How to have whole frame black and white BUT have one element as is, color. please help!

I was told it can be done. I am doing a video and need to keep a particular element (a sign) kept in color. Any tutorials out there?

Thanks and advance!

Some people call this the Pleasantville effect.

Simon Ubsdell has posted a free Pleasantville effect filter in the Effects forum. You can find the post here:

fcp.co/forum/9-free-fcpx-plugins-and-tem...-now-with-video-demo

You can also just use the custom color correction tools in FCPX to achieve this effect. Here's a tutorial:

Thank you for that Ronny. But what about something like this, with the sign /banner? especially at the end in the stadium, how hard would it be to do this since its various colors?

sorry if it sounds a stupid Q, still trying to get my head around this...

You're going to have to do a mask shape. The last shot will need to be manually adjusted frame by frame, a separate keyframe on every couple of frames probably.

If the banner in this video is what you have to deal with, this will be very hard to do in any NLE. You might better be off with rotoscoping the sign. Mask out the sign and keyframe the mask so it matches the camera movement, then superimpose the rotoscoped mask over the original video and make the original video B/W. This is compositing work, not editing. And it is very labor intensive. Fortunately the sign is easy to mask out, but the camera movement surely is not easy to match. You will have to use Motion or any other compositing app that has rotoscoping features to achieve this. You might try tracking the sign to fasten up the rotoscoping.

Thank you Ronny for your help!