building a dirty video mixer

This was a fun one, and thankfully much simpler than the boost pedal I built a while ago.

This dirty video mixer design was created by Karl Klomp. I found the tutorial for it on EVA LANDRY’s Youtube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRWvQf3u2c&ab_channel=EVALANDRY

done

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Part 1: wtf is a dirty video mixer?

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A dirty video mixer is a video mixer that fades between two video signals. But, because the design and components used are so simple (and passive), the fading between these two video signals is very unstable, often resulting in quite characteristic glitch effects.

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Part 2: The design

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The design is really quite straightforward (turns out that it’s pretty easy to make stuff look glitchy). The only parts needed are:

• 3x Phono Video sockets

• 1x 1k potentiometer

• 2x DPDT Toggle switches

• some kind of casing (I opted for a 1590B guitar stomp box case)

• some wires

schematic: G stands for ground

Essentially. the two switches act as independent toggles between the two inputs. The pot then sweeps between these two selected inputs and gives the resulting output to the output socket. And that’s it.

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Part 3: Building

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So first I had to have some kind of idea how I would lay out the components on the housing, and where I’d need to drill the holes in the housing. This just took a bit of measuring and making sure that I didn’t leave any components too close together to make it tricky to solder.

the decided layout

the drilled case

Then I just had to try fitting all the components in, hoping for the best that everything was spaced out nicely.

they fit pretty nicely

So now, all that was left to do was to solder everything together.

I started out by connecting all the grounds together on each of the RCA phono sockets (with black wires). Then simply, one at a time connected all the rest of the components as per what was outlined on the schematic.

Now that I’ve had a bit of practice soldering, this wasn’t too hard. Think I may have had the soldering iron a bit too hot though, seemed like it was burning the wires a bit at times?

I tried to properly colour code the wiring to make it look nice, but I didn’t have enough colours. Also, who gives a shit.

soldered to completion

And that’s it for this one. Not bad for a few hours work, but I guess it’s better to say that after we see how the testing goes…