MXO2 effects

Colour Correction

Matrox colour correction is excellent and includes full colour matching. Premiere Pro’s standard colour correction is actually pretty good too, although not quite as easy to use as the Matrox version, and has no colour matching. You can use both Adobe’s standard effects and the Matrox effect in a Matrox project.

Opposite we have the Matrox colour correction dialogue box. Note the colour pickers for removing a colour cast and for colour matching. To use these just select the colour picker and drag out a box over the colour you need to balance. The Matrox effect then averages the colour area in the box an removes the cast. It does the same for colour matching - averages the colours in a box that you need matched, which produces better results than just a one-click, as with most effects.

Matrox actually include 4 different colour correction effects, split into two types, Primary and Secondary.  Primary colour correction means that you effect all the colours in the image, and secondary means that choose to effect only some colours (just the reds for example).  Matrox have advanced versions of both which give you better control over the colour and brightness of the images, with controls to define the sections seen as shadows, midtones and highlights and a more advance version of the luminance graph which gives you greater control of the gamma of the image.

Matrox track matte

Put a moving or still piece of video on one track and use it to determine the opacity of various areas of your main image.  Premiere does this natively but Matrox does it in realtime. 

Chroma and lumakey

Matrox keyers are much better than Premiere version - if you have After Effects you would have the non-realtime ‘Keylight’ keyer is better. However that means two things - first that you own After Effects as well as Premiere, and secondly, although it will preview nicely in After Effects keylight will not playback in realtime.   The Matrox keyer will play back instantly, even with HD footage and will be quicker to set up.  Keying in Premiere without Matrox is fairly poor.  It has improved slightly with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5as there is a new keyer included called ULTRA. This gets pretty similar results to the Matrox keyer and is realtime with the right kind of graphic card.

Of course, with the Adobe software you can always just pop into AE for your keying and then drop that composition straight on to your Premiere Pro timeline using Adobe’s Dynamic link.