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On November 20, we had a preview showing of the 2007 Christmas lights display for those on Fontana. We had about 50 people in attendance, on a crisp and windy night, and received positive feedback.

The lights went on Thanksgiving evening for the rest of the world, but not exactly when planned. I thought I had the controller programmed for on at 6 and off at 10:30. But at 5, Mary comes to me and tells me the light show has started. So I run out to the controller and take out the SD card to stop the show. Then I reset all the timers and sequences on the chip, so it is now coming on and going off when planned. Read the rest of the article »

The lights go on in 4 days, but there is still much to do.

Since the last post, all of the sequencing has been completed. Night two is comprised of five songs plus voiceovers and took only 24 hours to sequence. But the songs are shorter than for the first night. Reflections of Earth will be the opening number each night. Here is a list of the songs that you will be hearing and the length of each show:

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Things are fast and hectic around here because

THE LIGHTS GO ON IN ONLY

12 DAYS

The last two days were spent putting up some of the outdoor lights. We had beautiful weather days and were also able to take advantage of help from our long-time friend Jim, who was in town from St. Louis. This included hanging the animated angel and thirty twinkling snowflakes 25 feet above the ground, wrapping our two big oak trees in bands of red and clear mini-lights, hanging icicles along the front eve, and placing the large star on the chimney. This phase of the actual installation took 25 people hours to complete, longer than anticipated. Next weekend, weather permitting, is when the remainder of the display goes up. This will include the installation of the tri-mega tree, the 16 mini-trees, and hooking up the five controllers to all the lights with several hundred feed of extension cords.

Sequencing of night one has been completed. In total, the show will run about 20 minutes and took 42.67 hours to sequence. We still have to record the voiceovers with the grandkids for night two, but two out of the five songs have been sequenced.

Stay tuned for more information as we move closer to Thanksgiving night and the reveal.

Last week has been spent sequencing the lights to the selected music. So far seven voiceovers have been completed, which took two hours to sequence. These voiceovers introduce the evening’s show, tell a story to weave the five songs together, and close the evening. Three songs have also been completed. The first will be used each night as an opening piece. The other two, plus another three, will be used to tell a story, but more about that later. What has been completed so far, including the running time and how long it took to sequence are:

Song Title                                    Length (min.)   Time to Sequence (hrs./min.
Reflections of Earth                      1:42:40            4:35

O’Come All Ye Faithful/o’Hoiy Night 3:35:40           10:40

A Mad Russian’s Christmas            3:36:73            9:45

Now it’s on to the third song in the story set, which is Christmas Eve/Sarajevo. The good news is that I’ve edited the length of the song down to 2:52 minutes, so hopefully it will go faster than the other songs. However, there are some detailed riffs included, which means more detail in the sequencing.

Stay tuned.

24 days, 22 hours

before the lights go on.

The four new controllers have been tested and work perfectly. Light-O-Rama makes a good product.

So now it’s on to sequencing. For one night there will be six songs in all, and all have been edited to be shorter in length. Then I have recorded the voiceover for an introduction, a story line to connect five of the songs together, and finally a closing. I didn’t keep track of the exact amount of time it took for the audio editing, but estimate it is somewhere around eight hours.

Before I started sequencing the songs, I elected to reconfigure my computer to accept two monitors, with one in a portrait mode so I could see all 80 channels at once, and a second one in a “normal” landscape mode where I can watch a representation of the display in an animation as the sequencing progresses. I also had to modify the animation as there was a last minute change in the light set-up. Here is the set-up of the computer screens.

But the preliminaries are complete and I just finished 35 minutes of sequencing the first song, Reflections of Earth. That 35 minutes accounts for 20 seconds of the song, which is 1:42:15 in length, which is one minute, 42 and 1/2 seconds.

Now that we are getting some much closer to the lights going on Thanksgiving night, I’ve really got to buckle down and get moving. After all, there are only