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Video Scopes

Lesson 36 from: Apple Final Cut Pro X: In-Depth

Larry Jordan

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Lesson Info

36. Video Scopes

Final Cut Pro uses three main video scopes -- the waveform monitor, the vectorscope, and the histogram. Larry walks through how to use each tool in color correction.

Lesson Info

Video Scopes

This looks like a black and white radiant, and in point of fact, it is it's, pure white, one hundred percent white on the left, one hundred percent black on the right and every shade of black, white and gray lives along. This is our knitting needle that we talked about before, except the knitting needle has been stretched out to fill the frame in and of itself. The grady in't moving from white to black is not useful. Where the grady in't becomes useful is when we display video scopes. Let's, go to the window menu and go down to doo doo doo doo viewer display. There it is. I don't know the keyboard shortcut, I don't always use the menu goto viewer display and show video scopes one of the reasons that I love being ableto hide the library panel in a browser panel is now when I look at scopes, I've got really nice big scopes, and I still have a really nice big picture toe look out! If the browser was open, everything starts to get really crushed aiken still work, but then when thie inspect...

or gets open, all of a sudden it's all cram together and there just isn't enough space to do everything, so I like hiding that which I don't need to see there are three broad scopes inside final cut the wave for monitor, which we already were introduced to as I was doing my slides at the beginning of the segment, the way for monitor shows everything we know need to know about the black and white the grayscale oven image going up to the settings menu the vector scope tells us everything we need to know about the color oven image and the history. Graham tells us that distribution of pixels from the darkest pixel on the left of the lightest pixel on the right there is a value for the history graham but it pales in comparison to what we can do with the way forming a vector scope and we always start with the wave form. First we have a couple of other settings that I'll introduce to you if you have a big enough screen into your cram for real estate horizontally but not cram for real estate vertically, you can change the vertical layout so you can stack the scope on top of the picture. This is a really interesting idea that is far more interesting and it's thought than in its execution. I prefer to have my scopes be next to the windows, so I'll go back to settings and change it unchecked this we can also have the scopes be adjust the brightness by grabbing the slider and dragging up and down so this makes the trace the actual pixels the lighter white brighter or dimmer and we can also determine what channels we're looking at I just want to see the red, the green or the blue in a picture or I want to see all the color generally when you're working with a way for monitor you wanna have this set tle uma and that's what we'll do here luna means is that he had another word like contrast and like exposure luna means that gray scale the black and white oven image the way for monitor unlike other scopes allow us to say things like the left hand side of the picture is a brighter than the middle of the picture and the middle of the picture is brighter than the right hand side of the picture we can make statements like the left side is or something is located in the center or over to the right I can't make statements like that with the hist aground the rgb parade or the vector scope but with the way for mike unmake left to right statements but I can't make up and down statements because up and down in the scope refers to how bright or dark a pixel is whereas left to right refers to its position inside the image this represents every shade of black, white and gray the way for monitor represents every shade of color and this is a very interesting thing which leads us to the first rule of color correction notice that every shade of black, white and gray is a single dot in the center of the vector scope. Why this is our grapefruit this is our grapefruit sliced at the equator as I look around the edges of the grapefruit there's red, magenta blue sayin green yellow back to read the angle around the grapefruit controls the color the distance out from the center control saturation. But the grayscale value is that nettie needle that goes perpendicular to our computer screen at this moment, so every shade of black, white and gray is running perpendicular to the circle, which means any shade black, white, light gray, dark gray, medium grade every shade of gray is a single dot in the center that's. Why we have to use the way form to see gray scale and the vector scope to see color. Well, let's, take a closer look at this and see how the supplies in real life we've seen already. That value of this image shades from one hundred percent white two zero percent white or one hundred percent black, depending upon how you decide to describe it. In our next image, we have a black around the edges that becomes gradually brighter until its brightest in the centre that's. What the way form shows pure black on the edge is slowly rising in brightness until it gets to about thirty five thirty three percent which is the brightest it gets in the center and it falls back off again and goes to black I can make a statement that the center of this image is brighter than the edges that's a true statement but I cannot say this is a circle I can't make content distinctions maybe it's a circle maybe it's a pipe maybe it's a rectangle it could be any shape we can't make shapes state mintz by looking at the scope but I can make brightness statements the center is brighter than the edges the left and the right edge are equally dark let's take a look at this next shot here here I have an image now let's just take a look at what's inside the image I'm going to pull this down a bit so I can see a bit more click on settings goto brightness and just brightened our trace up a bit more so we can see it a little bit more easily and go back here there is black that's the zero line there is white that's the white line and notice that our highlights which are coming off of snow which is down here in the middle it's the brightest thing it's not the middle of the scope though it's the top of the scope goes up and down refers to brightness or darkness so there's the snow on the left there's the peak on this bright spot here that's the brighter part rather than up there so there's the bright part on the sunlight this right there that thin line probably represents I'm going to say it looks like it could represent this let's see there's the cloud in the sky and we probably have this shoreline here's where that's going would be a guess or could be a reflection in the water notice that are black level is close to black but not at black it's maybe