I’ll be using the great, free software Vixen to control the lights. This app runs on XP and is feature packed, controls hundreds of channels, does effects like dimming, etc, and of course will play the music along with it. What it doesn’t do though, at least to my knowledge, is let me visualize what the lights will look like as they turn on and off.
Maybe the pros can do it in their heads, but as I’ve found the last few weeks, creating a light display is much like writing music. The music is your score, each string of lights is a note which can be played long or short. As a web developer with some experience with Flash, I naturally wanted to create something to see how it was going to look.
Here’s an example of what one of the songs should look like. This one is Chiron Beta Prime by the great Jonathan Coulton. I took the photo of the house from my iPhone and cut the lights into separate layers in Photoshop then exported them into Flash. I should be able to use the Flash score to pretty much dictate what Vixen should look like. I hope to start programming it this weekend. Wish me luck!