Now that I have lots of cameras and I’m regularly using more than 5 or 6 inputs at once, and a combination of cameras, laptop inputs, effects and feedback, it’s getting hard to keep a mental map of “what goes where”.

It seems like a simple solution, but it took me a couple of gigs to figure out that the simplest can be the most effective.

Now when I’m patching my VJX in, I quickly note down on a grid which piece of kit is plugged in to which input. Now I can choose and switch sources quickly, without having to remember what went where, look at the back, or have to translate from list to matrix form.

Other VJX owners: Do you have a clever way to keep track of your tracks? What do you do when you have lots of camera inputs?

The VJX’ Preset system is pretty robust, allowing you to save and recall 16 blocks of settings for Keyer, FX, Motion, Crop, RGB, BCS, Transition, Audio Type and Audio Link. If you haven’t made it that far down the manual: Press Preset then one of the Matrix buttons to save a preset for the current section. Hold down that section button (RGB for instance) and press one of the Matrix buttons to load a preset.

It goes deeper though. Somehow, on my first several readings of the VJX manual I managed to skip the part about saving and loading entire track presets. This will save all of the above settings for the track.

The “Select” button - your new best friend.

To save a Track preset, press Preset as normal, press the Select button for the track you want to save, then press a Matrix button to save the whole track preset in that matrix location.

This is very useful when you’re working with complex feedback effects, or have different track settings for different inputs. For instance: I’ve been using RGB and HSB tweaks to colour correct my camera inputs, but if I was to switch from a computer input on the same track to the camera I’d want to be able to quickly load these colour tweaks. To reset back to “default” you can do a Track reset, by holding down Reset and pressing the track Select button.

So this gives you almost all the track settings possible in just a couple of button presses. We can’t yet save a “super-preset” of the whole mixer setup including routing, compositing mode etc., although I’m told that this functionality is being investigated for a future firmware update, and in the meantime we can control all of these things via MIDI. Has anyone made an application to save and send VJX setups via MIDI? Sounds like a good candidate for the next PD experiment.