This Video Tutorial on the Waveform Monitor in Final Cut Pro originally ran in an episode of the Mac Pro Podcast.

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Welcome back to our series on Color Correction. Before we jump into the Waveform Monitor, let’ go over a few reasons one would color-correct their shots. I should mention that I color-correct probably 90% of the footage that I edit, with varying degrees of effect.

Making footage safe for television.

We’ve mentioned that white levels and color levels can be too much for TV playback. At the very least, I take a look at every clip and make sure that I’m within NTSC specifications.
Correcting production problems. Examples of this could be improper white balance or less-than desirable colors, low-contrast shots or footage that’s too dark or too light.

Special Effects

These could be changing day into night . . . adding a color to change the mood or the look of the footage. Anything you can dream up.

Ok, last week we showed an overview of the scopes, and this week, we’re going to focus in on the waveform monitor. This is the best place to start in your color-correcting adventures.
Quick refresher– 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, remember, you can be over 100% white. This is not safe for television playback.
I have a clip loaded in the viewer. You can almost make out the image of the car in the Waveform Monitor. See the collection of mids here in the middle, with the blacks of the tires and up here the white line on the street. We can see that the whites are out of spec– above 100%, and the blacks aren’t truly black. Let’s fix that.

First, Let’s go ahead and get a 3 way color corrector plugin on the clip. Without digressing too much, here’s a quick overview of this plugin. We’ll be using it throughout this series.
Right now, we’ll only be interested in the top half of this plugin, and we’ll dig into the bottom part — the “Limit Effect” in a later tutorial.
The three color wheels represent the 3 ranges of your image– Blacks, Mids, and Whites. Here you can adjust the overall color balance of each of these ranges. Please note that there is a LOT of overlap between the blacks and the mids, and with the mids and the whites.

Moving the little dot in the center changes the overall color of your range. The further from the center you drag, the more saturated the color. You might notice that the little dot moves very slowly . . . hold down the command key to speed it up. Another handy keyboard shortcut is holding the shift key . . . which constrains the dot in one direction from the center . . . in which you are essentially picking one specific color and only affecting its saturation.

The medicine dropper to the bottom left of each wheel allows you to pick an area of your image that is supposed to be a black, a mid, or a white, and let the color corrector automagically decides how to color correct. This is VERY handy. More on that later.

At any point you can click the little button to the bottom right of the wheel to reset the color to the center. Using this in combination with Command Z or Undo allows you to A/B your choices.
We’ll talk about the auto level and the Match Hue buttons in a later tutorial, but finally this time we’ll look at these 3 sliders under each color wheel. These are really the only part of this plugin we’ll be messing with today in regards to the Waveform monitor.

Each slider controls the overall levels of the blacks, mids, and whites. The saturation slider controls the overall color saturation of the image– if you pulled it all the way to the left, your image would go to black and white. If you pulled it all the way to the right . . . well . . . you’d have a mess.
Back to the Waveform monitor. So where to start? Here’s what I generally do. Have your clip that you’re color correcting loaded in the viewer. Ok, what is this showing us? Let’s look down here at our black levels. It’s very important to address the black levels FIRST before worrying about the mids and the highlights. This is because the black point is unaffected by adjustments to the mids and the highlights and should be a baseline and our first step.

Here’s where we can get creative. Unless you’re going for a low-contrast look, some of your blacks should be at 0%. We can see here that our black level is higher than that, leading to some of the mushiness in the image.

While keeping our eye on the waveform monitor, let’s go to the color corrector plugin and ease down the black level until we have some of the blacks hitting bottom. You can overdo this, for creative effect, but that’s not what I want to do here . . . I just want some good blacks in the image.

Ok, next let’s look at the white levels on the waveform monitor. Notice we have a lot of information up above the 100% line. This, as mentioned before, is NOT safe for television. We need to pull down the white level on the color corrector until we have our whites reigned in within our TV specification.

Ok, that darkened our image up a bit. What now? You guessed it . . . we can even out our luminance and brighten up our image with the mids. We’ll do that in the color corrector, while keeping an eye on the waveform monitor that we don’t push our whites up over 100%.

I have to stress at this point that in color correcting you need to rely on a balance between the scopes and your eyes. The scopes absolutely tell you what is going on in your image, but, remember, this is an art, and as long as you adhere to some basic rules . . . the rest is up to you.

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