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Posted by Ryan Boni on 03/23/07 23:04
To answer your questions:
Camera Cuts:
The MX70 has some strange stuff to it. As Bob Ford mentioned, you
never want to "hot punch" a camera in the program bus, because the
built-in frame sync freezes the current image before cutting to the
next. Sometimes it's a few milliseconds and hardly noticeable,
sometimes nearly a full second. On a normal switcher, nobody special
would be correct that you would use a take or cut button, but the MX70
only has an auto trans button. Typically, you preview in the B bus
while A is program. HOWEVER, apparently Panasonic made the bizarre
(I'm trying to be nice here!!) decision to have the switcher flip-flop
the busses everytime you hit auto trans. So while you preview B and
hit auto trans, the B becomes program and A becomes preview. There is
a menu setting to get the switcher to operate as all normal switchers
do with a set program bus and preview bus. I remember it was not
mentioned in the manual and I came across it by accident. I'll send
how to do it on Monday when I'm in front of the switcher.
So preview the source in B. In the upper right of the switcher, there
is a time dial. Below that is 3 buttons: ME, DSK, & FADE (I think
they're in that order). You must select which time you want to
adjust. The ME (or mix effects) is what you're looking for. The DSK
is obviously to adjust the auto trans on the downstream keyer and the
FADE is for the fade to black button. When you hit ME, then adjust
the knob counterclockwise until it says the ME time is down to 0 on
the LCD screen of the MX70. It is displayed in seconds and frames.
That will allow camera cuts.
Chromakeying:
The chroma keyer in the MX70 is surprisingly very good. Before you
try chromakeying make sure you have a preview monitor hooked up to the
preview out of the switcher. You can select what is going to the
preview monitor by selecting one of the preview buttons above the
busses. I think it's ME Preview, A, B and DSK. Typically, I've
always had my switcher hooked up with the B bus going to preview.
Place your camera with the blue or green screen in the preview bus and
what you're going to key (weather map, etc) in the program bus.
Halfway up the switcher is a bunch of buttons, one of which is labeled
"Chroma". Hit that button. You'll notice a cross/cursor appear on
your preview monitor. This allows you to select which color you are
looking to key out. There is a little joystick near the top of the
switcher near the power button. This joystick allows you to move the
cursor to a portion of the screen that has the color you want to take
away. When you move the cursor to the blue or green you are looking
to key out, then you have to hit "enter" which is a button on the
right hand side of the switcher (it has an arrow on the actual
button). Now your preview screen should show you what the chroma key
will look like. You then hit Auto Trans to take it and again to make
it go away. If your key looks bad, there are plenty of menu options
to allow you to adjust things such as slice and key level. To adjust:
with the chroma button pushed and lit, you'll see chroma key info on
the little LCD screen. Turn the first knob to go up and down the
menus. The other 4 knobs adjust the item that is highlighted above
each one. By the way, don't get too used to this type of chroma
keying, because most regular switchers have a key bus and you use the
key & program bus, not the program and preview.
Computer:
No, you do not need a computer to get the switcher to work. Hooking
it up to a computer allows you to use the MX-Navi software. Which is
some pretty useless software. Basically, it would allow you to import
graphics directly into the MX70 and things like that. Since we already
have a CG, it never made any sense for us to use. Plus the computer I
loaded the software onto got pretty mad about it, so we gave up on the
MX-Navi!!
Ryan Boni
Public Access Director
Peters Township Community Television
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