Behind The Scenes of Marc Savard's Christmas Lights!

: Hey guys this is Marc Savard. As you know, I setup a Christmas light display every year. I get a ton of email saying "how does it all work?" Here's how it works. Basically I am controlling the lights through a dimmer box. It has 16 power outlets, one power going in, 16 out. I tell it which of those channels to turn on. I'll show what the boxes look like. I got 16 individual channels per box and I've got 27 boxes for 417 channels is what's running the show right now. This is kind of what they look like. I tell it to a computer which particular power outlet in order to turn on. For example if I want channel one to turn on, I turn on channel one and that particular channel goes to some other, one of the lights that I have put on the house. The palm trees, as you can see, it's basically just a net light but everywhere that you see there's 4 colors. I've got a blue, I've got a green, I've got a red and I've got a white. This particular palm tree has 9 sections in it. Here's one section, 2 sections, 3, 4, 5 all the way up to the top. The next palm tree has 10 sections. I can turn on each individual section and I could turn them on in fractions of a second to give it that appearance of a chase feeling. Also the mini tress, these are the lights that are out here, the little trees. Basically what we've done is we manufactured a metal frame and we manufactured these trees. They're not really trees however at night time they appear fantastic. Basically it's a metal wire cage and we've got strings attached on there. Now because of all the different colors of the lights in the shell, it looks like the LEDs are multi-changing but they're not. It's 4 color everywhere you look. On here, there's 140 blue light bulbs, 140 green, 140 red, 140 white; pretty simple. On the backside of the tree I've got 4 power cables going into it. I tell the box that I want you to turn on channel and that's blue. Channel 2 is green, channel 3 is red and channel 4 is white. Just for these mini-trees, it takes 4 channels; 8, 12, 16 channels, 1 box to run these 4 mini-trees. Times that 32, basically 128 channels in order to run these mini-trees; 128 separate power cables turning on each individual thing so I need 32 power cables to turn on the blue, 32 for the green, 32 for the red, 32 for the white. The house has many different things. We've put lights on every groove of the roof, again I can control all those, control the windows, the Mediterranean palms and so on and so forth. That's kind of behind the scenes of how it goes. Everything is programmed on a computer, I manually do it. Because of the fact that I'm using 417 channels, it takes approximately 3 -- 5 hours for every minute of play song you see so a 3-minute song, 10 -- 15 hours for me to program. A lot of work, the passion, I do it for the kid; I do it for the community. I love it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.