how do i achieve a colour changing effect?-from b&w to colour

[Shane Ross]

It’s possible, but pretty difficult. This is something that you need to do in a compositing application, like After effects. A lot of masking and rotoscoping work to reveal each stroke. I’m sure if you hire a competent AE artist, they could do it.

Shane
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[Mark Suszko]

You can do this in a limited way within FCPX (you should ask in FCPX forums for more detailed help instead of here), by using the color board controls and secondary color correction. WHat secondary color correction can do is let you limit an effect to a very specific color region on the screen, then you can do things like translate from B&W to real colors or any other colors you want. The trick to doing this is to have an original image where every item within the area of the effect has a very specific and different color in the first place, if you want to treat each item separately. If you don’t need to be that precise, you can use multipoint masking tools int he timeline to mask out different areas of multiple, identical video tracks, all in a stack, then by varying transparency, you can get things to change as you ask, in larger sections.

larry Jordan does a specific demo of the color effect “often called the “Pleasantville effect” in his FCPX tutorials, and I think he has a demo of that section somewhere that you can see for free. But you’re gonna have to do the detective work to locate it.