Xlights Full Tutorial for Beginners (Updated 2023)

so you've embarked on a New Journey you've found this amazing hobby revolving around making hundreds thousands or even millions of lights blink so you're ready to dive deep into this rabbit hole and get started so you decide to start programming your show you go online you crack your knuckles you place them on the keyboard but then you have no idea where to start [Music] hey everyone thanks for watching how to pixel and in today's video we're going to go over how to fully use x lights to program your light show everything from programming your own sequence with your own layout all the way over to how to set up controllers to be able to read that program you made in X lights xlights is a very easy to use totally free feature pack sequencer it's probably the most popular and most used software to program a light show in this hobby X lights allows you to import a picture of your house and map out what props you want to go where it then can even give you a real-time rendering of what your house will look like as you're programming it you don't need any controllers any lights or even any idea of how you want your display to look to start programming in x-lights even even if your plans change and you don't use any of the props you've mapped out you could still easily go and redesign your layout without losing the progress and programming you've done with all of your other props even though xlights is very easy to use there is still a few basic things you should know about pixels or whatever type of Lights you're going to be using before watching this video so if you're brand new to all of this I highly recommend you check out this beginner's RGB pixels video so you can get a basic understanding of how mostly everything works now before we move on I'm going to be going over some basic terminology I'll be using in this video for anyone who's new to this so if you're familiar with basic X flights terminology you can skip to this part in the video but if you don't know anything about X lights then I recommend you stay for this part first off sequence the file or program that holds all the data for the animation or song that you programmed each different program you make within X flights is considered a sequence sequencer the software that is being used to make a sequence for example X lights is called a sequencer because you use it to make sequences prop an item or an element within your display for example a wreath is a prop a candy cane is a prop a window outline is a prop any item in your light show is considered a prop show folder or show directory the folder on your computer where all of your xlights files are stored node a single controllable light or element within a display for example each one of these pixels is considered a node because each one of these is a controllable item however if this whole strand of pixels could only be one color each individual pixel is not programmable then this whole strand would be considered one node a node is one thing that you can program individually in X lights string a single connection to your controller for example if you have four props in consecutive order all going to one wire going to one port on your controller that would be considered one string because it's making one connection to a controller and finally strand the number of times a wire zigzags or repeats itself within your prop for example this tree has eight different sections so this would have eight strands and that's it for basic x-lights terminology now we can dive into the juicy part of this video actually using X lights Feel Free at any time during this video to use the time codes in the scrub bar or in the description to skip to a certain part of the video you want to see this video is going to be really long but trust me afterwards you'll be able to make your first basic sequence all on your own now without any more of a delay let's get started so before we could start sequencing or programming anything in x-lights we have to install X lights first if you already have excellent installed that's great and you can skip this step and go to this time in the video however if you don't have X lights I'm going to show you how and where you can install it so you're going to want to go to xlights.org and I'll put this in the description below and this brings you to the xlights website this website has a ton of helpful tools and things to get you started if you're new to x-lights tons of videos and resources and tons of ways you can connect the experts that can help you with any problems you have so when you get here you're going to want to go to the download page and this will show you all of the downloads for X lights now they do update X lights very frequently because they're trying to get out all the bugs and add enhancements and just try and make it the best software for anyone to use you don't have to update Xbox every time a new update comes out I just recommend updating it maybe every month or two months so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to click the latest update or any of the updates you want I'm gonna pick the latest and you're gonna click it and then you can select where you want it to be saved on your computer and download it I already have X lights downloaded so I'm not going to do this but once you download the exe file you can run it like you would a normal program and then boot up X lights one thing I'd like to talk about before I go ahead and open X lights when you install xlitz you'll notice that it comes with three different programs and each of them do certain things but the one called xlight 64 this is the one you will be using for programming making your layout and all of that X scheduler what that does is that is a software you can use to put all of your program files on and use your computer that this is running on to run your light show and X scanner what this does is it scans your local network for any controllers um or any devices on your network and it tells you what they are so you know what the IP addresses of your controllers are so X scheduler and X scanner you don't need but X lights this is the main program you will be using for programming and setting up your layout but now we can get into opening X lights now when you start acts like you'll see something like this it'll be loading up and before it actually it's opens It'll ask you to select your show folder if you've already selected your show folder then that's great and you can get right into the tutorial which is at this time but if you haven't I'll show you what that is the show folder is basically the folder where all of your settings your program files everything for X lights is stored inside this is mine right here I call it BBL X lights uh it stands for Bridgeport spread it slides X lights and in here I have a ton of files from over the years of programming I have sequences all the way back from 2021 I don't know where my older ones are I have imported sequences I have music I have lyrics I have images I have exports and just tons of other files in here now when you're first starting out with Xbox you're probably not going to have this many files so create a folder you want your Xbox files to be stored in and then just select that folder I have this one right here called Demo X lights it is empty so I can get a fresh start and show you what that looks like and and access lights will open and it should look something like this there's a lot of different buttons a lot of different tabs a lot of different settings and they can be very confusing but I'm going to try and explain it as simply as I can for anyone who is new to this so the first tab we are on right here is the controllers tab this is the tab where you can set up all of your controllers that you will be sending your x-lights files to or anything that will be running the show this is where you can set them all up in X lights the first thing I'd like to go over is the directories right here the show directory this is what we just set up where your folder is stored for all the excites data if you ever need to you could change that folder permanently or temporarily changing it temporarily is if you wanted to import a sequence for example and there's a different um folder that you downloaded you need to open it from first or if you're like me for my Halloween light show I have a separate folder that way I could keep my Christmas and Halloween stuff separate and make sequencing a lot easier so whenever I need to program my Halloween sequence I will change it to my BBL excites Halloween folder right here and it's in this folder I'll select it here and then if you look at I already have my layout set up it's a little bit messed up but I have my Halloween layout right here I have all of my models on here and my controllers if you're in a temporary folder you could change it temporarily again you can restore it to permanent or you could change it permanently again I'm going to restore it to the demo excites file excuse me the Demo X lights folder and I'm going to talk about how you can add a controller onto X lights so an amazing thing about X lights is you don't have to have any information about your controller you don't have to have any of your layout planned you could just set something up this might not even be your permanent layout you might just be thinking maybe it'll look like this and you don't have to put in any controller information and you can immediately get to sequencing so if you're not sure which controller you're going to be using yet or you don't have one or anything like that you can get right into setting up your layout and sequencing however I would recommend that you still watch this part because eventually you're probably going to want to set up a controller once you figure out which one you're going to be using so there's three different types of controllers we can add here we can add a USB an Ethernet and a null the first one a USB be this is typically for AC lights um controllers that use DMX or Lor or vennard you probably wouldn't be using USB if you are using pixels in your light show or you plan to but if you're planning on using AC lights or regular Christmas lights which X lights can program then you'll probably add a USB controller now most of your controllers like um Falcon controllers from Pixel controller um occult boards sand devices a bunch of other ones I'll show on the screen these are going to be the ethernet controllers these are like if you want to say the regular controllers that you'd use for pixels so you could click add Ethernet and it'll add an Ethernet controller right here and give you some settings right here to set up for it you can put in the name of the controller whatever you want to name it so I'll put in let's say main controller and then you can add a description so like this is the main controller for the light show so and then you could select the vendor of the controller so you don't have to do this but if you know which controller you're going to be using you could select the vendor these are all of the different vendors right here the x-light supports if you don't see the vendor on here you just won't be able to get the fancy features uh that I'll go over in a second but for this example I'm going to be using let's say a falcon controller these are a really popular pixel controller and these are the brand of controllers I use in my light show and then you can select the model so Falcon has a bunch of different models I'm gonna go with the F16 V3 because that's the controller I have now most controllers will allow you to add an expansion board to it so if you have an expansion board and you know which one you're going to be using you could select any of these I'm going to select no expansion board right now and then I'm going to select these two check boxes right here the full Excellence control and the auto layout models XLIX has gotten amazing over the years of being able to set up almost all of your controllers right from within X lights back in the old days before this technology existed you had to go and look at the channels and universes and if this doesn't make any sense uh don't worry you don't need to know about any of this now but you'd used to have to go in and put in the ma and manually put in the channels and universes onto each of your controllers for each prop and it was such a pain but xlights has made it very easy nowadays so you can go and drag the props onto the different ports that you'll be using and I'll show that in a second but if this doesn't make any sense basically just know the X lights has made it amazingly easy to do all this and it can't do that unless you give it access to so select all three of these check boxes the auto size one will pop up too once you select the other check box the next setting here is the default Port brightness so you can have X let's automatically tell your controller what brightness to have each of the pixel ports on I'm going to set it to 30 because we use 30 brightness in our light show and you could select if the controller is active and active or Excellence only basically if you want this controller to be in excellence only like you're just setting this up to program or if you're actually going to be using it then you want to be active suppress duplicate frames um what this does is basically if X fights detects two multiple frames where it's the same thing it will just not send the data to the controller for the same thing because it would trust that the controller will just use the data from the old frame um if that doesn't make sense just leave it unchecked you don't have to check that the IP address and multicast right here basically um the IP address this is where you can put in your IP address for the controller if you know what it's going to be if you put this in it will give excites the ability to talk to the controller since it knows its address and where to locate it if you know what your IP address is going to be I recommend you put it in but if you don't right now like you don't have a controller you could just select multicast quick editor note since I didn't go over multicast if that's checked it will basically just search all over your network work for your controller and it won't know the specific address to it so if you can putting in your IP address of the controller on your network is the better option the protocol this is basically what the type of data the controller accepts um a lot of controllers except multiple types of data I'm pretty sure um falconboards can select e131 or it can accept e131 and artnet but the most standard um pixel controllers will use e131 so you could just leave that selected the priority what this does is if multiple computers are sending one controller data it will be able to read both of them but it won't be able to know which one to use for the data from because it's receiving both it won't know which one to use so um if one is set to a higher priority then it will pick that one over the other computer you won't need to worry about this for most beginner shows because you'll only have one computer anyway so just leave this at 100. these are some more or IP address settings right here you don't have to worry about them right now since we have multicast selected but you could put in the IP address or the hostname of the fpp fpp stands for Falcon Pi player it's just the software that you can run on a really small computer called Raspberry Pi and you can use that to send the data out to your uh controller for right now don't worry about it if you ever do set up fpp and you plan to use it I do have some other videos going over how to set it up and I do go over all the settings and Excellence that you have to set up for it start universe so I'm going to try to explain this as quickly and simply as possible but a standard pixel has a red a green and a blue LED inside of it three different LEDs and the pixel could turn on different LEDs at certain intensities to make uh certain colors so like you could turn on the red and blue LED to make purple or turn them all on to make white so since there's three different LEDs in each pixel there's three channels of data that go to each pixel one for the red one for the green and one for the blue each channel can have a different value set to it for how bright the pixel needs to be so basically each pixel takes three channels of data a universe is what holds the channels inside of it and a universe can hold up to 512 channels now most people use 510 channels and the reason for that is because this is divisible by three so one Universe could hold 170 pixels in it now if you were to use 512 channels it would hold 170 uh 0.6666 pixels in it basically and the next Universe would pick up that last channel that isn't included in here now I just recommend leaving it at 5 10 um it's just simpler and you don't have to worry about that now let's say to make numbers easy you have 1 700 pixels in your show if each Universe can hold 170 pixels you're going to need a total of 10 universes because 10 times 170 is 1 700. now if you enable the full exploits control and all these other settings X lights will deal with this for you and it will set it up for you the only thing you have to tell it is the start universe so if you have a controller before this one let's say you have two controllers in your show and that one the first controller is already set up but this one isn't and that one takes 10 universes then you're going to want this controller to start at the 11th universe that way they aren't overlapping and it's its own separate universes now if you have one controller in your show just leave this at one you don't need to adjust this leave it at one and xh will automatically determine how many universes you need and the channels and all that for it be if you select these um full extra control things but that is all the different settings on a controller and X lights and now if you come down here there are some different button buttons um on here some of them you cannot click because um the we did not set the IP address of the controller so it cannot reach the controllers but the visualizer right here this will open up all the ports on the controller so the f-16v3 has 16 ports on it when it's not expanded and what this will allow you to do is your props and elements will show up here so if you have like candy canes or wreath uh let's say like a line of Lights I don't know um it'll allow you to drag them onto the ports in the order that you want them to be connected to the controller to so let's say you have like a line of four candy canes and then a wreath and you want two of the candy canes and then the wreath and then the other two candy canes to be chained together in like that pattern you could drag them onto the port in that order but that's what this does this makes it super easy to tell the controller which props you want on which ports the upload input button this will up upload the input to the controller it will basically tell the controller hey this is the input you're going to be looking for you're going to be looking to receive 10 total universes because there's let's say 1 700 lights you're going to be looking for 10 universes and the channels the amount of channels in each universe is going to be 510 be on the lookout for this this makes it so you don't have to set it up manually and then the upload output that will basically upload everything you set up in the visualizer it'll tell the controller hey you're going to have three candy canes on Port 15 and then you're gonna have two wreaths on port 16 and then you're gonna have um what else is there a couple of arches on Port 12 and it will set up all of the information on the controller for you now some controllers