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Scoping Out Your Video

Many editing software programs offer a variety of colorful scopes to help enhance the hue, color, and brilliance, among other editing tweaks. But how do they work?

I recently took a documentary I was editing on a 24" iMac and brought it to a Mac Pro tower with dual 17" NEC monitors and - holy hue! - the colors were completely different. The iMac was much more vibrant, but were those the true colors or just a slick Apple monitor? How do we know what true colors really look like?

Truth Lives in the Videoscopes

The videoscopes in higher-end video editing software programs such as Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro or Avid systems are very similar to their physical hardware cousins in online or color-correction facilities. They provide exact measurements of color, including its hue, saturation and luma levels (explanations below). When we deal with these scopes in post production, we are using them to help us match shots, to correct individual shots, to make our overall videos more consistent or for special effects. We can use scopes on set to adjust the image the camera is capturing, which, of course, would make our job as editors easier, or even while capturing, though this is not always economical in our no-budget world. So most of the time we're forced to "fix it in post."

Today we will be talking about four scopes: the Waveform Monitor, the Vectorscope, the Histogram and the RGB Parade. But first, a quick primer on what exactly we are measur…