Scenes from motion pictures to be colorized are broken up into separate elements, composed of backgrounds/sets or motion/onscreen-action. These background and motion elements are combined into single frame representations of multiple frames as tiled frame sets or as a single frame composite of all elements (i.e., both motion and background) that then becomes a visual reference database that includes data for all frame offsets which are later used for the computer controlled application of masks within a sequence of frames. Each pixel address within the visual reference database corresponds to a mask/lookup table address within the digital frame and X, Y, Z location of subsequent frames that were used to create the visual reference database. Masks are applied to subsequent frames of motion objects based on various differentiating image processing methods. The gray scale determines the mask and corresponding color lookup from frame to frame as applied in a keying fashion.