I’ve had my VJX for half a year now, and for the last couple of months I’d been getting a little complacent. I had the feeling that I fully understood the device and that there weren’t any more surprises coming.

I was wrong.

Vixid Advanced: Keying and Titling Transparency with Channel Masks from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

The above video features a couple of examples of the VJX’s RGB “Channel Mask” function. This feature is so simple, yet so revolutionary, that I managed to completely gloss over its possibilities until recently.

In a nutshell: The VJX’s keyers all allow you to select a “Track In” parameter, which means that keying data for each layer can be taken from it, or any other layer. So if you’d like to Chromakey a video input with colour information from a computer input, you can do so for each layer individually. Which is super cool.

However, the RGB Masks allow you to use the individual Red, Green, or Blue channel as a mask. This means you can have 3 separate channels worth of masking data sent through an individual layer - through pre-produced mask layers or generative means - and then use this layer’s channels to key the other 3 layers in the mixer!

This ability had me creating videos with various spinning, oscillating and flipping red, green and blue shapes and using them to key multiple camera inputs. I was just about ready to post this information last month, when an idea came to me: Why can’t I use an input to key itself - split a video in half, with the bottom as alpha information, and the top as colour. I’ve uploaded a couple of demo videos to Vimeo so others can give it a try: Squares Key, Titles Key (use the “Download Quicktime version” link in the bottom right column to get the original files).

These videos by Deepvisual have been previously posted to CreateDigitalMotion, but they’re a very useful initial look some of the functions which make the VJX16-4 different from other video mixers.

Selecting Inputs, Blend Modes, Effects, Keying

Blend Modes, Layer Ordering, Previews