Several of you saw the presentation I gave in Texas about using Video as the basis of your sequences. I wanted to give some updates on that as I work through the practical workflow for dealing with the data.
For Christmas 2011, I had 4,166 channels of light. Sections of the show were completed in 30 second segments, converted to LOR, massaged with XML scripts from Frank, converted to xlights, then multiple xlights files were converted to one master xseq (thanks to Frank again).
For 2011, a 30 second export was around 180 MB in LOR data. In 2012, I'm jumping to somewhere just under 12,000 channels. Exporting a 25 second clip to LOR format is 617 MB. I edit almost all my songs to run between 2:30 and 3:00 length (people tend to get bored with songs longer than those times in my experience, unless the song is REALLY dynamic. For an average song, I'm looking at 3.7 and 4.3 GB of LOR data!! That's just an amazing amount of data...
Luckily Frank is working on some special sauce to help, but I wanted to provide some early feedback, particularly those with higher channel counts. Once I'm in xlights format, the data is tiny, tiny. Perhaps 5 - 6 MB for the same 25 second clip.