Why EVERYONE Should Use Video Scopes for Color Correction!

hey guys Caleb here and today we're talking about something that I think every filmmaker and anyone who makes videos should know about two tools that will change your life and it is this and this now these might seem very scary looking but trust me you want to learn about them because they'll change everything for you you can use these two tools on set when you're filming as well as when you sit down to color correct and grade your footage so what are these these are video scopes more specifically a waveform and a vector scope both insanely powerful tools that I use just day in and day out all of the time but Before we jump into that stuff if you want to learn more about your camera and also support this channel while you're at it check out the guides I have over at the video shooters academy here you'll find tons of content for film makers youtubers and training tailored specifically for certain cameras we have one for the xt3 the Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera cameras from Panasonic Sony and more so you can find all that information at Academy dot DSLR video shooter comm so what are these tools do for you well they are a way to measure luminance or luma chrominance or chroma as well as a saturation so luminance is the brightness value of your image how dark is it how bright is it different parts of the image what the pixels are doing when it comes to brightness chroma is going to be the hue of those pixels so is this background behind me perfectly neutral or is there you know kind of some green magenta what color is it what color is my skin is it the correct color and then finally we have saturation how much color is in each pixel within your image and these tools will help you figure all of that stuff out now why use these why not just grade with your eyes and use a nice display well your eyeballs actually lie to you constantly how many times have you sat down to edit your grading an image you're like oh this is so good man I just love this grade and then you go get a sandwich you come back and you realize it looks absolutely terrible over time our eyes adjust and it's an amazing science behind what's go with your eyeballs in your brain so if you look at a magenta color too long guess what your eyes are going to infuse or your brain is going to infuse green so you never want to trust your eyes because they'll lied to you other people will say we'll just get a nice monitor and go for it well the problem with that is that my monitor and your monitor are completely different so what I might think looks perfect on my monitor might look just terrible on someone else's monitor so scopes do not lie it's a scientific method for measuring images so a scope on your computer and the same scopes on my computer will say the same thing when it comes to the same image so we're gonna head over to the computer and take a close look at waveforms and vector scopes and how to use them so I'm in Final Cut right now and I have several clips here we're going to be going through and talking about a waveform so if you're in Final Cut and you should be able to pull this up in just about any software commands seven will bring up our waveform and you'll notice our first clip here is a gradient from black on the left to white on the right and that information is being translated to this waveform here so a couple things you need to know about a waveform the first thing is that it will show you what's going on in your image from left to right so again here on the Left we see around zero or black we have a line starting and it goes all the way up to 100 or white in this case our gradient now it's important to understand that you can't tell what's in the image when it comes to shapes for example if I jump to this gray heart here if we look at the waveform we can't tell that's a great heart it's just a line because it's just gray so we can tell that this particular heart is sitting right at 56 on this waveform that's it so you can't tell shapes and information up and down it'll compress it all into a single you know line if you will a more complex setup would be this shot of myself just standing there and you'll notice that we can't tell that's a human being but we can see there's a slight slope which is the background gradient lighting there is you know a person's kind of colored skin here in the middle which is my skin and then there's this really dark something handout that's my shirts I'm wearing a black shirt and that's translated to all this stuff down here by zero and if I jump to the same shot with a background light off you can see if I go back and forth that line near the top has gone down so that's our background here so that's what's up with waveforms you can not tell what kind of shapes are in the image because it compresses it all together but you can see what's going on from left to right so notice in the upper left corner of this image there's a really dark spot and we can see that translated here on the waveform in B lower right now what's going on with all these numbers here well for the most part waveforms will measure information from around zero to one hundred zero being black 100 being white here in final cut it gives us an extra 20 on either end but in some software you'll see different numbers like 100 to around a thousand and pretty much the same thing goes there 100 would be black 1000 would be white in this case zero to 100 and the waveform is really all about measuring luminance and