if you don't have them in the vendor list or access just can't they won't be able to upload the output for you and you'll still have to um do that manually but most common controllers excellent will be able to upload the output to for you and then there's some other buttons here like open you can click this and it will open the controller UI for you the user interface if the IP address is put in and the controller is online so if I had my controller plugged in let's say it was on IP address 192.168.1.200 and I put that into X lights I could just click open and it will automatically open a Chrome tab for me or Microsoft Edge whatever your default browser is and take me to the controller UI and then the delete button this will delete the controller um we don't want to do that because we want to save this controller for now and just because I'm going to type in an IP address now so if I do plug in my controller I can access it and the IP address of my controller is usually uh I can't type then the final type of controller you can add over here is add a um null controller this is basically a controller you want to set up just because um but you never want to do anything with it you don't want to send the data anywhere basically something you could just do to add your models to if you want to but you won't ever be able to do anything with this controller and then the final button on this list right here is the Discover button this will look on your internet or on your network your Wi-Fi um for any controllers and it will put them on here for you I don't have any controllers plugged in right now so this wouldn't do anything but if you had a controller plugged in and you don't know the IP address of it you can hit discover and it will search your network for it and then once you're done adding your controller or controllers depending on how many you have you can hit save and it'll save it and that is the entire controllers tab now before we move on to the next tab the layout tab I'm going to go over what all these different buttons up here at the very top do so let's get started with the fire one this one has some different buttons on here it will allow you to create a new sequence you can open a sequence open a recent sequence um there are some test sequences I have in here that I was using earlier if you had a sequence open you could also click these other buttons like save the setup save the sequence as um a file close the sequence preferences I'm going to come back to this because there's a lot of different settings in here that I'm going to go over um in just a few minutes sequence settings you could also click this if you had a sequence open this will allow you to go through and change any of the settings in the sequence keybinds um this basically tells you what um keybinds do what um feature and then you could change some of them on here too or add some um in my default Xbox folder I have a lot of these changed to how I like them but you could just go through here and look at the different things they do export house preview video what this will do is if you have a sequence open you can click this and it will export a video of what that sequence will look like for you and put it into uh mp4 file or some type of video file for you and then you can share it or look at it or do whatever you want with it I find this very useful because whenever I want to upload a video of the lights what I've been working on I don't have to just screen record it I can click this and it'll export a video for me select show folder this is the same Button as change the show folder it will allow you to change your show folder and it could show you also the recent show folders like I had my Halloween and the regular Christmas one open backup if you click this it will create a backup of all of your things in exercise any sequences any settings any um like saved effect presets which I'll go over later in the video what those are it will save any of that you can restore a backup so you can go back like if you made a backup two days ago and you want to go back to that you could restore that under the edit menu there are some um Regular editing buttons you have your undo there would be a redo button here if you clicked undo you can cut copy paste these usually only work when you have a sequence open um shift effects if you have a sequence open again you can click this and it will allow you to shift all of the effects in the sequence by however many milliseconds you want so you could type in like a hundred thousand uh milliseconds and that'd be 100 seconds if you update your audio file let's say or like it the audio moves two seconds for some reason if you had to change it you could click this and move all of your work for all the effects two seconds in that direction too and then shift selected effects you can select um effects that you want to shift so you could click this and it'll shift all those like it does with if the facts only the ones that you have selected and then color replace this will replace any certain color that you select with a different color for either every selected effect or every single effect in the sequence so if I wanted every yellow color with my selected effects to switch to White this is what I could do I could click this and it'll open a little menu to do that with under Tools there are a lot of different things I'm not going to go over all of them I'm just going to go over the ones you could probably use the test button this will open this testing menu where you can connect it to your controller and if you had any lights plugged in or you had you had to have you have to have your universes and channels and all that setup but it will test the lights that you want it to check sequence this will check your sequence for any problems some other ones you might use the batch render what this will do is it allow you to select any sequences you want that you've made and render them all fpp connect this will allow you to connect to your Falcon player if you are using one it will also allow you to upload any sequences any media uh songs videos anything to that fpp so you don't have to manually upload them bulk controller upload this will upload all the settings you have for your controllers to whatever controllers you select this is useful if you have lots of controllers in your show now a lot of these other different menus are for more advanced stuff which you probably won't be using if this is your first time using X lights so to save another 20 minutes from the video I'll just skip to the last bottom view these last three buttons down here these open different apps that are included like I showed when you install X lights this opens X schedule and now I'm gonna be honest my knowledge stops at X capture I am not fully sure what x capture does I'm not even going to attempt to explain what this does because I really don't know what it does another editor note I looked up what this does it's basically a tool that allows you to take data that would be coming from another program called Gladiator and it can detect that data and turn it into an fscq file which is the main file your program is stored in that you make in xlights and that way you can upload it to fpp or X scheduler if you wanted to use those um don't ever worry about having to learn fully what this does uh you won't need it and that is um everything that's important in the tools menu and then in the view menu you could zoom in and out of the sequencer view once once we're over there I'll show you what that looks like you could reset toolbars um you could show the AC lights toolbar so this will show any AC lights effects that you can use I don't know what they do because I don't use AC lights and X lights you can also show some other AC light settings perspectives this is basically when you get into the sequencer tab there's some different Windows Alma you could select which ones you want to be open and then you could save it as like a default perspective or if you want to switch to another one you could switch and then Windows once you're in the sequencer tab these are all the different Windows you can have open audio this allows you to change the speed of your audio track that you are listening to so you could speed it up a lot um you could slow it down so if you're trying to precisely sequence something you could slow the audio down to a quarter speed so you can listen to it very slowly you could change the volume level to very quiet quiet medium silent I keep it on loud which is normal right here at import you can import effects if you had the sequencer open and then the final menu The Help menu um this gives you a lot of resources for help like the user manual tip of the day if you want to look at that Zoom this will open um Zoom not like zoom in anything the Zoom app video conference app exploits has their own Zoom room you can join if you're having any problems there's usually a couple people in there that can help you you could share your screen and if you can't set something up right or you you're unsure what to do there's a lot of people in there that span into this hobby for years and they can help you fix almost any problem the keybinds this once again opens your keybinds except this you can't edit them on this page this just shows you which keybinds do what and then some other things like video tutorials if you click this this will take you to the excite video um website where they have a ton of tutorials on there for X lights release notes um this will show you any updates so like if I click this this will show me every single update that's been added to X lights since I think 2017 if we scroll all the way down nope past 2017 uh 2016 and then back when they went by version four and then three and two and all that then they have a Facebook page where you can also go for help or updates about X lights um they have a donate button if you like the software and you'd like to give back you can donate you can click check for updates and it'll tell you if there's any new updates and then you can click about and this is like their privacy policy and all the legal stuff if you want to call it that going back over to the file I'm going to go through the preferences the preferences menu is a menu where you could change a bunch of settings based on how you would like them to be set up the first tab we have up here is the backup tab xlights always tries to make sure that you never lose any of your work because sequencing can take a very long time and if you lose it all it's the biggest pain in the butt to redo it all so xlitz has a system to back up all of your files in a backup folder that way if XBox crashes anything that you have is saved within that backup folder which is inside your main show folder so you can have it back up on Save and backup on launch backup on save you usually don't have to check that that is at that is making a lot of backups every time you save a sequence it's going to back your entire folder up I don't really recommend checking that you don't need to have it back up that often but back up on launch that's what I do recommend checking anytime you launch X lights it will create a new backup and then backup subfolders please make sure you check this because if your sequences are held within another folder inside your main folder that is not going to be backed up it will only back up the files directly in the main show folder unless you click backup subfolders so make sure you click that and then Purge backups you can select how often the backups will be deleted anything older than 7 30 90 or 360 days you can choose to purge or you could choose the never Purge backups but I purge backups older than 360 days that's worked out fine for me and then backup directory you can select it for use show folder or you can unselect this and select your own backup folder I just leave this check this always works for me and if you want an alternative backup directory you could browse one and make your directory here the view tab this is a couple settings that you can adjust for how you like like your views with things tool icon size that is like the size up here of all these different effects that you'll use in the sequencer tab you can make up small medium large extra large I leave everything on small you can adjust the model handle size the effect assist window which I'll go over later when we get the sequencing you could select that to be always on and open always off or Auto toggle I never use it so I leave it always off and if you're new to this you'll probably never use that window either so leave it always off show play controls on preview what this does is if you open your house preview to see what it looks like in full screen it will give you the option the play the pause the stop button within that window and then Auto Show House preview this one it's a little bit annoying when you check this anytime you go to play the sequence it will automatically show your house preview but when you stop the sequence to go and adjust things the house preview will go away so it's out of your way and that gets very annoying because when you're pausing and playing the secret quotes it'll keep coming on and off and on and off so I don't usually check this in here are some settings that might look a little bit confusing the only ones you might want to adjust are like Snap two timing marks when you make your timing marks to move the effects near you could check this and it will snap them to the timing marks and then some other settings you might want to change all of this is usually fine to leave on default the only thing you might want to change is the auto save interval which is right here this is how often it auto saves please turn on auto save turn it on no matter what even if it's annoying because xlights does crash frequently especially with slower computers and if you have auto save disabled and you forget to save for like an hour and you spend a whole hour working you are going to be so mad when you lose that progress I've had that happen to me so many times so please at least set some interval to auto save I leave mine right at three minutes and that always is fine for me it doesn't bug me too much just make sure you have it set to at least some thing for basic stuff you probably won't need any to change any of the settings under output check sequence what this does is um you can just disable certain things Xbox will look for when you have it check your sequence X6 has a feature where you can check your sequences for certain things that aren't working random effects um what this does is there's a feature in excellence where you can have it create random effects for your um sequence for certain sections or the whole thing this allows you to select which effects you wanted to use and which ones you don't want it to use you probably won't be using Create random effects but if you do you can go through here and select which effects you want to work and which ones you don't want it to select colors under here this allows you to change colors of certain items in X lights for example like your timing tracks you could change what colors they show up as you can change the colors of like Words If you import lyrics um phrases and a whole bunch of other things I've never changed these I just use the default colors and then under other there are a few things I'd recommend looking at or changing depending on what you want the bottom part right here tip of the day you could select for exercise to give you a tip of the date if you wanted to and what level you want it to be to and then the other one I'd recommend um setting is your email address and putting in an email address right here you don't have to do that but what this does is if for some reason X flights crashes and they want to figure out why that bug happened they might want to reach out to you and ask if you could give them any files from what happened to see if they could fix it so if you put in your email they will have a way to reach out to you I've never heard in my time of using X lights that they've had reach out to someone with their email in here so you really don't have to put this in here they might never use it but I do just in case for some crazy reason they have to and that is all of the uh preferences that you should probably take a look at that you might want to change the other ones are pretty Advanced and you probably wouldn't be needing to change them much on a basic level level so once you're done with this you can hit okay and now that is all the menus so now we can move on to the layout tab so in the layout tab this is where you design or set up what your layout will look like you can drag any one of these props or any custom props that aren't here onto your layout right here and make it look like how your house is going to look how you plan on having it look or whatever you want so if you already know exactly what you want like you want a certain number of candy canes wreaths trees arches whatever you can set that up right now but if you don't know what your house is going to look like and you don't have a plan yet you just want to design some stuff and see how it'll look you could still do that and sequence a song and you could go back into it later and add new props or get rid of old props and it won't mess up anything in your sequence other than what's programmed on that prop so if I program a whole sequence and then later I'm like oh I wanted to add a tree and some certain spot I can still add the tree but I just have to go back through the sequences and add effects to the tree but you don't have to have any specific plan you could just start designing what you want your house look like right now even if you don't know that's what it'll look like so the first thing I should go over for when you're making your layout there are two options you have you can have it in either 2D which it's in right now you just can't see anything because there's no pictures or props yet or you can have it in 3D by checking this 3D box and then it puts this little grid down and you can move with your mouse around and take a look at your house you can upload like a model of your house here a picture of your house and looking at your light show like this is a lot cooler than 2D for example this is my Christmas layout and it's in 3D and it's so cool because I can move around the entire house however I want and I can see the light show from completely different angles like I have some saved viewpoints and I'll get over how to do these later like if you're driving West on our road this is how I'll look if you're looking at the house driving West if you're driving east if you're coming around our Corner that we have down the road what the house will look like so you can create so many different previews and it looks awesome the only problem is setting up a 3D layout is extremely difficult and way more challenging than 2D I only started using 3D last year and the reason why was because I had a lot of layers of props like things in front of other things and it was starting to get hard to look at it from 2D but making the model for my house was very hard because I have no experience with 3D modeling and you have to know all of that and how to import uh models and pictures so if you're new to all this I'd recommend just sticking to 2D because 2D still works perfectly fine and it still lets you preview your house like if you were standing in front of it so I won't be going over how to set up 3D but if that's something you're interested in then you can check out this video right up here I've made about how to use 3D and X lights but the first thing you want to do for 2D is you're going to want to set a background image and you don't have to do this but I really recommend it it makes it