2014 Zwiller vids

[zwiller]

I am being told that my vids are basically a tutorial for sequencing floods, and of course they are aetherIIs, so...

This one is the popular one this year.  My attempt to be younger/pop oriented.  Might have overused shimmer a bit...
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This one is my personal favorite being an old rocker and all...
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THANKS TO ALL IN THE DIY COMMUNITY!!!

[duane.mosley]

nice work as usual Sam

[chrisatpsu]

Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy....   still makes me feel like I'm playing Tetris!

[Gary]

How do I love thee your display? Let me count the ways:


Sometimes, less is more. The way you use your house as the main attraction by lighting it up with your Aethers. I imagine that it's much easier to set up (let alone sequence) than a megatree.

Your razor-sharp timing. What is the millisecond timing of your songs?

Love the rainbow wipe at 1:46 on the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. What software do you use?

It looks like your have a corostar mounted on another piece of coro, and then you have more lights mounted inside that for back lighting effect. Classy.

[dmaccole]

Sam:

Great sequences. Especially loved Spiraling's "Do You Hear What I Hear?"; I'd never heard that mix before.

I went to the group's site to download the song, but they've got the same ZenCart/PayPal problems everyone does today.

\dmc

[winwin]

so different than other shows we see most of the time and so pleasant to watch...it is kind of refreshing. you did great.
how many floodlights do you have (or is it a big secret)? The effects are amazing.
Thanks for sharing!

[lonewolf41]

Nice!  I guess you know I stole most of your Palladio sequencing from last year for my show this year.   Hey, why mess with a good thing.  Also, I responded to the questions about my megatree in my show thread in case you missed it. 

Thanks, Keith

[kernal]

Glad to see the Zwill-uminaries are still being used! 

[SteveMaris]

Great job. Love your show. 

[zwiller]

Thanks guys!  Last year I was on a long needed sabbatical from blinky.  2013 was a bad season to say the least…  A little bit before Thanksgiving the wife says, why don’t you just run the zwilluminariesâ„¢ on test mode and maybe the northstar.  I start noodling around and everything just started to come together.  The sequencing is basically 2013 with a few minor tweaks.  I am really looking forward to getting creative with the sequencing now that the gear and software can handle it. 

@chris: never realized Sugar Plum was used in Tetris!  Now that I think about, I am pretty sure my brothers and I played Super Mario all the way through the Tetris phase.  I don't think we never even owned any other NES games...

@gary: You get it: I am totally less is more.  My layout can be setup and broken down in like an hour or 2.  That said, much time (beer) was invested in mounting, spacing, and controller layout.  Sequences are 50ms timings.  Truthfully, the timings have little to do with the precision.  The key is a good beat track.  I use LSP and can do this by clicking the mouse to the beat.  I used to use vixen 2.0 and got the same precision with using the keyboard.  The rainbow thing is a macro and there are a ton of things in LSP like it.  Normally, macros like this were big bottlenecks and could not be outputted correctly until 2014.  The northstar is actually mounted over a window but it is covered with coro (good eye) and was not really intentional, but the backlighting was.   

@dmc:  Do You Hear was MY personal favorite sequence.   I used Amazon but just tried it and had issues too.  Hopefully they get that fixed.  I really like trying to find odd/obscure stuff.  I think it adds to the impact.  I hope you and others got the same thrill I did when I first heard it.  You might not believe me, but I actually sequenced a 16 strand rgb mega tree for this one but never built it.  You might notice the beginning of the sequence is kinda bare because of that.  The tree is “snowing” during the piano intro, stops when “a star, a star” and then dances thought the first verse with the spots on…

@winwin: I used 5 floods.  I did alot of testing and I think the best results I got were about 3' away from the house 45 degrees or so.  No lenses on mine.  The 2 on the ground are on 2' stands (huge improvement), the 2 on the second floor are nested in the gutters aimed toward windows slightly, and the last is inside the porch entrance facing the door.  I spent some time tweaking them until I was happy.  I think the 2nd floor aethers are about 4.5' from the house.  If more time allowed I would fashion "barn doors" to better control the second floor.   I would have to say the locations are obvious in the video starting around 0:36 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

[KeithTarpley]

Greetings,,,

Definitely fun to watch...

Keith

[Gary]

@gary: You get it: I am totally less is more.  My layout can be setup and broken down in like an hour or 2.  That said, much time (beer) was invested in mounting, spacing, and controller layout.  Sequences are 50ms timings.  Truthfully, the timings have little to do with the precision.  The key is a good beat track.  I use LSP and can do this by clicking the mouse to the beat.  I used to use vixen 2.0 and got the same precision with using the keyboard.  The rainbow thing is a macro and there are a ton of things in LSP like it.  Normally, macros like this were big bottlenecks and could not be outputted correctly until 2014.  The northstar is actually mounted over a window but it is covered with coro (good eye) and was not really intentional, but the backlighting was.   