sometimes color but primarily you're looking at your information when it comes to exposure this is great for use on set to make sure your skin is set at the right level you can also use a gray car to make sure middle gray is where it should be depending on what you're filming with and what camera you're using and it's also great for making sure your exposure isn't too overexposed so in this scene you can see we've got some clipping up here at 100 on set you can decide you know what that's okay because it's a window I think it looks natural or you can make that correction onset which is really handy so in post-production a waveform is phenomenal for making sure you're not doing something like this where you have tons of clipping in what's called the illegal range above 100 and you can make sure everything is where it should be same with shadows you don't want a grade like this and you know not see that you have tons of clipping going on now keep in mind all the stuff we're talking about here is for rec 709 in standard dynamic range for HDR delivery things are a little different but almost no one is doing that for the most part so we'll save that for a future video so now let's take a look at the vector scope and we're going to start with our gradient once again and you'll notice there's no info here on our vectorscope because the vectorscope only measures color and there's no color in this scene so it makes sense that this is completely blank so now let's talk about the anatomy of the vectorscope you'll notice here we have a color wheel with six points of color these are primary colors including red blue and green as well as secondary colors including yellow magenta and cyan there is a dot right in the middle or a little target there's these little boxes next to each of the colors and there's this line going up into the left so what's going on here well let's go ahead and jump over to a color chart and you'll notice here that this top row of colors on this color checker which i've done a video on you should definitely check that out super handy tool to have we have our colors yellow red magenta blue cyan and green those points are represented here on our vectorscope an important thing to keep in mind is the center of the vectorscope measures zero color and as you work your way to the edge of the vectorscope there is more saturation so we can see here that all of these colors have a healthy saturation and if I go in here and pull down or push up my saturation we're seeing that represented on the waveform so if i desaturate it it's closer to the center saturated it is further to the edges and these weird-looking little boxes next to each of the colored letters represents the max saturation you should go to so if you put red for example up here in this box or even worse beyond that box you are indeed what is called illegal range for saturation because just like exposure you can actually distort or clip your saturation so you always want to stay you know coming inside this range and don't go beyond those boxes when it comes to saturation in your image now this chart has a lot of black and white sand that is showing up as a bright spot in the middle of the vectorscope so we know this has good white balance for this shot if you saw something like this you would know your white balance is off because there's this big dot here and it really should be in the center so correcting it is really helpful and seeing that here on the vectorscope another amazing feature with the vectorscope is what's called these skin tone line and you can see that going up and to the left on this particular vectorscope sometimes you have to turn it on in your editor so pay attention to that but in this second row of color chips we have a bunch of skintone colors and we're seeing that represented on these skin tone line let's go ahead and jump to a shot of me standing at a desk and you can see we're pretty close maybe a hair off there but it's looking pretty good when it comes to skin tone and I love using this tool on the vectorscope you can use it on set you can use it in post and another thing you can do is kind of modify your skin tones to make sure it's more on that line so as an example we'll go to this clip here and I'll kind of show you how I would use a vector scope to double check my skin the first thing I'm going to do is drag a draw mask onto this clip and what we're going to do is simply draw a mask on my wife's face here and then I'm gonna blow up the image so it shows up nice and big and we can see that represented on the vectorscope now things are looking pretty good here it's pretty much on the line you'll notice it's a little red and it's a little fanned out so we can correct that in Final Cut and really in any software so I'm gonna grab a hue and saturation curve I'm going to do hue versus hue make a selection on her skin here I'll also add a point on yellow cuz what I'm gonna try to do here is move yellow in red closer to this skin tone line so let's start we have red I'm gonna push that you can see here sometimes you'll get a shot like this and we're going to be pushing it closer to that line and that looks pretty good right there I don't really need to mess with yellow too much but you could go in here and make it an even thinner line like that's like a razor sharp line I'm gonna keep it you know it's nice range because skin does have a yellow to red range it's not perfectly you know the same color so now we'll go back turn off our draw mask turn off our transform and we'll go