a lot easier to put your props on it so you come over here to background image and you click it and you click these three little dots and you can go through your files and find a picture sure so I have a picture of my house right here this is a bit of an older picture So eventually I'm gonna have to update it but with your picture here you can click this fill button and it will fill in the entire box if you wanted to um if you look it only stretches it a little bit because I have my layout size set to um 1280 by 720 which is HD and these extra bars are only because of how I have the screen stretch right here but if I move this out all the way it will eventually fit so you could set the resolution that you want for your preview um I'd recommend just leaving it 1280 by 720 that works fine and then another thing I do is I reduce the brightness by a lot because it makes it look like it's night time so let's go down to 30. when I'm actually programming I have the brightness down to four or five and I can still see the house decently well but it's very dark so it looks like it's night time there are some other settings down here but you don't really have to worry about it just once you have your image up here you can start adding your props to it so I'm gonna get started adding some of these models and I'm going to start um over here and I'm going to start with the Arches now the way you add a prop is you click the element once so like if I click the arch um it's selected and then you click anywhere on the layout where you want this Arch and I'll just click it here for now and then it gives you the option to move it and I'm holding left click right now so I can adjust it wherever I want I'll just leave it there for now because we can move it later that red line at the bottom that tells you if it's level or not so right now it's level I'm going to let go of left click and then it created this Arch and now I have a lot of settings over here that I can go through and adjust so for this Arch I can move it by left clicking it and I'm holding left click and I'm moving around and I can click any of these boxes to adjust the size of it and I'm holding left click right now to adjust it and then you can click and hold this top box to make it a really tall Arch or a shorter Arch if you want to zoom in to the entire picture of your house without any model selected you can use your scroll wheel to zoom in and zoom out and if you want to move the picture side to side you can hold down your scroll wheel and move your mouse so I can zoom in here and then I'm holding my scroll wheel and I'm moving it to the side and then if you want to get it back to where it was you can right click the picture or anywhere on here and hit reset and then it'll bring it back to here so before I put this Arch where I want it I'm going to go over the different settings that you have right here to adjust with the arch all of your models will show up right here and you can click the different ones to adjust each one the first setting at the top is the name so you can name it whatever you want I'm just going to leave it at arches for now and then this you could click this button right here and this will enable it to be a layered Arch so there are different types of arches that you can buy they have a single one like I have here and then they have layered ones where there's multiple layers in each Arch so let's say I have like a three ring Arch so I could click this box in some extra settings are given to me and let let's set the layers to not 33 layers so right now the arch is set to have 52 pixels or nodes they call them nodes and X lights and the 50 are in the first ring and then there's two others in the second and third rings that um I haven't specified how many pixels are in those rings yet so I could go into this layers plus sign click that this little drop down comes and I can select how many pixels I want in each layer so I could let's just do 50 for each and see how that looks so the pixels are a little bit more dense in the um middle because they are closer together whereas the outside ones are spread more apart but now I have a three ring Arch right here however I just want to be on one single ring arch for now so I'm going to click unclick the layered Arch button and then the nodes per Arch that is how many pixels are in the arch so I have a arches that have 50 pixels in them so I'm gonna set mine to 50 and then there's another a setting right here number of arches this is how many arches you want Total within this one Arch model so I could set this to three and now it created three arches and I can make them a little bigger like that and there are still 50 pixels per Arch because I have the nodes per Arch set to 50. the next setting is lights per node um this is basically how many lights there are within the pixel and I'm not talking about how the three LEDs inside pixel red green blue that wouldn't count here what I'm talking about is there are different types of Lights sold such as these ones in this picture where each group of Lights is technically only one pixel so these lights right here even though there's three lights within this segment it's only one pixel because the data controls all three in that section now those lights can all be any different color but they have to be the same color as the rest within that module because it's only one pixel in that segment so this allows you if you have three lights in one pixel this would allow you to set that so it gives you the proper number of how many like lights you'd see but most standard pixels that you would probably buy only has one light per pixel this is the pixel and it counts as one light the next setting is the arc degree so um if I didn't want this to be a perfect arch I could set this to a lower number like one let's say 160 and it shrinks it a little bit and I can make it go even lower like a hundred and it keeps shrinking the arch the way my arches are set up they're not a perfect 180 degrees they're slightly less so I usually leave mine at 170 and this works about fine for me right here the arch tilt is how much it tilts to one side so I could put in like 10 and now tilt this way and I can put a negative sign in front of it and it will tilt the other way and I can make it tilt a lot or if I don't want it toting at all I could just leave it at zero the gap between arches um the higher this number is the more of a gap there is between each Arch so if your arches aren't perfectly next to each other you could put in a number there and make it a little bit of a gap next the starting location this is where the input of the pixel data will go and the direction you want the pixels going so there's two options the green and the blue square so this is the green square right here and if I put it here that means this end of the pixels needs to be plugged into the controller and the data will flow this way through the Arches or I could choose the blue square and then have the data flow the other way the next setting is the controller this is where you can select which controller you want the pixels to go on or you can use um the start Channel which is basically if you were to do it manually and type in the channels and universes like I talked about earlier the main controller this is the one we programmed or we set up back here here in the controller tab right here but for now I'm just going to leave it in no controller we don't have to have it plugged into a controller for now since we're not actually doing anything with this layout we're not going to be sending any of this data to the pixels individual start channels is um another setting you'd have to use if you were doing the setup manually where you put in the universes and channels but since we're going to be doing letting X lights do everything for us we're not gonna have to use this now there are some other settings down here but most of them you won't need to use I'll only go over the important ones um you can set a description if you wanted to so like what these arches are for like I could say these are The Arches for the yard if I wanted to yard yard I yeah these are The Arches for the yiard then the preview setting right here this is um basically what preview you want these arches to go to so you can make multiple previews up here with multiple different angles of your house but usually one works fine maybe if you're on like a corner property you might need to make another preview so you could create another preview and then you can have these arches set to go to whatever preview you want I just leave it on default um and when you're using 3D you don't have to use previews so I've never had to use previews before the other two that are here are the all models so all the models will show up on this one preview no matter what and then the unassigned preview any models that have not been assigned to a preview will just go there if you don't mess with the preview button they'll always go on to this default preview so if you don't need multiple previews just leave it alone another setting right here that you might use is the sub model setting um basically what this allows you to do it opens this pop-up window when you click the three dots to edit it it allows you to break the model down into pieces so like I could have half this RGB one section and the other half be another section and create it on here with the sub models and be able to control them differently and it makes sequencing a little easier if you ever need to do that usually that's only done with bigger props like trees I think some people might do it with big wreaths now sub models is somewhat Advanced and you usually don't need it if you're just trying to make a basic sequence so I'm not going to cover how to set it up in this video but I am planning a video in the future where I'll go over just how to use sub models but moving on the next tab we have on the settings for the Arches is the controller connections this is basically where we tell xlights which port and protocol we're going to be using for the controller that these arches are going to you don't have to set this up and when you're using X lights and letting X lights do all the work it will do this for you so you won't have to mess with these settings the next section is string properties this is where you tell xlights what type of pixels these are um there are a whole bunch of different options right here most pixels that you buy will be called RGB pixels and it shows it right here RGB there are other pixels such as rbgbr grb brg g b gr and it can be a little confusing but the RGB or whatever the three little letters are stands for the order of the colors how the chip inside the pixel tells which colors to light up so RGB stands for red green blue that means the order of the picks of the colors in the pixel will be going red green blue so if we go back to the three channels that go to each pixel if I was to turn on channel one one would go to the red pixel because if you put it in order one to Red two to Green and three to Blue but if I was to turn and the third Channel and was using let's say gbr pixels the color order for those are green blue red so instead of the blue light turning on when I turn on the third channel the redder light would turn on when I turn on the third Channel basically all you need to know out of all of this is look at the type of your pixels you have and they should say what type of color order they are and just select which one you use these are the top most common ones right here these top six and from almost every place you buy pixels they would be RGB when you leave it on RGB you won't have to mess with these other two settings either because um there's no need to since they're just regular default pixels if you want to call that next is appearance um here you could select some different appearance armor features for the Arches like I can make the pixel sizes bigger right now it's two I can up it to like 10 and now the pixels are giant you could if we zoom in see how big they are or I can put them back to two I can select the pixel style so I can make instead of them being a smooth Circle let's make it a little bigger so you can see it um I could make it a square so each of the pixels are squares I can make it a solid Circle so they're not smooth and I can make it a blended Circle so it looks like this I use smooth because that's like what the default is and I think that's what looks the best you could set the transparency of the Arches so how much stuff you could see behind it so if I put it at 50 which is half you can now see half the props behind it or half the light coming from the props the other setting you might want to change is the tag color so basically when you're in the sequencer and you're looking for the prop on the list of models when you're sequencing you can make it have separate colors so they stand out more if you leave it on black it will have no color and it'll just be in the list I've never changed these colors before and I always just leave them on black but if you want to have colors for certain props so you know like anything yellow is maybe something from the yard and anything green is something on the roof you you could do something like that and the final one is size and location this is the coordinates basically of where um on the layout the prop is the Z coordinate when you're in 2D you will never have to worry about it because the Z is the distance from front to back going back and forth which you never use because we're in 2D so 2D is X which is horizontal this way and Y which is vertical this way you can also add some rotation and adjust a few other settings and then this locked button right here when you click that it locks it so you cannot move the prop I highly recommend once you're done setting up everything you lock your props because I've gone into my layout multiple times and accidentally just clicked something and moved it and then I have to go back through and get it exactly where I wanted it and it's so annoying so you could check this to lock it and unlock it now for each individual element that's in this list the controller connections and anything below it is always going to be the same settings for each thing you will have the different options and they'll all be the same across all models the only thing that might have different settings is up here depending on which prop it is so now I'm going to right click the arch up here and I'm going to delete this model and I'm going to now go through the rest of them next in line is the candy canes so I click it once and then I can drag and make candy canes they come in sets of three when you make them but you could change this in a second and one other thing I forgot to mention if you double click the prop that you want up here you could keep dragging and every time you click somewhere it's just going to make more and more candy canes but um we don't need all these candy canes so I'm going to delete the action ones and you have to click this again when you don't want to make new candy canes because if you don't and you want to go to click to like highlight props and select certain amount of props you will just keep creating more candy canes so here are the settings for the candy canes you can select the name like you could with the Arches and then you can select how many canes are in here so right now it's set for three I can make it one candy cane now it's a one big one or I can make it 10 candy canes now it's 10 small ones but I could adjust the size of it I'm gonna leave it at three next is the nodes per cane so how many pixels are in each candy cane so we can make this a higher number if we want more pixels um I think 30 that looks pretty nice right there lights per node this is the same as the Arches that I talked about how you can have multiple pixels in or multiple lights inside of one pixel we can adjust the height right here so we can make this like shorter or we can make it taller um I'm gonna leave it at one because that looked all right not 41 just one because that looked good we can select the cane rotation so like how much it leans one way or the other so if I like set this to 20 it leans a lot this way I can make it even more um not 2050 just 50. so it means a lot this way you can reverse the candy canes so instead of the hook going to the right we can make it go to the left like this by just clicking this reverse button we could change the candy canes to sticks so all they are are just sticks that go up and down these are kind of like the peace Stakes if you've ever seen those before you could use this to set those up and then we can uncheck that for it to be um back to candy canes the next button alternate nodes this is a very useful one um because this determines the wiring for the candy cane so it would be wired to go from the bottom up to the top but then the problem is you you're ending pigtail for your pixels will be here so it would look weird having a wire hang from there so if you click this it doesn't change anything you see but what it changes is the wiring view which I'll show you in a little bit after we're done with the rest of the props if you look at the wiring view the pixels will go instead of one two three four five it'll go one skip this one two skip this one three so go back and forth and then when it gets to the top it'll go back and skip the other holes so the beginning and the end wiring are at the bottom it's something that's very useful if you don't want wires hanging from the ends of the cane and then the rest of the settings below here are the exact same as the Arches um if you click the starting location you could change if it starts at the green square then goes through to the blue square or you could select the blue square and then have to go to the green square and that's all the settings for the candy canes next we have Channel block and what this is this is how you add AC lights regular Christmas lights into the layout like I've said before I haven't used AC lights in X lights so I don't know how to set up anything AC related I think what you do here and I may be wrong so don't quote me on this but you select how many um number of lights are in the strand of AC lights and you could select the color for what strand it is and if the colors change you could select them here just know if you plan on adding AC lights into the layout but you're not sure which controllers to buy yet there are no pixel controllers out there that can also run AC lights AC lights and pixels are very different because AC lights take a very high voltage they take 120 volts which is what you'd usually get from an outlet inside your house whereas pixels take 12 volt DC power it's completely different so you would need to buy a separate controller if you want to run AC lights in your light show next we have the circle you can click this and make a circle so kind of like a wreath if you have a wreath you could use this you could select the number of strings and the number of strings is how many times the prop connects to the controller so let's say you have a very big circle of like 500 pixels and you don't want all 500 pixels being plugged into one port because that's a little difficult to do for reasons such as power injection if you don't know what that is don't worry we'll get into that in a different video so this allows you to select multiple connections to the controller so if I was to set like three that means there's going to be three three different strands of pixels in here connected to three different ports on the controller but it will still make one Circle they just will be different strands you won't be able to tell when you're watching it or programming it it's just how the wiring is in the back you can select the number of nodes