What's new

Keeping up with the Jones's this Xmas (1 Viewer)

Kirk Gunn

Screenwriter
Joined
Aug 16, 1999
Messages
1,609


What - no plug-and-play ? ;)

But seriously, are there any retail PLC's available for AC outlets ? I googled PLC, but didn't find too much on the retail side. Think it would be cool to have 3 or 4 sets of lights flashing in patterns.
 

Dennis*G

Supporting Actor
Joined
Oct 7, 2003
Messages
524


I don't know about that. There is a light that flashes to the upeer left of the house (some tower light?) and that flashing is steady throughout the display.
 

Dave Poehlman

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 8, 2000
Messages
3,813
I dunno.. it just looks like video compression artifacts rather than footsteps to me.

I think it's legit. I mean.. people do wild stuff when it comes to the holidays... my brother's neighbor does his own 4th of July fireworks synchronized with music.
 

CRyan

Screenwriter
Joined
Feb 9, 1999
Messages
1,239
Pretty sure it is not time-lapse. I think you are seeing mpeg artifacts making the grass appear to move.

Look closely at the left portion of the image where there is a white tower beacon in the sky. I am pretty sure it would not blink that rythmically (as it would in real life) with time-lapse video.


ooops. already posted.
 

Chris_Morris

Screenwriter
Joined
Jan 4, 2002
Messages
1,887
I believe the video is real. Jon Daggett created MidiLites (www.midilite.com), lights controlled by computer, by first doing it at his house. His company now sells kits and sets up "Living Christmas Tree" displays around the country, as well as the original here in Central Va. at Jerry Falwell's church.

I have a documentary on The Living Christmas Tree that talks quite a bit about MidiLite and has some footage of Jon setting up his home display. The amount of cabling running through his house is unbelievable. I'll have to go back and watch it again to see how many lights and how much cable.
 

Scott Dautel

Second Unit
Joined
Oct 6, 1998
Messages
471
Yea ... It's real alright. The owner's [alleged] name is Carson Williams and it was done last year (Christmas 2004). He wrote about it in this thread (warning ... slow load time)

I'm still amazed and would love to know if anyone has found a [cheap?]PLC-connected relay device to power AC lighting.
 

chris_everett

Second Unit
Joined
Jul 20, 2003
Messages
403
At my church we have an annual "Living Christmas Tree" production. We don't use midilights system, but we do have 108 Dimmer channels on our "tree", controlling some 86,500 mini-lights, and about 250 C-9s. We also have a 24 point star with a seperage dimmer channel for each of the star points. (This in addition to normal theatrical lighting)

Cost of the Dimmer channels= about $2200
Cost of the lights = about $3000

Control is done by a custom program that we wrote ourselves, we use DMX (the standard theatrical lighting protocal) to hook everything up.

This guy seems to have about 50 channels of lighting, and I would guess half as many bulbs as we do, so he probably could have spent around $2500 for the set-up. It would take us about 5-6 hours to program that song in our system, so if he has something similer, the time investment for a single song is high, but not absurd
 

Jason Harbaugh

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2001
Messages
2,968
Looks like Miller bought it and is using it in their Miller Light commercials, a slightly newer version with Happy Holidays spelled out.
 

ThomasC

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 15, 2001
Messages
6,526
Real Name
Thomas
That would be this year's version. I saw it on the local news a couple weeks ago.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Forum statistics

Threads
356,814
Messages
5,123,788
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
0
Top