That's correct - even in the Platinum edition, for chroma keying, using the eyedropper to select the chroma colour is limited to a 'spot' colour, not a range or swatch. Every example I've seen of picking an area has been in the PRO edition. I am uncertain about the Production Suite Version.

There are - as always - a variety of ways to chroma key if your have a big difference in your 'screen' colours. Two I use are:

1. apply multiple chroma keys
2, increase the colour saturation to try to even or average out your 'chroma screen'

I have applied both techniques often - but, prefer to take more time now to obtain a homogenous chroma screen before recording when possible ;)

HTH

UPDATE

Tim L's reply is correct! Even with VMS HD Platinum you can left click and hold and drag over a variety of colours or hues and get an average. It never looked like that when I used a uniform colour, but I just tried with a coloured test pattern with various combinations of colour ranges, and the eyedropper will yield an average. So, the missing dashed outline may be a bug.

Thanks Tim L.

I'm pretty sure that you can select a rectangular area for your chromakey color. The problem is that several versions ago Vegas/VMS lost the little outline rectangle that shows your area selection. It seems like it would be a simple thing to fix, but it's been this way for several versions.

So, click and drag to select a range of background, but you just have to visualize in your mind where the selection area is.

This is easy enough to test -- just click and drag an area with multiple colors and see if you get an average of those colors, or get just the color you started on or maybe just the color you stopped on.