An hour or two is pretty impressive. I thought I had it good by being able to set up in about 2 days.

I am currently at 25 ms timings. When I built my controllers and hooked one up to a laptop for the first time to try some basic fades in Vixen, the fades looked terribly choppy at default 100 ms timings, and choppiness was still visible at 50 ms, so I settled for 25 ms. As it turns out, it was probably because I didn't know what the LED strings I was using should have had the light curves set up for them because the light output barely changed on them between 50 and 100% brightness, and went down really fast below 30% IIRC). Oh well, I will be going for 50 ms timing with Smart Strings as not to max the PC's CPU or waste network bandwidth.

As for the macro bottlenecks being solved in 2014, is that because you got a new Show PC?

[zwiller]

I am constantly looking for ways to minimize setup time.  Plan to do a few things that will help more this year.  That said, they key is to mount everything you can.  IE luminaries: all mounted, spaced, squared, on a wood strip, wired and sent to one 3 core connector.

I remember what you are talking about with fades.  Dig around here much and you will find many a post of mine dealing with fades.  I think we much will be learned about timings this year.  IE sequence timings and output timings are 2 separate things...

It seems backwards, but it seems the farther we get away from using a computer to run a show the better.  DIY tools like RJ's conductor and David Pitts' FPP have gotten rid of the bottlenecks.  The commercial stuff has they're own show players too.  RJ recognized this issue a long time ago.  I never really believed him until I tried it.   I drop serious coin on a gamer box and think I am ok, but it did not work well at all!  That said, things continue to improve and who knows what will happen in 2015!  Hard to believe that I thought 128 channels was huge a few years ago.  I run 8K now and I am average now... 

[Gary]

It seems backwards, but it seems the farther we get away from using a computer to run a show the better.  DIY tools like RJ's conductor and David Pitts' FPP have gotten rid of the bottlenecks.  The commercial stuff has they're own show players too.  RJ recognized this issue a long time ago.  I never really believed him until I tried it.   I drop serious coin on a gamer box and think I am ok, but it did not work well at all!  That said, things continue to improve and who knows what will happen in 2015!  Hard to believe that I thought 128 channels was huge a few years ago.  I run 8K now and I am average now...

What were the specs on your gamer box that wasn't performing well? You are using Light Show Pro, right? Wasn't that program supposed to be a resource pig? I haven't been dabbling with software yet (Vixen, XLights, or perhaps HLS?)... Instead, I'm lining all my ducks in a row to order light strings in the next few weeks.

Perhaps my knowledge on the Conductor is a bit out of date now, but I like the flexibility of the PC to do what I want quickly and easily.  For example, I'd like to see live what I just sequenced (sans lagging issues) without needing to convert to to a special format with 8.3 FAT file names and MP3 files at specific bit rates. Am I whining here? 

My yard isn't too large and I don't want too much in it either (I think less is more, too), so looking at my planning spreadsheet showing all the channels required for what I want in 5 years or so, I can do what I want with 4 PixelNet universes (i.e. only one EtherDongle) so I would hope that a decent laptop computer could handle the data throughput.

[tbone321]

What were the specs on your gamer box that wasn't performing well? You are using Light Show Pro, right? Wasn't that program supposed to be a resource pig? I haven't been dabbling with software yet (Vixen, XLights, or perhaps HLS?)... Instead, I'm lining all my ducks in a row to order light strings in the next few weeks.

Regardless of the hog level of the software, Windows tends to do it's own thing and if it feels that something that it needs to do takes priority, then your sequencing software grinds to a halt.  Sure, you can shut down many of the processes that can cause this but you really kinda need to know what you are doing and IMHO, that is more of a PITA than converting files for the Conductor.

Perhaps my knowledge on the Conductor is a bit out of date now, but I like the flexibility of the PC to do what I want quickly and easily.  For example, I'd like to see live what I just sequenced (sans lagging issues) without needing to convert to to a special format with 8.3 FAT file names and MP3 files at specific bit rates. Am I whining here? 

Maybe just a little bit of whining    The primary advantage of the Conductor is once you get it configured properly, you can set it and forget it.  This takes the load of the network sending data to the ETD or tying up a PC to run a show because when the show is running, it is not a wise idea to use that PC to do anything else.

My yard isn't too large and I don't want too much in it either (I think less is more, too), so looking at my planning spreadsheet showing all the channels required for what I want in 5 years or so, I can do what I want with 4 PixelNet universes (i.e. only one EtherDongle) so I would hope that a decent laptop computer could handle the data throughput.

The Conductor can also put out 4 Pixelnet universes and doesn't flood your network with show data like a PC will while sending this continuous data to the ETD.  As said before, the issue is not just the data throughput, but also the other processes that a typical Windows machine is also running which will compete for and at times, take over those resources and freezing or disrupting your sequences.  Not everyone has issues running from a PC so this may not be an issue for you.