or pixels per string so if there's three connections to the controller how many pixels are gonna be on each connection if there's 50 50 times 3 is 150 so that would mean there'd be 150 pixels on here if I want more pixels in this circle I could just say like a hundred and now there's a lot there this next setting Center percentage you only need to set this up if you have multiple layers in the circle so if I wanted this to be like the Arches example where I had three rings and the one Arch I could do the same thing and have three rings or more on this wreath so let's type in three just to make this easy and you'll see now we have the center ring in these two two outer Rings if you click the plus sign next to the layers you can select how many pixels are in each layer so let's just type a hundred and now you'll see there are 100 pixels in each circle part now this Center percentage is how far the distance is between the rows or the layers in the circle so if I set this to a higher number there's less room between each circle so this makes like a pretty nice looking wreath that we could put like if we shrink this down a little bit like right there between the windows and then starting location this is like the green and blue box setting except it's a little different so here are the different options and like if we were to choose top outer and CCW which stands for counterclockwise let me just start at the top outer ring and go counterclockwise around then into the middle ring around then into the last ring and around we can choose top outer clockwise top inner counterclockwise top enter clockwise bottom outer bottom outer and a bunch of other ones and then the rest of the settings are are once again the same like they will be in all of the elements that you can add next we have the create new Cube this one is going to look a little weird since we're in 2D you won't be able to tell what it is but this is a 3D cube so if we would quickly to switch to 3D now you could see how it's a cube and I'm moving around um you can see it's Cube shaped like button 2D you can't really tell that it's a cube so setting these up in 2D might be a little hard but you can see I think these pixels the farther lower they go the farther back they are the different settings in this one is uh the start location we can adjust that so the front bottom left front bottom right um diff you could pick different parts where you want the wiring to start we could change the direction so how the pixels will go um I'm just gonna leave this in 3D quickly so I could show you how it would look that way I think this might be a little easier to explain so let's imagine this is the front face right here this is the right side and this is the top we could do vertical front to back so I'm assuming this one would go up down in the vertical and then move back a layer and do the same thing and then we can do vertical left to right so like it probably start on the side go up and down this way and then work its way back and then we can have it stack then we could choose the Strand style so if there's zigzag no zigzag um if it alternates and then if all the layers start at the same place these four settings were for the wiring aspect of it but the rest is how many pixels are in it so we could have the height the width and the depth adjusted so if I change the depth to like 10 now it's more of a rectangle shape we could change the height to 10 and we could change the width to 10 and now it's a very dense Cube um with lots of pixels in it and once again you could choose the number of strings so how many times it connects to the controller so this Cube would have a thousand pixel in it so let's say we want like four connections with the controller we could type in four and then it'll be 250 pixels across four ports it doesn't change how this looks at all it just changes the wiring part of it and then the rest of the settings are all the same as everything else is next we have the custom one when you drag this out it doesn't make anything um all this is is if you want to make your own custom prop you click the model data right here and then you basically select these little dots um which pixels you want to light up so let's make this like a hundred by a hundred scale size let's see and we make this a bit bigger let's make this the full screen so we can see it then we would go through with all these different um holes and so like just basically draw the shape of our prop now this is another Advanced thing so I'm not going to go over this in this video you probably also won't be making custom models if this is your your first time um running a light show the other two settings you can adjust on here is the number of strings how many connections to the controller it makes again and you can also add a background image to it if you wanted to next one is another um Advanced one I'm not even going to put it on here this is just basically any item that takes DMX data such as a moving headlight like the ones you see in Tom bet George's amazing light show uh servos so like Motors they can move back and forth anything that has like actual Parts moving or floodlights that use DMX um don't ask why you can just create a skull I'm not going to be covering any of this though because I guarantee you you're not going to be spending thousands of dollars on moving headlights if this is your first light show because that would be really Overkill but actually everything we do in this hobby is overkill so if you do spend tens of thousands of dollars on moving heads good for you I'm not going to judge you but moving on um the next one we have is create an image this is not a pixel prop all this is is if you wanted to add an image somewhere in here so you drag it out then you select your image um let me just pick a random image oh yeah so Random picture of a donut that's what we will pick I found this random picture of a donut on my computer so we could just drag a random picture of a donut anywhere we want um yeah let's let's put a giant picture of a donut on the roof because that's what we would do for a Christmas light show next we have icicles um which are self-explanatory the options for settings over here um you can adjust the number of strings once again the number of connections to the controller the number of pixels or nodes per connection to the controller and then the drop pattern so what this is is how the drop pattern looks so it's set for three four five four so there's three pixels then four pixels then five pixels then four and then it repeats itself so if you have something different like let's say I don't know four uh six five seven that's a really random one you can set that up too and you just put it in you put a comma between each number and then then they have the alternate nodes box again that you can check and that will make it skip the nodes so the wiring doesn't hang down from the bottom it will go like let's say for this seven one it will start here at this top one bounce down to this one this is pixel number two number three number four then go back up number five number six number seven that way there's no wiring hanging down below it and then you can also choose the green square or the blue square for the start of the wiring and then like always all of the other settings are the same next we have the Matrix this is a really cool one because this allows you to make screens in your light show if you want to you could put together really dense matrixes and have like videos be able to play over them and be able to see text or anything if you have a TV in your light show which I know like a lot of people put a TV in their window you would use the Matrix to set that up and you just make it a really dense Matrix if you're also using a panel in your light show you do use a matrix to set this up the first setting is the direction whether it's horizontal or vertical so do we want the wiring to go this way back and forth or do we want the wiring to go this way you could choose alternate nodes um once again so the wiring ends up on one side and then you can choose the number of times this is connected to the controller the way this is set up right now is each one of these different strands they're 50 pixels long they will each have their own connection to the controller so this will be one port two ports three ports four ports five ports so on and so forth you could select the number of pixels per string and then the strands per string is how many times the each string will zigzag before it ends so if I set this to three the this one strand will go this way then this way then this way and be one strand so it's going to make it very dense um vertically and it's actually yelling at me because 3 does not divide into 50 evenly and we must select an even number so if we pick five um that works better so now basically if you look it's very dense vertically and there are still 16 connections to the controller and each connection zigzags back and forth five times while using all 50 pixels so that means there's 10 rows of pixels now if we did some adjusting with the settings we can make this a really dense screen I could set that if I really wanted to to 1280 and then select the number of strings to 720 and I am going to crash it okay didn't crash this is a miracle and now we have this super dense screen this is the equivalent to an HD screen this would take so many pixels and the only way I'd recommend doing this is if you add panels or a TV and if you have a TV you should not use the resolution of the TV in here so if it's like a 4K TV do not make it so that this is equivalent to 4K X lights will not be able to handle it your computer will not be able to handle it and this will be the end result the projector that we use in our light show that is an HD projector it can go up to 1920 by 1080 for pixels in it I had it set so it only went 170 something pixels by 90 pixels and that still made my computer run very slow when I had to render it and then you could select the start location um which corner you want the wiring to start for if you were to wire this massive Beast together and have millions of dollars to buy millions of pixels and then there is this setting called the low definition factor I've actually never messed with this before I don't even remember this being here so this might be a new feature um I am not sure what it does though but it looks like the number can range from one all the way to a hundred so I'm not sure what that does but it's there the next item we have is probably the most basic item that you'll use all the time in your layout it is the single line and it's basically what it says in the name it creates a single line of pixels super simple you could use this to outline a fence you could use it to outline your roof literally anything where a single line of pixels that doesn't really need to be bent would be used over here in the settings it is super simple to set up you have the number of strings the number of connections of the controller how many times you want it to plug into the controller you have the number of nodes or pixels a strand so we can up this to like 100 if we want 100 pixels there we can make it a ton like 300 and then you can't even tell where the pixels are because there's so many and then you could set the starting location for the wiring if you wanted to start at the green or the blue square the green squares here and the blue squares there and then like always for the 100th time all the other settings are the same next we have the polyline which is basically a single line but multiple of them so what you do is you click to start the line and you can make the first line and then when you want that line to end you click where you want to end and it'll create a new line and you could keep doing this over and over and over so for example I could outline the roof with this polyline by going like that and then touching this corner touching that corner coming over here and touching about there and then back down to here so once you're done placing your final line it will still want to make a new line so once you're done you can push escape to stop creating lines now for the settings on here the first one is how many nodes are in it the number of pixels in it so we could set this to like 200 or maybe even more because that's a little that's not that dense so let's try like 300 that looks about good um the number of Lights per node so how many lights are in the pixel like I went over before the number of connections to the controller the number of strings and the start location whether you want to start the green or the blue square if we start the green square the wiring is going to go this way and if we start the blue square the wire is going to go this way the drop pattern is how many pixels if any you want to drop kind of like icicles so I could make this three and now it's like three sections of pixels so there's three rows on top of each other um I'm gonna just leave it at one for a single line if you did have multiple you could select alternate drop node so it will go back and forth um like I went over with the icicles that way your wiring is always on top or bottom or wherever you want it to be the height is how far you want the rows to be spread apart so I could put in the number like four and I will spread it out and then the bigger the number the bigger the Gap individual segments this check box right here is if you want each of these segments of lines to have individual pixel numbers so you could check this box and then if you click this little plus button right here where it says individual segments it will show each segment that you have up here so let's say on the left and right we want there to be 20 pixels on each of those sides we could do that and then let's say on the top and bottom so segment one one is the bottom right here and segment three is the top right here let's say we want segment one to have 200 pixels but we want the top to have less so we could type in 100 pixels and now each of the segments have their own number of pixels and then the rest of the settings you have the string properties appearance size location all the same as the other ones next we have the sphere and this is again another hard prop to show in 2D but when you make it it's supposed to look like a sphere in 2D you it's kind of hard to tell if I was to switch to 3D you could see that this is a 3D sphere right here for the sphere settings you could set how many degrees you want the sphere to be so if it's 360 it will make a complete circle if it's 180 it will be half a circle so if we switch to two or 3D you can see that this sphere is half of a circle we could set the Southern and Northern latitude which is basically how close it comes to a point at the bottom so if I was to change this to like let's say 40 it doesn't come as close close at the top but for the upper value you can only go up to 89 for how close it can get so we can make it a little less close like 70 and we can make the bottom A Little Less close by doing negative 70. so now it doesn't come to a complete point at the top or the bottom but that could be a good thing because when you're wiring props it can be very hard to get a ton of pixels in a small space so if you already have a frame or some sort of a prop Built For This you might want to look at it and see how close the pixels come at the top so you can know what to set the latitude to next we have the number of strings the number of connections to the controller if you want this only make one connection to the controller we could set it to one now you'll notice it's only one singular line right here for the sphere where you can set the total nodes a string so let's say we want a hundred um it's going to be a very dense line but then we can adjust the strands per string so how many times it zigzags back and forth and we can use this to make it circular again let's say like 20 times 20 was a bit too much let's try 10 and there we go now it zigzags back and forth 10 times using all 100 pixels total for the starting location we could choose the top left or right and the bottom left or right and then that is all these settings for the sphere next we have the spinner which um I'm not really sure how to describe it it looks kind of like a fan almost if you wanted to say the settings for this are how many connections to the controller we have it for one how many arms there are per connection to the controller so right now there's five we could up this to ten so now there's 10 arms if we were to add another string so two connections to the controller there'd be a total of 20 arms because there's 10 per connection to the controller so if I was to change this to two now there's a lot more then you could choose how many lights there are per arm so right now there's 10 pixels in each arm and we could up that to like 20 if we wanted to the start angle you could put this in if you don't want this to be be perfectly aligned because right now the top and bottom they're perfectly up and down but we can um adjust this let's say if we put in 10 it will tilt it a little bit to the side and we could keep tilting it if we wanted to like 20 so it's uh let's try 15 that looks like it'll be more in the middle nope let's try 17 and that looks about for the middle of it to be between these two arms but now the left and right arms they are perfectly straight we can adjust how hollow we want it to be in the middle so if we want the pixels to be farther away from the middle we can up this number to like 40 so now they're farther away or you can put them super close like putting in a number like five and now they get really close to each other the arc setting tells it if this makes a full circle so if it's at 360 it will make a full circle but if we put it like 180 it will do a half circle we could do a quarter of a circle by putting a 90 we could do three quarters of a circle by putting in 270 or we could just leave it 360 for a complete circle then we have the start location um for where the wiring comes in you can have it start at the center going counterclockwise the center going clockwise the end going counterclockwise the end going clockwise then the center alternate counterclockwise and the center alternate clockwise and then you can also check this box if you want the wiring to zigzag and that is all the settings for the spinner next prop we have is the star um is exactly what it says in the name the settings for this are the number of connections to the controller one connection the number of strings the number of pixels per string number of nodes um let's set that to a bigger number let's try 200 that looks pretty good A nice Dense Star the number of points in the star how many different points you want in the start right now it's five we can up that to like seven which is a really weird number eight if you wanted to you can make it four you can make it two if you wanted to but then that looks weird there's a ton of different settings for the starting location so you can look at these there's some like the top Center counterclockwise top Center clockwise top um Center counterclockwise on the inside um multiple different ones I'll let you look through those you can adjust how many layers there are in the star so if it's one layer or multiple layers like we can make it three different layers when you do this it will only add one pixel into the two other layers so we have to click the layers button and adjust how many pixels are in each layer so we could put like 50 in each layer let's see how that looks it looks like the outer layers might need a lot more pixels in them to make them look better so let me adjust that the outer to Inner ratio is basically how close the um corner of the star goes to the middle so if we like