Greg Young

That was great! I have to wonder how that would be received by neighbors, given all the issues that seem to be cropping up these days...

Don't waste your $ on an expensive HDMI cable for that length. I use a $60 HDMI to VGA adapter (you can get non powered/amplified units for less than $10) that feeds CT5e cable that runs about 75 feet to one of my projectors. The images look great. For the holiday images and videos most project, projecting them in HD would be overkill.

While I agree with the advice given above, I have a different take in part based on my personal experience. Background: I live a little South of Buffalo (I think most know it gets COLD here) and have been using video projection in our display for a long while. I use 2 Epson's. One is in the home, projecting to a screen outside, so that unit is not exposed to temperature/moisture extremes. It projects the videos, most of which are sync'd to the display's music. The second unit however is in the outside environment. It is exposed to temperatures that get well below freezing, and

You cab build your props to withstand high winds, it just takes a little planning. My megatree, and pixel tree for example, both about 20ft in height, have stood up to 72 mph winds without issues, but I tend to over engineer things a bit, as I live up on a hill, and we routinely get high winds... We tend to get a fair amount of snow here in the Buffalo, NY area, but the last couple of winters have been mild. Don't give up, you can build for the winds!

Good decision Expected.. Technical specs aside, you need to look at the gear available for our use. The various LED floods, rotating heads, lasers, etc that we see commonly available and use in our displays usually have 3 pin DINs. If they don't, use a 5 to 3 pin adapter, as 3 wire (shielded) cable used for balanced mike inputs etc is readily available, and lasts well. You don't need the other 2 wires for DMX control of devices. I have been using the same cables in my display since the mid 90's for DMX devices (long before there were LEDs.. those were the days of larger,

Right, which is why I referenced the 2 that work reliably - wmv and avi.

I don't know what controller you are referencing, but for traditional DMX only 3 pins are used. Greg

LOR will handle .wmv and .avi video files. Greg

Don, assuming your Lenovo's 2 video outputs are both constantly active, they should output the exact same signal. Simply setup your dual monitor screens as you did when outputting a single video feed. I don't have a Lenovo, so don't know how their onboard video is setup, because with a few models when you output HDMI, you can't simultaneously output VGA. If you find that to be the case for your laptop, an easy fix is to use a Y adapter from the HDMI port (assuming of course your other projector can also use a HDMI input).

A lot of us use that approach, as it gives you the best of both worlds.

A buddy of mine has one of those units. While it can easily be used for window projections it is no where near the 2000 lumens claimed, although it is brighter than the HD model! Just like IP ratings, the Chinese manufacturers tend to exaggerate their numbers! It's native resolution is a similar 800 x 480, that 'supports" HD as they like to call it. Essentially you can input any higher resolution image/video but it projects at 800 x 480 which should be fine for display viewing. Can't beat the price, which is less than the cost of many replacement projector bulbs! I b

Having been around these forums for the last 15 years dating back to the early PC days I have had the opportunity to see more than few businesses start up by fellow decorators. Some have gone on to be very successful (ie LOR). Others have started out well, go on for a few years, then fail. It is a rare person who intends to start a business to screw over others in the community. The one common issue when their businesses fail is the lack of communication which leads to a lot of understandable angst on the part of folks with orders pending. I am not going to defend Seasonal Entertainment,

The LOR website has a number of video tutorials outlining the different functions associated with the sequence editor that should quickly get you going, especially as you already have some sequences you are just trying to adapt. If it's simply timing (lining up the effects to the music), use the sequence editor's skew command in the pull down menu under edit. Greg

Like Bob, Steven, and others have posted I have been running RDS for quite a while. I did it as a fun project, incorporating the hardware in my Ramsey 100B. Wrote batch files to broadcast song information (name and performer), but I agree with the above posts no visitors comment on it. I wasn't expecting them to, as if they were watching that rather than my display, I would be really concerned! I still run it, as there is no maintenance, and to be truthful I had forgotten it is still running.... if you want to incorporate it as a fun project go ahead. If you are expe