ahead and go back and forth and as you can see it's a very subtle difference there but if we look at the vectorscope we can see some of that red has been pushed over to the skin tone the last thing I'm going to do is go in here and add some saturation in these shadows and in the mid-tones because it's a little under saturated it's looking pretty good you can go back and toggle on and off our huge changes and that's a great way to make sure your skin tone is where you want it right there on the skin tone line as well as checking overall saturation so I love the vectorscope it's also a wonderful way to make sure your white balance is correct so if I go to this shot you'll notice there's a little dot here but it's not truly perfectly on our little target so I could go in here grab my master and you can see I can move everything in the image around let me reset it here and then I'm just gonna drag it over a little bit sometimes I pull it away make sure I can see that target and bring it back in and right about there is correct so you can see I added a little bit of green to this image but go back and forth subtle but now we have a truly white background there's other ways to do this and we might get to that in a future video but vectorscope czar amazing definitely use them if you can especially on set it's awesome to have that to make sure you don't have any funky colors and your white balance is good to go so that is a basic overview of vector scopes and waveforms multiple times I mentioned using these tools on set how do you do that well the first thing you're going to need is a monitor or camera that has those built in so I'm filming on the gh 5s as wave forms and vector scopes built in although they're tiny and almost completely unusable so I always recommend picking up a monitor and using its waveform and vectorscope unfortunately monitors that have these tools are usually really expensive but there are a couple options that work really well without spending a ton of money the first is going to be the atomists ninja 5 it's sitting on top of my GH 5s right now also a more affordable option from atomists would be the shinobi I've got one right here that's going to do a great job giving you those tools and allowing you to use those on set the other company I would recommend is small HD here I have their focus monitor it's on sale all the time these days a wonderful little monitor and you can pinch to zoom and all kinds of fun stuff so both are going to do a good option they both have waveforms and vector scopes with a lot of settings for now when you use these onset a good candidate would be a setup like you see right now I used a monitor to make sure my key light and my background light were both as neutral as possible how many times have you sat down to edit your footage and you realize your background light or a window in the frame and your key light you're using our different colors ones may be a little green or magenta or something like that a vectorscope on one of these monitors will help you see that while you're filming so you can add a gel or tweak your lights to get the color perfect you can also use them for checking your skin tones and then finally of course waveform is a wonderful way to get your exposure correct you could use false color but often that's not going to pinpoint the exact you know level of a gray card or something one second this is the gray card I use every time I sit down to film and what I do is I put it in front of my face like this I rotate it slightly and at that level since that's where my key is I'm going to get a perfect reading for middle gray now we need to talk about this in a separate video because it's really important but in short every single camera and log or color profile has a specific gray card value that you want to adhere to so for me and my setup at all the Lots I use 50 Ayari is where I want this to land so I can just look at a waveform find that line where this gray card is landing and set it to 50 and I know when I sit down to edit no matter what I'm good to go with my exposure so we'll cover maybe exposure in a future video but that's a wonderful use for waveform you can also immediately see the entire landscape of your shot when it comes to luminance so both wonderful tools hopefully this has helped you guys out of links to everything we talked to in the description just check it out pull some footage into your favorite editing software and pull up scopes and start tweaking with them and I think overall you're going to really really appreciate using them if you've never used them before if you enjoyed this video make sure you check out my guides where we talk about stuff like this when it comes to using specific cameras and as always you can watch fresh videos here at DSLR video shooter every single Tuesday thank you guys so much for watching we'll see you in the next [Music] you

Channel: DSLR Video Shooter

Views: 76,126

Keywords: color grading, color correction, waveform, video scopes, vector scope, waveform monitor, camera monitor, video editing, FCPX, Premiere, Adobe, Davinci Resolve, scopes, false color, LUTs, camera color, color, science, monitors, monitor, camera settings, tutorial, review, what is a waveform, what is a vectorscope, skin tones, edit color, filmmaking, post production, photography, photo, learn, cinematic, panasonic, camera, sony, canon, how to, atomos, smallhd, fcp x, final cut

Id: itr8ULe6U0A

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Indy_Matt]

Oh damn! That's super helpful!