lower this number the point will be basically very far away we can up the number a ton and that will make the Stars Point um Corners go very close to the middle um 2.62 that is the normal star ratio that this is left at the inner layer percentage is how close the pixels are to the middle the bigger this number the farther away from the middle they are so if I make it 50 the farther away I can make it like 75 make them super far away or I could bring them back in a little bit like 66. I think for this 50 looks pretty good and then like always the rest of the settings are the same as everything else going with the star you could create a new mega tree if you wanted to or just tree it's called Tree in here you can use this to create little trees or Big Trees I'll just make a big tree for right now there's a couple of different settings in here that I'll go over so there's three different types of trees the first one is round which is the most common used tree there's the flat tree so this is like if you want to put pixels flat up against a wall or something it still is somewhat tree shaped except it's flat and then the other one is a ribbon tree but I'm Gonna Leave it around because that is the most common tree this setting right here the degrees is how many degrees the tree is so if it is 360 it's going to make a full circle you're gonna be able to have pixels on all sides of the tree so you can view it from every direction if it is 180 degrees it's a half tree so the back half won't have any pixels this works great if you don't have any people on the back side of your tree it would be a waste putting pixels back there so our mega tree sits right here um this is an older tree that we don't use anymore so I put this like right there and it's a half tree because you have no need to put pixels in the back half of the tree no one would see them and it's a waste of pixels you can make it a 270 degree tree if you wanted to to add more to the back but not all the way or you could make it a 90 degree tree a very small front tree if you wanted to but I'll leave it at 180. the rotation setting that is how far rotated to a side the tree is so if you wanted your tree to be like facing more this direction on the road we could turn the rotation to like 40 and now if you look it turned the tree a little bit so more of the empty space is facing this way if we were to go into 3D you can look at it the tree points mostly to this direction now or we could type in a negative number to have it Go the opposite direction the spiral wrap setting this is a setting you can use to make the tree like Spiral down so if we set this to like a 1 one wrap it makes one wrap around the tree so the pixels go this way around it and then up to the top this makes a really cool design but making this actually work in real life is very hard you have to build some sort of frame to be able to hold it we can make it wrap multiple times like three and now it wraps around three times or you can leave it at zero if you just want a regular tree the bottom to top ratio that is how small the or how close together these pixels get compared to the bottom so if we make this like a lower number there's going to be more of a point to the top of the tree actually that is wrong the bigger the number the closer together it gets so if I up this to 12 all the pixels get really close together if I make this a really low number like three the pixels are very far apart the perspective setting um this tilts the tree forward and backwards if you needed it tilted at all so I could type in a number and now it tilts a little bit towards me if you have a slope on your yard you could use this to to adjust armor towards the slope so if your tree points down a little bit you could set that or if it's just flat land you could leave it zero and then it's a regular tree the alternate nodes checkbox this basically does what it's done in other props it will alternate the nodes back and forth so instead of a straight line going all the way up it'll go one skip this pixel two skip this pixel three skip four five six and then the other skip pixels it will come back down this way so both your connections are at the bottom of the Strand so this could be really useful to put all of your pigtail ends at the bottom next is strand Direction This is the direction of the Strand so right now it's set for the strands to go upwards and if you have like multiple on one strand it can go up and down then up then down and up and down or you could set it to horizontal so your strands go from left to right up and making its way up I use vertical and if you use horizontal I think you have a problem because horizontal just makes absolutely no sense so I recommend you use vertical number of strings how many times the the prop is connected into the controller so you would need 16 ports for this each of these rows has its is on its own port so like this row all the way over here is not its Port this row has its own point this one and this one and this one but if you wanted let's say four zigzags to be on one port um across four ports because four times four would still make 16. we could set four connections to the controller at first it will only make four lines but we can adjust that in a second then we could come down to the strands per string the number of zigzags put four in there and then each line zigzags up then down then up then down to make one strand now it's yelling at me because 4 does not divide into 50 equally the number of nodes per string this is how many total pixels are on that string not on each individual row but how many is on the total string since one string goes up then down then up then down this is going to include the total number of pixels for that so if we wanted 50 pixels on each row or up and down down direction we would need to set this to 200 that way it could divide into four and make 50 per section so this number the number of nodes per string and the strands per string this has to divide equally into this number or it will yell at you you could set the starting location so whether you want to start at the top left or right or the bottom left and right most people leave the um starting location at the bottom left or right that's just easier than running wires up to the top and then the rest of the settings are the same like I've said one bajillion times next is create new window frame um what this basically does is make a window frame like it says so we could use this to like outline any of these windows if we wanted to you can give it a name and then you could select how many pixels on the top the left and the right and the bottom the reason why the top and bottom are separate from the left and right is that way you can use this as a door so if like we put this let's say around the door but oh no we have pixels at the bottom where we can set the lights on the bottom to zero so now there's no lights down there and then we can select how many lights we want at the top like we can make the top 20 and then we if we want like 30 pixels on each side we could put in 30 and now there's 30 pixels on each side of the door now when I first use x lights I thought I had to have the top and the bottom the same and that is why for the first year of my light show you see that we have lights underneath our door that is because I didn't know there was a way you could use this window frame and not have lights under the door and then you could select the start location for it and the the direction of it so if this was a full window frame let's make it a full window frame we wanted to start at the bottom left we can have the wiring either go clockwise around it or counterclockwise around it that is all the different settings for the window frame next we have create new wreath you can use this to make a wreath you could also use the circle to create a wreath but um they have a wreath model in here so we're going to use that the number of strings how many times it connects to the controller the number of nodes per string we can increase this to let's say like a hundred and then we could select where the pixels start and which direction they go in and that is all the settings that the wreath has there's no other settings so if you have a wreath with like multiple um segments in it you're going to want to use the circle because this allows you to create multiple segments the read just makes one Circle that's not even symmetrical and then these last three models aren't models in the X light what you do with these is import stuff so if we click the import one make a box this will allow you to import a model from your files if you have one saved in here it has to be a model with an extension of dot X model dot lff dot LPF or dot gdtf I don't have any models I can import so I can't show you that the next one is create a new download what this is is if you bought a um prop from a store like bascoyo or Gilbert engineering and it's something that's not in x-lights you can use create new download and it will download all the vendors lists from tons of different stores besides just bascoyo and Gilbert engineering currently it includes models from biscoyo Studios Gilbert engineering efl designs custom Christmas Creations build a light show and a few others so let's say we had a special singing face from boscoyo Studio if you don't know a singing face is basically a prop that you can make sing with your light show so we would go onto buscoyo Studios and we can look under the Christmas section if we had a Christmas one um and we can look throughout here to see which one it might be under probably under singing elements I'm going to find the one I use in my light show you can look for which one you bought I think I have the chroma bulb 30 inch standing Yep this is mine right here so it will grab this model data and then you can hit insert model and it will put it in here for you and then you can adjust the size for how you need it so mine is usually right here on my roof so I can adjust that and put it right there there are three different settings once you put a download in here that you could change you could change the model data which is basically where the pixels are and in what number they go um this is very Advanced and there's a lot of different settings in here so I'm not going to go over it you usually shouldn't have to change this if you're importing a model you can adjust the number of strings the number of connections to the controller so if you have a very dense prop and you don't want one connection to the controller you want like four let's say you can adjust this for how many connections to make to the controller and then you can add a background image behind it if you wanted to the final model you can add is add an obj this only works if you are in 3D you can't click it and it won't let you add it basically what it allows you to do is import a 3D model of something that you've made in another piece of software an example is like blender you can make 3D models and then in import them like I did to import the layout of my house my house is a very generic house it's just a box with a roof on top so my house was very easy to make a model for if I had a house that looked something like this and I had to make a 3D model for it I probably would still be using 2D and that is all the different models up here and how you can add them into X lights now there are a few other things I want to go over so I'm going to create a model I'm just going to create this tree right here and I'll leave it right there I want to go over some of the settings that show up when you right click the model like if you right click it here in the models list you can delete the model you can lock the model you can unlock the model basically like you do down here under size and location how you can check this lock box you can also do it up here you can view the node layout which tells you which strings go to which nodes the end nodes that's basically pixels and it will say like if it's 12 that is pixel 12 on S11 or a strand 11. you can open a wiring view which is a very useful tool I'm actually going to make a different model to show you around because showing it on a tree is kind of hard I'll make some candy canes and let me just adjust some of the settings quickly to make it denser if you right click it and hit wiring view this will allow you to look at how the pixels are wired on the prop so this is looking at it from the back side of the candy cane so it says it right here caution reverse view so there are three different strings of pixels three connections to the controller and this is the first candy cane since we're looking at it from the back and it shows you this is the way you wire it you go upwards this way if you had props like that singing face that I showed you it will show you the proper way how you wire it up and wire the face you can't just shove the pixels in there anyway because X lights programs them a certain way on how to expect you to wire it and for the most part xlights allows you to easily change the wiring view for any prop the way you want to wire it but certain ones like downloaded models they're very hard to change the wiring views so you have to follow the way it does it in X lights next you could export this as a custom X lights model or export it as any other file type you could flip the prop horizontally so now I flipped the candy canes so now they're horizontal you can flip it vertical if you wanted to I don't think it's going to allow me to I'm clicking it but it won't do anything it does allow me to flip the tree vertical so now it's an upside down tree you can replace a model with this model so if I click this I could select to replace the tree with this and now it got rid of the tree and added that there you can also push control Z on Windows I'm not sure if that's the same shortcut on other computers but on Windows it's Ctrl Z for undo and you can undo what you just did and then these other three settings down here have to do with model groups and that is what I'm going to go over now model groups basically allow you to group together any models you want and then when you're programming your sequence instead of programming each individual model which you could still do do if they're in a model group you could also program the whole model group so I'm going to quickly outline all these windows and doors and get back to you in a second so I can show you an example of this so now I have all these windows and doors outlined let's say I wanted to make a model group and call it all house face or like the entire face of the house so I can right click anywhere in this model section and click add empty group and I can choose a name so I'm going to call it all models on house face hit okay and then there's a whole bunch of settings that it gives you within this model group that I'll go over in a second but it shows you all the models that are not in the group right here and all the models that are in the group right here so I can click any of the models I want and move them over this way the way these models are named is it goes I'm a window frame one window frame two window frame three four and five so I can move them over like this so if I click the model and then click the arrow it moved the window frame so it's now within the model group and I can move all the other ones and I can also hold control while clicking these to select multiple models and then hit the arrow and it'll move them all over at the same time you can also click the model within the group and move it back over here or move it this way and if you want them to be in order any specific order you could click it and click the up and down arrows to move it up and down in here or you could just hold it and drag it yourself health so now all these window frames are in a group now an example where the group could be useful is if you want the all of these window frames to turn on red at once you instead of having to put a red effect on each individual window frame you could put one single red effect on the model group and it will immediately turn on everything within that group to Red an example where a model group would not be useful is if you want each individual window to be a different color you want to be this one to be red this one would be orange yellow green and blue let's say you cannot put multiple effects on one model group so you would still have to go and put each individual color on each individual model the model groups just make it useful for when you want to put a one effect on a whole group of models it allows you to do that very easily now some of the other settings down here um show sub models to add like I said earlier sub models are a little bit Advanced they are different sections Within model you can select to show the sub models you have available and move over sub models into the group but not the entire model if you wanted to you could show inactive models to add models that you don't want on that have been set to inactive and then you can select to show only the models in the current view like I went over there's different previews you could select only the models that you see in this preview to be able to be moved the tag color this is like I said with the other models where when you see them in the model list you can change this color so they'll show up as a different color in that model list to make it stand out more if you wanted to or you can leave it on black to have no color the center offset this is basically where the center of the group is so this plus sign is the center right here we can move the X over to the left or the right so like if I put this at let's say 200 the plus sign has now moved over here so the middle of the group is here so you can move where the middle of the group is now why is this used useful well let's say you have an effect like a pinwheel running and you want to put that on the model group when you put a pinwheel on a regular model it automatically goes to the center of that model so if I put a pinwheel on this window right here it's going to go into the center of this model when I put a pinwheel on a group it's going to go to wherever the center of the group is which is right here now for almost every single effect you can change the X and Y of where the effect will show up but generally you want to put the plus sign to the middle area that you want to be of that group the preview right here this allows you to select which preview this group shows up in so out of the different um previews I could make this group only show up in unassigned models if I wanted to or any other ones I create these last few settings set up how the effects are rendered on to the models these are a little bit Advanced so I'm not going to go over them just leave them at the default and that will work all the time plus us you could change most of these settings on each individual effect that you're making this is just what the default will be set to if at any time you want to add more models to the group you could come back down here find your models right here and move them over inside the model group if you right click the group it gives you some options right here it will allow you to delete any empty group so if you've made groups but not use them you can delete the empty ones you can clone this group you can rename it you could delete it you could create a group from everything you have selected you can add the selections to an existing group and add an empty group if we didn't want this group we could just hit delete group the final thing I want to go over in the layout tab is when you right click the screen these settings that show up here when you right click the screen when no models are selected it gives you some different settings you can save the layout image