New effects that LED's can do different/better - L.E.D.s Read Only. No more posting. - PlanetChristmas! Forums. Read Only. We've moved to http://talk.planetchristmas.com - The Forums of PlanetChristmas have moved to http://talk.PlanetChristmas.com
Now that there are a lot of folks using LED's in their controlled displays there
are sequences and effects that LED's can do that I/we are discovering.
Here's what my son and found : Mega: select all the lights on one of our mega trees (48 channels, 192 strings)
and and having them all twinkle (not shimmer). The led's actually strobe
they turn and off so quickly.
You can see it in our videos and we think it's one of the coolest effects.
The same effect looks pretty good when we twinkle all the MR16 LED up-lights
that we had on our stick trees.
Anyone else discover something new/better with LED's?
____________________ Kevin Thomas
"When you believe a thing, believe in it all the way" - Walt Disney
99,999+ lights - 500+ channels - FM100B http://www.ChristmasInKent.com
Let your light so shine before others...
wirekat wrote: Anyone else discover something new/better with LED's?
The responsiveness of LEDs was a bit of a challenge in my case because I mix LEDs and incandescents in my display. There's no way to get the filaments to react as fast as the LEDs do, and the same sequence will look different just by changing the bulb type on a channel.
In some cases the responsiveness was "too much", meaning that in order to soften the on/off events to emulate incandescents I had to add fast ramp ups and ramp downs to the on/off events. The LEDs are very non-forgiving in that respect.
There's a section in Wizards in Winter (towards the end) where I actually strobe almost everything white (and the multi-color mini lawn grid) to the beat of the music - in this case the lights on and off in .18 second cycles, .09 seconds per on and off event. It's hard to capture in video, but if you were standing there watching, the strobe effect of the whole front of the house was so intense I actually dialed the LEDs in at 50% during that part of the sequence because I was a little concerned about how the audience would react to such an intense strobe effect. I heard alot of "Whoa..."s during that section.
I would really encourage LED users to experiement alot in the off season - the capabilities and control you can have over these lights are pretty powerful.
Fabian
____________________ See the Lights @ GordonLights.com
The responsiveness of LEDs was a bit of a challenge in my case because I mix LEDs and incandescents in my display. There's no way to get the filaments to react as fast as the LEDs do, and the same sequence will look different just by changing the bulb type on a channel.
In some cases the responsiveness was "too much", meaning that in order to soften the on/off events to emulate incandescents I had to add fast ramp ups and ramp downs to the on/off events. The LEDs are very non-forgiving in that respect.
We ran into that too... my neighbor had a 70% conversion to LED's last year and my house remained mostly incandescent... we could see timing differences. Also even though LED's fade correctly, they fade differently from incandescent bulbs (like at a slower curve) and while both houses were running same grid, diming, fade off transistions from one color to another are differnet. As I catch up a little bit more with more LED's this year, I'll have to either adjust fade off rates with color change transistions but then again it might be fine. It just stands out when you can see my yard and his in same field of vision and there are subtle differences that werent there when we were both 100% incandescent.
I too have found that LED's fade different from Mini's. Most I have tested is the 70 light strings but will be going to 50 string LED's.
With the 70 light strings if I go over 50% intensity and then fade on a arch with a chase the fade is not right, but around 40-50% intensity you get close but still not right. Might have to change the ramp intensity to fix the fade.
Also I did notice the flicker playing with the random values. It works great using the 1/2 wave wired LED's but not as good using the full wave LED strings. I made a test arch with 9 channels and using 2 strings of 70's 1/2 wave on each channel and you can get some great strobe effects.
We need to gather information on what changes are necessary to your sequences when using LED's or doing an upgrade to LED's for mega trees, arches, etc.
