Newbie doing research (and getting confused)

[owenewo]

Hi, i'm sure this has been covered elsewhere, I have genuinely spent a long time reading articles and watching videos, but have a specific question that I can't find the answer to....

I want to do a christmas display on my house, similar to the halloween one everyone has seen done to thriller. I haven't brought any of the kit yet, as it will be sizeable investment (that I want to do on the cheap), and am looking for the best value for money way of doing it. I was thinking of making a wire frames for the faces, with short lengths of rgb strip attached, each strip on different dmx channels for mouths, eyes, etc. I was going to mount a weatherproof enclosure to each one containg a psu for all the rgb strip and a 27 channel decoder card i've seen people selling on ebay. I would make four of these, and I could store them easily, with just simply plugging them in to a main power source, and connecting the dmx flying lead. i was planning on making the sequences on LOR, using my laptop and a usb-dmx interface, then transfering the files to a LOR director box on a flash card (cant remember the name of the unit exactly but means I dont need to dedicate my laptop to running the shows)

I'm fairly confident I understand everything I need for the faces, but its the CCR lights in the video that i'm really impressed with and want to mimic, without spending a fortune. I found a tutorial on making a set of 6803 lights run in LOR using a dmx to 6803 protocol converter, and this is something I'd like to do. i understand that as 6803's are only 5bit, the dimming wont be as sweet as a 2801 or CCR, but for the savings in money I can live with it. As I understand it, each pixel would be given its own address, but this is where i'm confused, as how does the protocol converter card know how many pixels there are to address, as you can buy 6803 strip in varying lengths with varying numbers of pixels. The last thing I want to do is spend money on this stuff and find I cant get it to work. I haven't used LOR yet, still trying to read and view all the tutorials before forking out the money on software and hardware, but I'd like the majority of the lights for my displays to be made up of pixels - other than the faces, and a few small rgb spots. I need to know that if I buy varying lengths of 6803 strip and some dmx protocol converter cards, that I will be able to easily address each pixel.

Thank you in advance for your guidance, please remember I am a complete newb, never used dmx before and haven't brought any kit yet to play with so have zero experience, just a throbbing headache from trying to absorb as much information as possible from many different sources.