so it will save this for you you can print it if you wanted to you can import previews models or groups you can import Lor models or groups I stands for light-o-rama and that is usually used for AC lights so if you want the import like any AC models you could have you can export the layout as a file you can right click and hit reset which um resets your view so like if I zoom in and move to like right here it will reset to whatever the main Viewpoint is the X lights chooses now if you want to create your own default Viewpoint what you could do is first get to that Viewpoint so like let's say I want it zoomed out like this to be the default I could right click and hit Set current Viewpoint as default so you click that and then let's say you move around you're adjusting things and you want to go back to that view you can hit restore the default Viewpoint which was this now let's say you wanted another Viewpoint called left we can move it to the left right here if you want I don't know why you'd want this but let's just say you wanted this then you could come down to save current Viewpoint not as default just as another one if you don't want this to be the default you just want this to be an option that you could choose from then click this you can put in the name so I could put in left side of display let's say and now when you right click you have some more settings you can load a Viewpoint so any viewpoints you make will show up here so I can click this and it will move it back over here and I could delete any viewpoints so I could click here and delete the left side of display and I could hit reset to go back to the xlights generated default Viewpoint now when you right click a model over here it gives you all the settings that you'd see when you didn't right click with the model selected so these two settings right here and it also gives you all the settings that you see when you right click over here so all these settings I've already gone through all these different options it just shows them combined if you were to click this or this and that my friends concludes the entire layout tab so before we move on I'm going to quickly create a little layout right here a little display that we can use when we move on to sequencing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign so I got a little carried away and I was going to add way more models than this my inner light show maker wanted to make this the coolest display ever with tons of models but I want to keep this simple at the same time so I tried to include a lot of the basic models that you might be using in your light show I have windows at the door I have a roof outline right here I have a garage a tree a fence and then some models on the fence um now this is never a display I would make because it's just not perfect I wouldn't put a star on a fence when it could go on top of the tree but I wanted to keep it close to the front so you could see it easier and one other model I think I'm going to add because this is a very common one is an arch um so I'm gonna add some arches there so now I can also include those they might be a little blocked right now but you should be able to see them when I'm programming I also went and created some different model groups for programming I have one called all models and displays this is everything in the display and I'm going to add the Arches to it now too so that's in it so this is everything in the display all the models on the fence so anything that's on the fence all the models on the house so anything actually touching the house and then all the models on the house face the front of the house so I'm gonna add the garage to this as well because that's on the front of the house and with that we can click the save button always click the save button so you don't lose any of your progress and with that we can now finally move on to the sequencer Tab and begin programming so congratulations to making it this far in the video and now we are going to begin talking about the sequencer tab this is where all the magic happens and this is probably where you'll be spending 99 of your life programming the light show so this is the sequencer Tab and there's a whole bunch of different little Windows here and right here is where your main timeline will be in a second once I open a sequence there's some other windows too that aren't shown here and they're in the top bar but I'll go over all those in just a second first what we're going to be doing is I'm going to go over all these buttons up here and what they do because these buttons only work in the sequencer tab the first one is Select show directory this is another button you can click to change the show directory the folder where all of your files are stored in this button right here is create new sequence this is what we'll be using in a second to create our new sequence over here we have open sequence so you can open a sequence that you've been working on you have save and save as for saving your sequence this is the render button this is what you click to render your seat sequence it tells what pixels when to light up using the effects you have these two buttons right here these are your different settings as to how you can paste effects into the timing track once you lay effects down on the timing track which I'll get into all that in just a second you can copy them by using Ctrl C or right clicking and hitting copy and then you can paste them into another part of the sequence Pace by time basically means that whatever the effect you copy if the effect is two seconds long wherever you paste it it will go and still be that two seconds long whereas Pace by cell if you copy the whatever effect is in the cell and you paste it in another cell it will paste the effect to fit that cell and change the time of it so let's say if the original effect takes up a hundred percent of a one second cell but then you paste it into another cell that's two seconds long it will fill that whole cell by a hundred percent because the last cell was filled by a hundred percent however the effect will now be twice is long two seconds because it's set to fit that spot if this doesn't make any sense I'd recommend leaving it on Pace by time because that one's a little bit easier to deal with when you're new to this all these buttons right here these are the buttons that you'll use to play the sequence while you're watching it or programming it obviously you have play you have pause and you have stop this button takes you back to the first frame of the sequence this takes you to the last frame of the sequence this will replay the section you have highlighted this button is output to lights if you click that it'll output the sequence to the lights as you play it now this only works if the controller is hooked up to your computer and all of the settings are correct on it so if you don't have a controller plugged in or you don't have a controller or lights at all if you click this it won't do anything this whole section right here this is the different Windows you can open like effect settings that's this window you can open effect colors that's this window and then there's some other ones I'll get into once we have a sequence open these two buttons they zoom in and out of whatever you work working on in the sequence and this final button is the sequence settings now I can't open it because there is no sequence open but I will show you what this does in just a second so we're going to click this button and we're gonna make a new sequence now when you click that button it's going to open this little wizard right here and it's going to give you a bunch of different settings that you could choose for your sequence it gives you all these different windows up here of things you could change but you usually don't have to mess with these just stick to the wizard and follow the instructions on here so your first option is you could pick either a musical sequence or an animation if you pick an animation there is no music to it and you're just programming the lights to do whatever you want they're not going to be synced to music if you choose musical sequence this gives you the option to add music to your sequence so you can sync the lights to the music most people if you're making a musical light show or syncing lights the music will use the musical sequence button but if you want to make an animation with no music then you can click this we are going to make a music physical sequence in this video Once you click that it's going to open your files you're going to select any type of audio or video file it does work with video files too it will just take the audio from the video file though so look through find the song that you want to use I'm going to use a copyright free song it's a remix version of Jingle Bells by Tokyo machine once you click that this next window is going to open it and it wants you to choose the FPS of your sequence FPS stands for frames per second so how many different frames can you have in each second of the sequence the options you have is 40 20 or custom I'm not going to get into all the pros and cons of each option and which one you should choose if you would like to know more in detail on how each one works and what they do differently you can watch this video right here but to go over it quickly 20 frames per second that means that will have 20 frames in a second like it says and that will allow you to change the lights up to 20 times in one second so every 50 milliseconds the lights can change whereas 40 frames per second you could change the lights 40 times in a second which is double the speed the problem is going to 40 frames per second your file size doubles nowadays it's not that big of a deal because files aren't gigantic in x-lights for me personally I always use 40 frames per second because I think it looks smoother and the effects look better but that's because I've been sequencing for years so I can notice the difference in 20 frames per second really just bugs me because everything doesn't look as smooth 40 frames per second will also make your computer take a little longer when it's trying to render the sequences and there are some controllers that only work on 20 frames per second most standard controllers can do 40 but there are just a few out there that can only do 20. so if you don't care about how smooth everything looks you just want to program something pick 20 but for now I'm going to pick 4D for this video the other setting custom I would not recommend using this because controllers work better with either 20 or 40 going in between mean or lower or higher than 40 frames per second could cause problems I wouldn't recommend going above 40 frames per second and I wouldn't recommend using custom at all just pick between 20 or 40. this final window here allows you to change some other settings like what models show up in your model list when you're programming either all or empty if you have pre-saved model layouts you could choose between here we don't have any yet but I'll show you how to make one in a little bit you can also click more options here which allows you to import data or you can change any of these other settings right here but you probably won't need that so once you have either animation or musical Chosen and then your frame rate chosen you can hit quick start and it will open the sequence in here so this is the main timeline right here and this is your audio track right here if you did not choose an audio track it will be blank up here you won't see any sound waves and it'll only be 30 seconds long the default animation length is 30 seconds long and I can show you how to change that in just a little bit down here are all of the different models that we have on the house right here so we have the Arches the tree the candy canes these are the model groups right here with these little shapes next to them this shows that it's a group and these are all the single models right up here these are all of your different effects you can choose from to program your sequence with I believe there's a little over 50 they've been adding new ones every couple of months so what you see now may be different in the future there may be way more effects they may have removed certain effects and the overall way of how this works is you drag the effects into the row that your prop is on that you want it for so if I want an effect on the candy canes I'm going to drag the effect onto the row of the candy canes and then you line it up in the column line if you want to say there is no specific lines but you line it up with the audio track so like if you wanted an effect to start here and and here you could put it on here in the row of the model and then adjust the time with this now all of these these different Windows right here these will allow you to change settings within the effect you could change colors you could change um effect settings that come with it you could change how it blends with other effects if you have multiple effects on one prop we'll get into that later over here you have these two windows this is your house preview so all these windows are snappable so you can pull them out you could snap them in other places wherever you want and you can also make them full screen this is the house preview and anything you program will show up on here so you can see what the effects will look like and it almost makes it look like you're in person watching the show that way you don't have to go and set up all of your lights if you have them already and run back and forth inside and out trying to check to see how each effect looks so these are the only Windows I'm going to be showing right now you could create a full sequence using just these few windows and that's what I did for my first and part of my second year sequences now if you want to create more advanced sequences with certain effects and Fades you will have to open in the other windows but I'll go over those later when you're in here you could still move with your mouse around the house preview so you can click the scroll wheel to move it side to side you can zoom in you can zoom out and when you right click you still have the option to switch to or to um restore the default Viewpoint now before we could get started programming there is one last thing we should adjust you don't have to do this but you can rearrange the order that these models show up as if you'd like to so there's two ways of opening the menu to sort these one is you can click this button right here the display elements button or you can right click here and go through all these settings and at the bottom is the edit display element so either of these open this window right here now these are all of the models that you will see within the view the view is whatever models are right here this is the view that we have you can make multiple views on here and we can switch them right here if we wanted to so if we wanted to like some of the elements only show up on one view then switch to the other view we could do that but I'm going to leave it on one of you just to make it easy for now over here would be all of the models that are not on a view and you could move them over here but all the models are already on The View this is kind of like when we did the groups where you could click an element and then move it side to side so we could click this left Arrow to move it into the available elements so I clicked the candy cane and I moved it over here and now it is not on a view so I could click the candy cane again and click the right arrow to move it back into the view and then you can click and hold any of the elements to drag them wherever you want or you could use the up and down arrows the double up Arrow this will move whatever you click all the way to the top and the double down arrow will do the same except going down so I like to put the all models in the entire display the main group all the way at the top and I keep all my groups near the top next I'll put all models on the house up here all models on the house face can be below it and then all models on fence can be right there and then the most important models that I use they'll probably use frequently I like to put at the top I'm just going to start support this to how I like it there so I move these around to my liking and if you wanted to create another view now what you could do is come up here to the different views this is the master view so if we click this this is what we'd see on the master view we can click add and enter the name for the view so we could call this one like uh view two if we wanted to and then it creates view too if you click on it there's no models in here they're all on the available list so you can move whatever we want onto view two if you hold down left click you can select us any of these that you want and then we can move them all over if we wanted to if we don't want this view you can delete it you can rename it you can clone it you can import a view and you can make this the master view I don't want any more views I'm just going to leave the one right now so I'm going to hit delete you know ask are you sure you want to delete it yes and we have the one master View and then we could close this and now all these elements have been moved around to how we like it if you make a new model let's say we made like a snowflake and we put it on the roof and you come over here it's not going to show up here and if you're missing any models that you can't see and you don't know where they are you can open the display elements and then it will show on the unused models and you can move them into a view and with that other view I made called view two I would have been able to select it right here if I left it but I didn't so I'm just gonna leave it on Master view so I'm gonna get started right with adding some effects now before you add effects you want to create a timing track right here where this says new timing this is where your timing track will be kept basically this is where you put marks on the grid right here to hold your effects within now you don't have to do this and you could just drag effects onto the um props you want and line them up but that could be very hard and you always want to add timing tracks because it just makes it really easy to line things up so what you do is you can click anywhere on the audio track right here and while you're clicking it you can push space to listen to it or play it foreign effects here the lights would be lighting up I did just go and turn down the brightness of the house because it was pretty bright and you couldn't see the lights as well with it but you could push space to play and stop the sequence and you can also click with your mouse up here to make this little red mark come down um basically showing you which effects are going to be played with the audio you can also hold left click and make this little box right here and when you play this it will only play that section now let's say right here I wanted to place a timing mark to start an effect because the the music changes a little bit right here and if we listen to it I'm going to push space to play it the music changes into this part so right here I want to make a mark where the effects will change from whatever is on this side going over here so you click where you want that Mark to be and then you push the letter t on your keyboard and now you'll notice this little white line is made and if we move the red mark this blue Mark has been made there and that's a permanent Mark now you can always move your um thing around and play it and that Mark will stay there and you can use this now to line up your effects perfectly with this Mark so you know where you want it to change you can also left click the mark and move it back