is going to be pretty terrible. They may or may not look okay - test it!
@@LearnChristmasLighting Thanks, haven't gotten around to do it yet. So far I'm using halogen flood lamps with CT Blue and it helps.
Just thinking of starting out which controller do you recommend
I am doing my first light show this year as well. I went with the Kulp Lights 16A-B controller. Lots of people recommended it over the Falcon for learning.
Where are you finding the controllers? 'Out of Stock' is all I have found for Falcon and Kulp. I want to do a few christmas trees and arches for 2022. I'm not going to build the trees or arches without having the controller(s) in hand.
That seems kind of normal just after Christmas as every vendor has pushed everything they can out of the door for this season. I would think by mid Jan they will have fresh stock. Of course in the current environment, who knows. Agree with your thinking though..... get the controller first. Thats how I built up my show and its quite rewarding if, after spending several hours pushing in pixels to props, once your hands have stopped bleeding, you can fire up the controller and see the fruits of your labors!
Yep, as noted below by @ForestRiver , a out-of-stock from December thru Jan or Feb is normal. This year, with all the issues we're having with shipping and manufacturing/chip shortage, it might be a little longer, but we should be able to get something in the summer (my guess), if not sooner.
So one thing I do not enjoy is the "art" side of the pixel shows, are often over looked. And I wish I knew how to articulate the concern, but music isn't cool if you have a trumpet guitar and flute all playing the exact same notes at the exact same time. An orchestra uses various instruments to preform different pieces of a song. Unfortunately I seem to find too many pixel shows forget this and as a result, I find the best / most exciting light shows actually tend to be LOR shows since one must use the music as a medium to make the lights interesting. While with pixels, people tend to over rely on some fancy behavior the pixels can do, that doesn't utilize or even align with the music.
Frankly if people treated pixels more like comventional ac lights and then just used their color changing and individual control to mimic having 4 layers of ac lights (w+rgb) you would really get a lot more movement in your light shows, since just changing colors means moving lights too.
And it would allow you to do sneaky things like "hide" lights till a particular part of the show or song.
I have a lot more thoughts on this but its impractical to type them all here.
I really do enjoy your content and how approachable you're helping make this all, but part of me thinks people are losing the artistry of a show. Partly due to how pixels really benefit so much from a "prop" to hold them in place, they don't do things like, hang in trees well (I know length between power and signal concerns too). And just being limited to needing to be so close to a controller/reciever too. Those are some of my concerns.
But yeah this has made things much more approachable, xlights guides have been important and knowing the "tricks" of using pixels too helps take away the " how the crap did they write/ test the code for this".
Hallo
Ihre Videos sind so eigentlich ganz toll aber gibt es eine Möglichkeit die auch auf Deutsch zu bekommen oder gibt es jemanden der das auf deutsch macht?
I won a contest in 2020 for decorations, I'm totally wanting to take it to the next level, but I'm lost , someone said they have websites where people help us rookies, you have any info to help me??
Sure, we've got lots of info @ Learnchristmaslighting.com - be sure to grab our free guide on the homepage!
Does the receiver get power from the controller or does it also need a power supply?
Each receiver needs its own power supply. Ideally you prepare your yard with both distributed power outlets as well as dedicated network cables for the required comms between the controller and the receivers. Thats what I did for my first year of showing last year. I added more network and power outlets than I needed in the hope that I can keep expanding my show without having to dig up the garden (again).
@@MrScottCorboy Thanks for the response. What kind of power supply would your recommend? Any suggestions for sufficient amps/watts?
@@JoeCrawXS Meanwell is a popular brand and its what I use. Their 12V units comes in 350W size. As for how many you'll need, that depends on 1. How many pixels you are running from that controller, and 2. What brightness you are going to run them at. Through experimenting, I found I could run my lights at 40% and visually it looked just as good as at 100%. In fact I found when I had them at 100% they kind of dazzled and I didnt like the effect. When you buy pixel strings, they will come with a power rating. This is normally the max rating, ie full white (red, green, blue per pixel on) at 100%, so you should take that into account when sizing. If you do the maths on my system, in theory I have a few controllers that on paper dont have enough power capacity, but as i only run at 40%, its fine.
hy to all,does anyone how can y buy a controller in europe?
Build a light show: buildalightshow.com
@@LearnChristmasLighting thank you very much
again this has been replaced by a $5 microcontroller