Holiday Lights Designer from Holiday Soft?

[stanward]

Anyone purchased and is using this software? I'm wondering if it's worth to purchase this software for the integration with LOR S2?

Stan

[beeiilll]

Well I purchased it, but haven't had too much time to play around with it yet.

It does seem like it has some nice features in it, but the only thing I have noticed that I don't really care for is that it seems to be resource hog. It slows my 3.2 GHz Pentium D show computer down to a crawl when I try to run it. It is the only program running on that computer (which is dedicated as a show computer).

When I ran the program and was assigning lights it would take it seconds to layout a string of lights on the picture of my house and everything that I did in the program seemed to take forever for it to run.

On the plus side, I saw that it does have features that would make it great to use for light layout like the tree designing part and of course the ability to run LOR.

Hopefully now that the rush of getting the display set up is over I will have time to work with it and see what is happening. I would love to be able to use it, but the slowness of it was just too much for me to work with since I was under the gun to begin with getting everything set up for this year.

Bill

[friskybri]

I played with it for the month trial and it was ok to see what the house looks like with light but the LOR function really sucks. When it connects to LOR and you play the sequence it is slow to respond to the song so it looks like your house is out of sync with they music. When you look at the animation of the LOR software its right on. I decided not to purchase it because of that and what beeiilll said.

[Danbel]

I purchased it and i'am very happy .I run on my laptop 2.00 GHz 3,00 GB Ram

Daniel

Happy Holiday

[RickWIlliams]

We purchased 4.0 - use it on a 2Ghz 2 GB laptop - I really like the concept and some day it will be great software, but to be blunt; it's current state is terrible:

Problems:
1) Resource hog - it will utilize 100%
2) Very slow mouse click reaction
3) Channel lighting will not stay sequenced (ABCABCABC)
4) Limited Flood light (Amient light) capabilities - crashes
5) Software will not maintain timing
6) Small software shop, updates and resolution will be SLOW to none.
7) Online forum is moderated not to really help much.
8) Documented help is useless

These are just the things that stand out from what I remembered using it for a presentation last year (30 Circuits/Channels), I was not happy at all, but I was happy I didn't spend more than I did............I haven't touched it since

[bisquit476]

If you decide to download the demo, use it quickly. I downloaded the trial, didn't open it for about 2 months, then installed it and the software said my trial was over and I would have to buy it. Same thing happened the year before with version 3. But after trying support from Mike at Holidaysoft, he said same thing, I had to buy the software. So I did, and like Rick said in post above, some day it will be good software, but at this point, I wouldn't buy it again.

[George Simmons]

At least I'm glad to know it's not just me or my machine. I downloaded the demo version almost a week ago and it's been a majestically unsatisfactory experience. I used it (or tried to) for three evenings and finally decided it wasn't for me - I've got too much to do before Christmas to be hamstrung like that. Bill and Rick's experiences and observations mirror my own.

[stanward]

Thank you for clearing this up, as you are helping me save money by not spending on something that seems to still be in a beta version.

I never heard anything good of this software yet.

Stan

[redsea300]

I bought it last year when it came out. What a mistake. My machine runs at a snails pace when it is running and nothing is in sync. Think of the hours of programing time you spend. Just spend a couple of hours using LOR visualizer. I imported a good pix of mu house and then drew my template on a piece of paper. The put in into the visualizer. Take your time and do a good drawing( you will be looking at it all year). The LOR visualizer work great, Stay with it.

[ShawnT]

Well it seems that so many people are having problems with this.

I bought the 4.0 software shortly after it was released. Did I have some problems, Yes, but Mike was quick in his response to get it fixed. He requests that you send him your animation file so that he can recreate the exact problem on his side. At one point he contacted me directly via phone to work through a situation. How many other small 1 man application shops will do that? Not many.

With this he did roll several quick updates to the application. I have to say that there is a learning curve to figure out the tricks to get things setup the way you want it. After it is setup and the layout is complete, you don't have to do anything else to it.

Now as for the resource hog, if anyone truly understands complete constant 3D rendering, then you will know that resources are a huge factor. I have a 2.4 GHz computer with 1 gb of ram. Did it slow down, Yes, but it didn't stop me from being able to conceptually see what my show was going to look like. I also have it loaded on an old IMB Thinkpad and it is able to run just as smooth on it as it does on my desktop pc.

Mike knows that he has to do something with the timing issues between LOR and HLD and is currently working on this to get it better. I will say that HLD can not keep up with the .05 On and Off that many of us do during our show. But if you know that is going on, and know that LOR will do it, then you should still be able to see a good representation of what your show will look like.

Overall I am extremely happy with the application. It does have some areas that need to be tweaked.

Suggestion - keep an eye on it and don't give up on it. I didn't from the start and glad I didn't give up as my first year show matched what I saw in the HLD animation.

If you would like to discuss what I did to get it to work so well for me, feel free to contact me.

p.s. - I had all 128 channels setup in the application

[stanward]

I have an old computer, and if this program is really a resource hog, I won't be able to use it much.

I have an old Dell 4400, P4 2.4GHz with 768MB of RAM. On the plus side, I do have an ATI Radeon 128MB AGP video card (to you guys who are into computers, my system must still suck to you). I only have a 80GB hdd, which is almost full.

I want to upgrade, but can't afford to right now. 3D Rendering is a very difficult task, and it does take a lot of resources. Now, I will go look at the minimum system requirements for this software, just to see if I can even use it.