and forth anywhere you want you can right click it and it gives you some options like to lock and unlock it so you can move so you can make it so it's unmovable you can copy and paste it and then you could delete it so you could push delete and it got rid of that timing mark now if I want to put that timing mark back I'm going to click here again push T and I'll move the little slider out of the way and now the timing mark is here again if you want to delete it you can also click it and push the delete key on your keyboard that also works and if you want to undo anything you can right click anywhere and you can click the undo button right here so I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna make a few timing marks where I think I want certain effects to change to a new effect so right here there is a change in the music [Music] and then if we listen to the audio track there's also a change right here so if we come over here and listen to that the music gets a little bit more upbeat right here so I might want to add something or change in effect so I'm going to click here again and I'm going to push T again and another timing mark has been made now you can also make timing marks while the song is playing so while this red line is moving if you push T you could create timing marks so I'm going to show you that if I push T now I made one and I made another one there and I made another one there and you can keep pushing t as the song goes along to make whatever timing marks you want now I don't want all these timing marks so I'm going to delete them and you could delete them one by one or if you hold down the control key and click multiple timing marks then right click you could delete multiple of them at a time so we have these two sections right here where we can paste the facts and as you see I can click within that grid area and it like makes this blue line where I could select effects if there were any here we can't really Place effects out here because as you can see it it doesn't fill in a whole grid that's because there's no timing marks any farther so I'm going to start here with this section and now I'm going to listen to the audio so I can think what effect I'd like to use so I'm thinking some sort of Sparkle you can hear this little Sparkle at the beginning and I think it'd be cool if there's like a sparkle effect on certain items so what you do now once you know what effect you want to grab there are many effects up here like I've said and when you're new to this you're gonna have no idea what all of them do you might put some on and they might just be black and not do anything that's because you have to change some of the settings in them if I was to go over what each effect does I would be here for about another three hours so if you'd like to learn what each effect does then I recommend you check out this video where I go over all the effects and X lights so you could just watch as I use some of the basic easy to use effects now there are multiple effects up here that can achieve a sparkle effect but there is one called Shimmer and when you think of Sparkle Shimmer also sounds like sparkle so we could use this effect right here if we wanted to if we click the effect it opens the effect settings right here but changing these will not do anything because it is not on a Model yet so now we need to determine which model or models do we want to put the Shimmer effect on and I'm thinking we should try on the entire house group one other thing I forgot to tell you quickly that I notice I've been doing is I've been zooming in and out like this without telling you how I'm doing this you can use the zoom in and out buttons up here but there's also a shortcut by holding control and scrolling you can zoom in and out so sorry I've been doing that and not telling you how I am but that's how you can zoom in and out but back to adding the Shimmer effect I think I'm gonna put it on the all models in display and just see what it looks like it'll never hurt to try it it's not permanent once you put a effect on there you can always delete it and change it so now what you do when you're ready to drag the effect on the onto here is you can either drag it from up here by clicking the little effect right here or clicking any of the effects up here so I can grab the Shimmer effect I'm holding left click and I can drag it to any of the elements in the light show or I could put it into the next timing segment and put it here but we're starting here and I'm going to place this on the all models in display and now if we click the effect it will show you you what the effect is doing over here but this effect is acting weird for some reason and it's flashing between white and black like now it's black and then it was white and it's not really doing what the effect sounds like it do so we could go through and adjust some of the settings and if we do you can see it's doing some really weird stuff and you can go and just change any of the sliders click any of the buttons fiddle around and figure out which each one does if you don't want to take the time and learn it yourself like I said you can watch the video on what each effect does and what each button does so I think the reason it's very violently flashing between white and red is because if you look up here the colors white and red are selected so with the effect clicked so excites knows we're editing this effect we could change the colors we can add more colors to it so now blue is in this very rapid flashingness and I'm actually going to stop this by putting it back down to one so it won't do that now for this opening Shimmer I think just doing white and having black and it would look good we might need to select black but I'm not sure yet I'm going to adjust the settings and see what it'll look like so it looks like we did have to select black and when we select use all colors because if we didn't it would just be white and select this setting right here pre um 2017.7 Shimmer I think this means that this Shimmer effect was updated after 2017 and you can select to use the old version it looks like the old version works better but there is a lot of lights in here so let's see if we can reduce how many lights are in here it doesn't really look like changing any of these sliders will reduce it so I think we might have to find a new effect because this effect doesn't work as I imagined it to and this is what sequencing is all about you're going to go through many different effects and you're going to change them all out and find some other ones that will work better because you're not going to instantly find the perfect effect in colors to begin with so another effect I have in mind is the twinkle effect that also makes you think of Shimmer or Sparkle when you think of those words so I'm going to add that and I dragged it I picked that effect up and I dragged it on top of the old effect when you do that it will erase whatever is behind it I could have also gone and right clicked it and hit delete and then grab the new twinkle effect and put it on top you could do either of those now this effect this looks like a really good effect it has a nice little bit of Twinkle and I'm going to select just white for this and let's see percentage of light so if I was new to this I would assume that this setting probably means how many lights are in it so if we up that there's gonna be more lights in it now the twinkle steps I will tell you this is the speed and it's a little confusing because the lower the number the faster it goes so let's decrease this make it go a little bit faster so that looks pretty good so I'm going to zoom in to the timing track and I'm going to play it now and let's see how it looks I'm going to click first frame so we'll start at the beginning and let's see how it will look [Music] so that looked really cool with that Sparkle as the music went on we could go and change some more settings but I'm going to leave it right now at this and move on to the next section so now I'm going to listen to this next section and think of an effect that would look really good here foreign effect I think would be really easy to add right here is the butterfly effect the butterfly effect is a really beautiful effect I'm going to left click it and drag it onto all models and display all of the effects I'm just going to use in all models and display for now now this effect instantly creates a rainbow wash if you want to say across the entire display since we have it in the entire display group it makes it look really nice and beautiful and there are some different settings on here so the first one is like colors we could change what colors we want right now it's set for rainbow but if we set it to palette it will use whatever colors are selected up here so since we only have white selected there's no other colors so it's just all white but if we add like Christmas colors now it's white red and green we could speed it up with a speed setting right here and we can make it go normal Direction which is this way or Make It Go reverse which is that way and there are some other settings you can mess with but let's just see how this looks from the transition from the sparkle it looks a little bit fast so I'm going to slow it down a lot maybe like 20. so that looks really good but I am not going to go on any farther and sequence anything else I'm going to show you the different settings and how you use these tools to make a sequence but I'm not actually going to be making a sequence there's a whole lot of different things you could do with layering Fades you can change brightness and colors color curves value curves that's all a whole bunch of sequencing stuff so I'm going to continue showing you the different mechanics on how you create these sequences but I'm not going to be attempting to create a masterpiece because it does take a little while to do that but if you'd like to see how to make a sequence I'm going to add another video up here um you can check out this video right here where I go over how I sequence but let's continue on with the different things in settings there are that you can change in here so I've gone over making the timing marks and I've gone over how you place the effects on here you could drag them onto the different different spot you on another thing you could do is you can also left click and hold and move these effects side to side but it won't let you move them up and down to different rows it stays in this row you could also left click an end of it and move it to make it longer or shorter of either side and whenever you have an effect clicked it will show you what that effect will look like over here but let's say you want to move this effect down to the tree the way you move it up and down is you use your up and down arrow keys on your keyboard so if you click the down arrow it will move it down to another model and now it's on the all models on house group so moved it to that group of all the things on the house we can hit the down arrow again and now it's on all the models on the house face move it down again and now it's on all the models on the fence and if we move it down one more time now it's showing up on the tree you can go back up to and move it up and down back and forth wherever you want it we can move all the way down to like the Matrix if we wanted it on there move to the candy canes the fence whatever you want now if you were to right click any effect there is a lot of of different options that show up you can cut it so you can get rid of it out of the sequence you can copy it you can't paste anything because we don't have anything copied yet I'll show that in a second you could delete it you can split it and if we click split it splits the effect into two so now there's two of these effects and if we want to undo that we can just go and right click anywhere and hit undo or push control Z for undo we can duplicate the effect we have undo and redo here like I said you can align it so the way alignment would work is if you had multiple effects selected you can select to align them both at a certain point effect presets if you open this it opens an effect preset menu where you can create load and Export your own presets you can save certain effects that you like on here you can create random effects so what this does is you can't have an effect selected but if I was to select let's say these two segments right here and I was to highlight them over um like this if now we were to right click you could click create random X and it will randomly generate effects to fit these two sections somehow it randomly generated the two same effects these are fill effects I talk a little bit more about creating random effects and trying to use them to make a sequence in that video I previously showed you we can also reset the effect so if we click this it will reset all the parameters in here to the default settings you can add a description to the effect so if you click it you can enter any description you want um like let's say this is the Butterfly Effect and then if you want to read the description you have to right click it and hit description and they'll show you what it is you can lock and unlock the effect like you can with models or the timing marks so if I was to lock it I can't move it I can't accidentally touch it and move it it's locked until I right click it and unlock it you can enable and disable the render and what that does is if you disable the render and then you go to render the entire sequence by clicking this render button it will render all the effects except this one because this one is disabled and you can disable multiple effects but if the render is not enabled on it the effect might not work because Excellence hasn't gotten the chance to render it so you can re-enable render if you disable render a time I find this useful is if I ever use a video on our projector screen or if I'm going to use a video on our new panels that we have videos take a very long time to render in X lights so if I'm just sequencing the song and I don't want to see the video I don't care if it's there or not I will right click it and disable the render so when I render the rest of the sequence it goes a lot faster and finally timing if you click this you could type in the milliseconds of where you want this effect to be so this effect currently starts at 12 075 milliseconds there's a thousand milliseconds in a second so this would mean that this is 12 seconds in 12.075 seconds in from the start of the song the duration the effect lasts for three second 3.05 seconds and it ends at 15.125 seconds now if you're changing your colors up here and let's put this on palette and select some colors let's say we have red and green but you want to add another color let's say you want to add orange or purple but wait there is no orange or purple here how are you going to do that well there is this little drop down you can select and there's a whole bunch of other color palettes in here that you could choose from so yay now I get to use orange with the red and green but wait when I click that it changes them all to different shades of orange so how am I supposed to have multiple of those colors in there if it only does that well if we go back to the default palette you can click any one of these colors and it opens this color option and you could change that color so it was blue but let's say we want orange there we could change that to be orange and then select that color and now we have red green and orange if you wanted to flip the colors so whatever's on this end is over here and it just re it flips the entire palette which can be useful for some effects that do certain things based on which color is selected first you can hit this little rotate button and it will flip the um palette now you'd have to uncheck these and go back and check the colors you wanted but now as you can see the butterfly effect looks a little bit different because the Orange is the first selected color if you wanted to go back to the default palette then get that blue back you can click this right here and go back to the default palette right there there are some other things you can do with the colors like if you right click the color it opens this value curve or excuse me color curve but these are a little bit Advanced and I do have a video about them I would link it up here but I'm probably hitting my five limit amount of banner links so I'll put this in the description along with all the other videos I've shared let's say though you make a palette that you like using all the time um let's say let's select the first three colors and you make one that includes purple and orange and what's another color not used uh and we could put a red right there because red is no longer there you like using these colors quite frequently you could save this palette so you don't have to change it every time by clicking this save button right here and when you click it it automatically saves it and now if you look you have your default palette right here you can hover over it and it says the um name default but if we go to the top there's this one p-a-l-001 the first custom palette we made we can now select it and you can select the colors that are within it if you want to delete the palette you can um choose the palette make it open and then click the X and it will delete it if you scroll down in the color menu and I'll make this a little bit bigger by I just clicked The Edge between the sequencer right here and the color um menu and I just dragged it gives you the little arrow so you can adjust all the windows you have some other settings down here like you can add Sparkles into the effect by upping this you could change the brightness you could change contrast there are some other things you can adjust this checkbox right here reset panel when changing effects I recommend checking this so anytime you use a new effect it will reset the pan uh the panel back to where it was with the default settings that way you don't add let's say Sparkles to this effect then we add a new effect the Sparkles would still be on there because they are selected for this effect to be on you can go up here and click this to have it automatically reset the panel now these settings if I have no effects selected are always available and I can always adjust them but it's not going to affect any set adding unless you click that setting excuse me unless you click that effect you have to have that effect clicked and then you could change the settings you could tell if it's clicked by if it lights up purple the next thing I'm going to go over is making layers on your different elements you can have multiple layers within one of your props and have multiple effects on them doing different things so let's say on the tree we want it there let's find an effect we wanted there to be this bars effect if we zoom into the tree over here or excuse me a spiral effect it makes this spiral on the tree and let's select one color we want it to be purple or maybe something a little brighter orange we adjust the movement speed which is right here so we speed it up a little bit we adjust the number of times the palette is repeated in here so we make this twice it rotates around more and we can decrease the thickness so there's more space behind it as you can see the sparkles from this effect is going down and also is on the tree at the same time because since this is in the model group all models in display it's going to obviously make the tree Sparkle because the tree is a part of the group all models in display but if we put an effect on the tree as well that's going to layer on top of that other effect right here and now the priority this is rendered in or which one goes on top of the other one it goes from top to