Color Blocking With Video Mixers

Have you ever seen a TV commercial, special effects shot or music video that was monochrome, with the exception of one person or object, which is in color? This is a very popular effect, color blocking, that you can do with your digital mixer’s chroma key function.

Here’s how it’s done on the Panasonic MX-50, Videonics MX-1 and Sony FXE-100 video mixers. If you have another video mixer, such as an Panasonic MX-20, Panasonic AVE-55 or Videonics MX-PRO video mixers, just follow these instructions and adapt them to your mixer.

Assign your single video source to both busses of your digital mixer by pressing the same input select buttons on both your “A” buss and your “B” buss. On the MX-1, you will need to go into the Set-Up mode and assign your one video source to both the Current and the Next inputs.

Next, you need to change your key source (B buss on the MX-50 or FXE-100, and Next input on the MX-1) from color to black and white by going to the digital effects section and engaging “mono” (monochrome). Your background source, which is the A buss or Current input, will remain in color. Put the T-Bar in the B buss position and turn on the Chroma Key function.

Now you will need to specify color you want to have stand out on the black and white background. With the MX-50 and FXE-100, you adjust the Hue control to the desired color. With the MX-1, you will use the cursor on your Preview screen to select the color from the background that you want to show through on the foreground.

It may be necessary to fine-tune this effect by making slight adjustments of the slice, clip, or gain controls on the respective mixers. The end result is, the specific shade and tint of blue, red, green, yellow, etc., that you selected will appear in it’s natural color state and everything else will be black and white.

Please Note: We DO NOT sell or provide support for video mixers.
We offer instructional videos on the Panasonic MX-50, MX-30 and AVE-7.
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