Looking for MX1 and Mx-PRo

[peri]

Hi all,

I am looking for several Mx1's and/or MxPro's from videonics. They are for me and a friend of mine. I am from the Netherlands so they should be PAL standard. I also have been contacted about some Panasonic mixers so if anybody has got those for sale please contact me!

Thanx!

per-i :nod: :jump2:

[BigG]

I have an MX1 that i currently use on my mobile rig, it's a fantastic unit and has nover given a moment of trouble.

Should I be successful in moving onto software based vision/audio mixing in the next few weeks, I'll let you known. Then we'll talk money....

[vjklik]

As someone with no vested interest in either mixer I thought I'd run down the pros and cons I've come across with each one. They're basically equal, except for price...
I just wanted to chime in on the major differences between the Panasonic and the MX-1 having used both.

Panasonic Pros: Analog Take bar. allows for more accurate real-time mixing. Does the CIRCLE WIPE! I don't know about the MX-Pro but the MX-1 has no circle wipe, it will compress your video into a cube with six faces and send it spinning off over a background or your "B" Feed and dozens of other tricks, but no circle wipe. Very simple to use. Nice Color correction feature on the joystick, (mx-20 and higher I think) if you're projecting ona wall that's slightly blue, you can tale the blue out on the fly, even tweak the colors on your video. The Joystick/Circle Wipe combination combined with the white back color and you have a video spotlight. Dancers love to see themselves all lit up.
Panasonic Cons: Very weak Luma and Chroma key. Monitoring takes getting used to. Bigger than the MX-1 but still rack mountable.

MX-1 Pros: Small profile. Assigning one feed to different source takes. Especially helpful with the inversion menu and the split screen. Everything becomes kaleidescopic. Excellent Chroma key which you can adjust for a noisy video feed if necessary. To get around my circle wipe issues I just made a tape with a blue circle in it and then used the chroma key. The Luma key, (#28 if I remember correctly) is very nice. Excellent monitor display.

MX-1 Cons: Uses power transformer, instead of standard power supply. That thing can get loose over time or the transormer can get sketchy. The take bar is digital and so sweeping back and forth with a crossfade between two sources to the beat can be a daunting task. 80 percent of the wipes and transitions are irritating to the general public and often overused and abused. (but not number 28...) I found the "Freeze" function too much of a nuisance to get right.

I don't know if that helps or not. I don't know much about MX-Pro and I've surely left some pros and cons out which may or may not occur to me later. I found the Panasonic worked better for me at my weekly. Use the circle wipe and center one of the club's platform dancers into the image with a video camera. I don't know why but the lack of a circle wipe on the MX-1 really irked me and saved me on the panasonic. But there were times I would have traded for a decent chroma key or transition 28.
-klik-
(Note in the image I uploaded; With a camera, a sticker and an MX-20 I put that "r" logo in the corner of the screen. I got that with my camera on a sticker which I froze, circle-wiped and joysticked to the corner of the screen. May not seem like much but the promoters were very impressed.)

[MoRpH]

There are excellent and comprehensive reviews of both the MX1 and MXpro in the review section here on VJC :)

[vjrei]

I own a MX-Pro, I'm more than satisfy with it. The transition bar still slow, I mean, not real time, you have to make the transitions slowly, but there is a botton for automatic transition that would do the job weel.

Between the Panasonic and the MX-Pro... I take the MX-Pro for sure. The Panasonic is "high end", it is more Pro, but for the price and for the ammount of money I can make in a event I preffer the MX-Pro. I was thinking of getting the MX-ProDV but I'm glad I didn't, I do not need the DV ports, I use s-vhs and rca connectors, they work and look the same.

Remember something, do not hesitate too much in having a 100% quality in your sources, you are not working for broadcasting, you are working for video beams or plasma monitors, they ususally will enhance the quality of the video. The video beams uses very los dpi, so even 320 x 240 res would look good and no one will tell.

Recalling, the MX-Pro, is easy to transport, de Panasonic is heavier and it was made for broadcast quality mostly.