bottom so if you have this sparkle effect on top it's going to render this one first and it's going to render an effect here if there was one then here then here and it's going to get to the bottom and since this one is the last effect it's the last one rendered meaning it has the most priority and it will be on top now if we were to go into the display elements and let's put the tree on top of all models in display now it's kind of hard to tell because it's hard to see the Sparkles but if I up the percentage of sparkles you could see the Sparkles are now taking priority and cover on top of the Spiral because the Sparkles are rendered last now if I put the tree back below it and let's click the tree move it back down here I know it's a little hard to see but now you can see the Orange is going on top of the Sparkles there are no sparkles on top of the orange the orange is on top of the Sparkles now something to know about these layers is if you were to create another view and have let's say the tree is on top or on bottom of that view that way the tree is on top of everything since it's rendered last but if in the master view the tree is on the top the tree will not be rendered last it renders from top to bottom in your master view this might all sound confusing but I'm trying to make it as simple as possible just whatever is under the master view the main view whatever is at the bottom will always be rendered last so it whatever is on the bottom will always take priority since it's the last thing rendered on to your display now I'm going to delete this Sparkles effect so I could show you some other different things with layers so let's delete that let's say we wanted that sparkle effect to be behind the trees still because it was really cool but we don't want it on the rest of the display so how are we supposed to put multiple things on the tree when there's only one section for the tree right here well if we right click the tree model in the model list you can see there's a bunch of different settings here if you click insert layer below or above it will create a layer below or above that row so now you can see there are two different rows that go into the tree so if I was to move the spiral on the bottom the spiral still works because it's both they're both connected to the tree but now we can add multiple effects so we can put that twinkle effect back on here let's select white we're going to go back to the default palette and check white now we can have the sparkles on the tree at the same time as the spirals but it's not doing anything else but now here is where it gets confusing you'd think x-lights would try and be nice and make everything simple by making it follow the same pattern the bottom is rendered first no that's not the case when you have multiple layers on one element whatever is on top now takes priority so if you look at this picture this might help you make sense of this everything at the top is rendered first and it goes down the line if you have 10 elements here like in the picture it's going to render the top one first and the last and the bottom one last since the bottom one is ready to last that one is going to show up on top of everything else but if you have multiple layers on one single model when it gets time to render that model it will render whatever is in the top of those layers first disrupting the pattern of everything and making everything confusing just like programming is so it will take a lot of time to drill the end of your memory so you can remember that it does that you can add more layers if you wanted to to add even more Effects by hitting insert layer below again or you can hit insert multiple layers and it can make multiple of them if you want to delete a layer you can right click it and you can hit delete layer delete multiple layers or delete unused layers if you click this it will automatically delete any layers that aren't being used if we don't want this layer at all we can just right click it hit delete layer It'll ask and yes now when you right click on different models here there are some other settings um and buttons you can click here to do other things but I'm not going to get into them now because you usually don't have to mess with these next I'm going to go into the other windows and briefly show you some of the settings you might want to use in them the two I'm going to go over is layer settings and layer blending and we can open them by clicking them and it adds them into our little tabs up here the other menus I did not go over are the um effects if you click this it just makes a menu where all your effects are you could just drag them from here but now you can also drag them from here I don't use this because I find it a waste of space um you can just use the effects already up there the effects assistant this is something you can use to map out what the effects will do now I'm going to go through the layer settings window first there's two different tabs on here there's this one called Roto Dash zoom and then there's the buffer this window right here you have to make sure you have an effect selected when you're changing the settings otherwise it won't apply to anything but the first thing up here is render style this to put it in simple terms is telling X lights how you want this effect to be rendered onto the props so when the effect is in a group there are a ton of different options but when the effect is on let's just say a singular model like the roof there's only a few options the default one just takes it as if it was a picture and puts that effect on there and and just makes it run normally if you want to say per preview will basically also make it look like it's on a picture except the other ones like when it was on default the if you were to look the lines were moving in opposite directions almost as if this single line was a straight line and it was just going down the line like imagine the line unfolding that's because that's basically what a polyline is and that's a polyline on the roof if we set it to per preview it will render it as default but actually doing it as default and making it look like it's a picture based on how the preview looks most of the time the models default and per preview will look exactly the same single line that models it as if the effect is going down One Singular line of the roof so to make this simpler I'm going to put this effect on the Matrix so we have default it's making it look like a picture and does it the default way we have per preview it also does it the same way on The Matrix single line though that models it as if so if we were to look at the wiring view I think for this it zigzags back and forth this way sort of it's going to model it as if it was one long straight line and run the effect across the line and then as pixel that will render it as if this Matrix acted as one whole pixel so it might just stay one color depending on the effect but if this Matrix was One Singular pixel all the lights together are one pixel it will only change and show one color at a time because it's one pixel now when we had this on the roof there was one other option line segments this will render it per individual line segment so each individual line segment will be rendered on its own but if we go back to a model group and we were to change the render style now there's a whole bunch of different settings the basic ones I'm going to go through are at the top there's default per preview single line and as pixel like always and then the other ones I'm going to talk about are some of these bottom ones default model as pixel that will treat each individual model as its own pixel so now if you look each model is just one color so this matrix it's only one color this window right here is only one color the roof is only one color and it's treating these as if they're individual pixels all grouped together per model default what that does is this effect will get distributed onto each model and render it as the model by itself not as one whole group when it's on default it's one whole group so if you would imagine the picture going on it the picture goes across the entire display but when it's on per model default it is rendering it so the picture is going across each model individually and then you can have each individual model per preview each individual model has a single line and those are probably the only ones you'll have to worry about the buffer I'll go over this quickly basically you could select which section of that model or group is lighting up so if I was to put this in half and only select this half of the buffer only this half of the display is going to get that effect and I can move this around so like only this section of it will get it down here I can make it have it you could right click and have some defaults pop up like left half you only want the left half on thirds all that over here I'm not even going to use I'm not even going to make an example with this I'll just tell you what it does you could change these settings to make the effect rotate you can make the effect zoomed in like if it was a picture you could zoom into it but you don't really need all of this this is to make really Advanced sequences and if all this made absolutely no sense that is perfectly fine you don't need to use layer settings to make a sequence maybe sometime in the future I might go in deeper on each individual setting but I don't want to make this video 24 hours long the final window layer blending there are two different sections in here you might use the top check box this is reset panel when changing effects it's just like the color one how every time you change in effect it will reset the panel everything from this canvas button and up don't worry about it it's basically how effects that are overlapping each other blend with each other the only ones I want to talk about are the in transition and the out transition basically for the beginning of the effect let's say we have the butterfly effect right here you could select for there to be a transition as it comes in and out if you want the effect to fade in you have your transition these are a bunch of different transitions you could try them out yourself but I'd recommend using starting with fade because it's the simplest to use and then you could select how long you want that fade to last in so I can make it fade in for two seconds and now if you see this little green line this shows you the time that it takes to fade in so if we were to play this the butterfly effect fades in you can make it really long or you can make it short and do like half a second and now watch it fade in the out transition is the exact same thing except on the right half the outside of the model we can make it fade out for like a minute and a half if or a minute and a half we can make it fade out for a second and a half if we wanted to and then it would do this foreign if we move the effect the out transition will still be at the end for however long you have it and there are some other ones you could do like instead of having it fade you could have it explode with a circle you could have it a shatter you could have a pinwheel you could have a doorway and certain transitions will give you the option this adjustment setting you might need this to adjust how it works and you can reverse certain ones you still don't even have to use in or out transitions if you are looking for something a little bit more advanced though to make your sequences look cooler you could add in and out transitions to them now before I finish up I did just realize that there's two things I forgot to talk about I forgot to talk about the sequence setting button up here and what that does and about how you can add more timing tracks so I'm going to start with the uh sequence setting button and all these settings right here and what they do so these are your overall sequence settings like the music and the length of it and all the details about it these are also some of the settings you saw when you use the wizard to make a sequence this is the main page right here though where it shows the uh version of X lights how many models are in it the file names you could change the sequence type even after you've programmed it to an animation or media if you want to and right here is where you change the song I have mine under my light show folder under music you can also download the sequence and lyrics you could see the sequence duration right here and then the sequence timing this is the FPS where you could change that if you hit this little question mark it will ask you are you sure modifying the timing interval can cause problems um if you were using 40 frames per second and you go down to 20 it might move some effects by a few milliseconds since you lost half the timing but if you move up from 20 to 40 there won't be that many problems so if you click yes you can adjust the timing interval by the milliseconds 25 seconds is 40 frames per second right there it will show you and if we went up to 50 that would be 20 frames per second if you went lower like 10 that'd be 100 frames per second but I don't recommend going lower than 25. and then if you had an animation loaded with no song the default duration of it is 30 seconds and you could um change that right here if you want the animation to be longer or shorter you would go into the sequence settings go to the sequence duration and change the length of it and if you ever need to change your song for any reason or switch it to Media or animation you can click this little button and it will give you the option to select your song the other settings over here there's nothing that important that you'll really have to mess with it's only on the info media Tab and once you're done and you hit done it's going to automatically render your sequence to apply all the changes so that's the sequence settings and here's an older video I recorded a few days ago of the timing tracks and different settings and things you can do with those you can add multi multiple of these timing tracks if you wanted to so all of your timing marks don't have to show up on this one um first timing track to add a new one you have to right click the timing track up here and then you can hit add timing track and then it will ask you to add a timing interval so you can have it automatically detect certain beats or go by placing timing marks every 100 milliseconds 50 milliseconds whatever or leave it empty and there'll be no timing marks on it yet so I usually leave it as empty and then you can give it a name so I can name it timing track two and now there's this other timing track so if I was to play the sequence I could place timing marks on the red timing track now so now it is red and I'm placing these red timing marks but if I click up here and go back to the new timing by tapping the little bubble right here now I'm back on the blue timing marks this is a good way where if you have a lot of Beats that you need to place multiple timing marks for but you don't want them interfering with the main timing marks it's a simple way to do that you can also right click either of these and you can rename it you could delete it you can Import and Export timing tracks and there are some other things down here like import lyrics and stuff but that's all for other videos with more advanced things you can do with X lights but that is the entire sequencer tab that's all the different settings in it and since I didn't want to make a sequence and make this a very very long video I will go and show you this exact same song that I've already programmed for my show and show you just briefly how I program that but first anytime you go to close the sequence and you're done with it I'd recommend rendering it that way when you open it it will be working correctly all of the different elements will be rendered already so you can click that and it shows you this little render bar at the bottom and how long it will take it just did that in like half a second because it was only this one single effect and then once you're done you can hit save you can add a name to it you do want to keep this dot xsq extension on the end be because this is the extension to open it so we can name it whatever we want it will automatically generate to the song name if you pick the song but I'll just call this test so here's a sequence that took me about a couple of weeks to make on my display this is my display right here and as you can see there's a lot of effects to it there is a lot of timing marks lots of layers and I would call this a pretty good sequence I think I did above average good on it definitely not one of the best sequences I've done but it is a pretty good one I'd say as you can see lots of effects are being used at once so if we like take a look at this one row right here we have an entire display group up here and there's four different layers in it and it starts off with two of these snowflake patterns one is blue and one is white it's kind of hard to see the blue one but there is a blue one there and then on the candy canes we have an off effect and the reason that's here is so this entire display effect does not go on to the candy canes and then we have the Arches doing something right here and then the floodlights at the same time are going on this wash color wash effect changing colors and then down here I have a Shockwave effect which goes in line with like the beat for the candy canes so if you were to listen to that you could see the candy canes move with the song [Music] foreign blending and layer setting panels those were used a ton in this sequence um definitely with the in and out transitions they were used a lot but there is just lots and lots of different effects and patterns and settings I had to use on this so like I said earlier if you would like to see how I make a sequence how I program all this and dive deeper into this sequence specifically how I came up with each effect then I recommend watching that video I shared earlier I will put it in the description and with that that concludes the X lights tutorial if your head isn't exploding with knowledge then you have a problem congratulations you made it through the full two and a half hour long Excellence tutorial you should be ready now to install X lights set up your layout and make your first sequence my only two goals with this video were One update the last full episodes tutorial because it sucked my mic quality was terrible I forgot to talk about a lot of things and my second goal was to hopefully reach new people that haven't heard about X lights and are looking for a tutorial if you're to scroll through and see one from two or three years ago you might think it's outdated and not watch it so hopefully this new one was able to help you get started using X lights and feel comfortable making a sequence if you have any questions comments or think I missed out on anything any future video ideas anything you want to let me know about please feel free to put them down in the comment section below if I don't reply instantly I'm probably working on something but I will eventually reply but thank you for watching and supporting the videos and like always I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: How 2 Pixel

Views: 58,287

Keywords: Lights, Pixels, RGB, Christmas, Bridgeport, bridgeports brightest lights, how 2 pixel, xlights, xlights tutorial, xlights sequencing, xlights for beginners, xlights beginner, xlights light show, xlights christmas lights, xlights christmas show, xlights program, xlights programming, xlights controller, xlights layout, xlights setup, xlights tutorial 2023, xlights tutorial new, xlights beginner tutorial

Id: xLd35K_e65Q

Length: 153min 16sec (9196 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023