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Video Scopes in Final Cut Pro

So thus begins our series on Color Correcting. This week we’ll kick it all off by looking at all the scopes and letting you know what they do. We’ll get more in depth in the weeks to come.
You bring up the video scopes by going to Tools / Video Scopes or by hitting option 9.
This brings up the default video scopes window.
You might even have a built-in window layout for color correction . . . try Window / Arrange and then Color Correction.
The video scopes are the Waveform Monitor, Vectorscope, Parade scope, and Histogram.

Let’s start where I always start . . . the Waveform monitor. We can selet this by going to this toolbar and choosing Waveform.
The waveform monitor shows the relative levels of brightness and saturation in your footage. It reads from left to right, just like the levels from left to right in your clip.
0% at the bottom is absolute black, and 100% at the top is white . . . but you can be over 100% white. This is not safe for television playback. More on that in our Waveform Monitor Tutorial.
Ok . . . on to the Vectorscope. You might remember from waaaay back in MPP #20 that we did a tutorial on the Vectorscope. I suggest checking that out . . . a link will be in the shownotes. Either way . . . here’s an overview.
The Vectorscope is layed out like a standard color wheel and shows the distribution of color in your clip on this scale. The squares are called targets and represent the colors. The distance from the center of the circle indicates saturation of the color. A color that shoots past its target is too saturated for television and should be reined in via color correction filter or the Broadcast Safe filter.
There is a handy flesh tone line on the vectorscope that is a good indication whether skin tones are accurate or not. Yes, there are many different hues of skin tones in this world, but this flesh tone line is a great starting point for all of them.
Next . . . the histogram. This handy tool shows you the relative strength of the luminance values in your clip, from 0, or black, on the left, to 110 or “super white” on the right. Remember that luminance is the measure of black and white or non-color information.
The height of your peaks, valleys, and spikes indicate the number of pixels in your image at that percentage of luminance. The histogram is a great tool to check exposure levels between images & to compare contrast (no, I didn’t say compare & contrast) compare contrast between clips. A low contrast image will have a big clump in the middle of the graph, and a high contrast image will be spread out across the histogram.
Ok . . . the Parade Scope. This scope is a modified version of the Waveform Monitor. Instead of showing us the overall saturation, it splits up the red, green, and blue parts of the image and shows them to us side by side. They even tint the color of each waveform to make it easier to read . . . nice touch.

Ok, nerd alert factoid here. In case you were wondering, all the scopes in Final Cut Pro work by sampling 16 lines of your video clip that are evenly distributed from the top to the bottom, all within the action safe area of standard definition video. This comes out to about every 27th line of video. Just thought you wanted to know.

Filed under: Tutorial, Video