I’ve had my VJX16-4 for around 6 months now. It’s no secret that I think it’s an amazing piece of kit, but it’s a tribute to the vision of those crazy Frenchies that every time I think I’m ready to review the thing, I discover something else exciting and have to spend another couple of weeks exploring the new techniques and possibilities made available to me.
Vixid Advanced: Keying and Titling Transparency with Channel Masks from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Music by Edward Guglielmino.
The above video shows some advanced uses of “Channel Mask” keying. The VJX’s keyer functions allow you to select any of the 4 tracks as a “Key Layer” for Colour-, Chroma- or Lumakeying. Additionally, there are “RGB Mask” functions, which use the Red, Green or Blue channel of a selected layer as an alpha mask for the keyed layer. This allows you to use one layer to individually mask the other three layers, or do titling with detailed transparency as displayed above.
As far as I’m aware, no other mixer has this RGB Mask capability. It’s a deceptively simple thing, but once you spend some time experimenting with it, an ocean of possibilities flood your skull, and you need to go for a quiet lie down somewhere.
I have a project launching soon which uses this technique to pretty exciting effect. In the meantime there’s more technical information at Vixid.Noisepages.