three or four percent high and that's actually a lot three or four percent in the shadow detail is a great deal it'll make it look washed out but we can see that we've got what's called a high contrast picture there's a lot of distance between the darkest pixel and the lightest pixel high contrast is a generally good thing you want to be able to see lots of pixels of different grayscale values even if it's a night you don't want to have everything be a solid black color let's take a look at this next one notice here I've got skye in the picture but the brightest it gets is about eighty five percent I've got this nice flat line this is the brightness of the sky floating right through there we got a couple of brighter elements but basically this grays about o seventy five percent gray throughout the mountains we could see the mountains right through there grass is this grey from about twenty five to fifty percent of shadow on the barn right down here. Dark shadow. There is no shadow over on the left. We don't see this kind of dark detail on the left because there's no shadow on the left notice also, the black levels elevated about four percent, give or take a little bit. The reason that it's elevated is this isn't pure black. We can look at the side of the barn and see detail. We can see texture. We can see individual board's going across. We'll compare that with this image here. There's the sun right against one hundred percent the brightness of the sun. Look how it falls off. Not a lot. I mean, we still have some highlights around eighty. Eighty five percent. But we see the vast sweep of it gradually decreases in brightness off to the left. And look at where the black level is. Black levels elevated. The closest we get to black us around ten, maybe eight to ten percent off this bark of the tree here. But the rest of this is so old wash and golden light that we're not able to see pure black. Nor do we. Nor do we have a really bright image on the left. It it goes from medium bright toe fulbright and scales back off against a dark too bright, too dark. And we can see that very clearly by looking at it inside the way for monitor let's, take a look at the next one. This's not so good. Our black levels are elevated. Our white levels are maxing out around ninety percent. We're seeing the snow is this line right across the top. The blue sky is going right through there. The face of the rock is a variety of shadows from about twenty five to fifty percent. The dark green shrubbery is below twenty five percent. The way form helps us to start to isolate where are the bright parts of the picture? Where are the darker parts of the picture? This helps us to repair images which are getting too in just a minute. Look at this one. The paper is white, but the grass not so much around twenty percent. There is no really black here, look inside the basket. Look at how washed out and gray that looks look at where the black levels are actually eighteen. Twenty percent with spikes coming off the fan on the right, spikes off the paper in the center. And the fan on the left is pushing about ninety five ninety six percent but the bulk of the images right around fifty to seventy five not that rich not that that solid it's ok but we can definitely improve the shot thinking of improving look at this shot there is no highlight here yes there's a speculum coming off the yellow balloon we see that spike right here but essentially this blue balloon is blue it's not black so we want to have it float a little bit above zero because if it was zero it would be a black balloon and it isn't it's a blue balloon look at how dark the blue is right around three percent look at where the red is not much brighter right around ten percent a little bit of a fall off to the left look at the yellow balloon also dim right around thirty percent none of these balloons are particularly bright. In fact the brightest it gets is the the side of the balloon right here in the sunlight and that speculum we see the sunlight with this arc and a speculator popping up to about eighty percent when we color correct this we're going to ignore the speculator but we would need to include the concept of how do we control the speculator if we were doing this for broadcast will try to have time to talk about that as well this is a really woefully under exposed picture but we can always make underexposed pictures look good in a way that we can't make over exposed pictures look good when in doubt underexposed your shots by a half a stop maybe ah whole stop because opening stuff up is easy getting rid of over exposures is why ed gets paid the big bucks so you want to try to keep your stuff a little on the darker side now this is next one I love this shot there's a whole variety of reasons why I love this shot but I want to study the way for monitor and I wanted to study her face we would consider her if we were discussing her in a book we would call her white she isn't white she's a mid tone grey forget the color look at the grey scale the background it's white it's one hundred percent white the background is perfect white her skin doesn't come close to that her hair is a really, really, really dark brown nothing about her this white everything is mid tone grey look at her sweater this is her sweater right around in there that's the left shoulder of her sweater this is the right shoulder of her sweater this is her face, her face is between fifty and seventy percent this is her hair right down here this is such a critical statement I need to drive it home there are no white people there are no black people there's just mid tone grey people some of us are lighter mid tone grace some of us are darker mid tone grey but every single one of us is a mid tone grey person we're going to see this in just a second because that which gives our skin color is not our skin it's the red blood under the skin which gives this color and every single one of us has the same red blood under our skin which means in point of fact every single one of us is the same color we're just not the same gray scale this is why you need to understand grayscale separate from color the two of them are different let's go back to the beginning and this time let's look at this on the vector scope again every shade of black white and gray single dot vector scope look att the blue wheel I have no concept off where black is or for white is or shading or where this blue is I just see that there is a huge spike that starts with no saturation great that's the black around the edges becoming mohr and more saturated headed out toward pure blue and it ends up being about fifty percent saturated which is when we get to the very center of the blue dot I can say the hue it's almost a pure blue I can see saturation it's up to fifty percent saturation, but I can't tell you where that shape is can't tell you the shape of the shape. I can't even tell you how big that shape is. All I can say is somewhere in the frame is blue that ranges from zero to fifty percent saturation and almost a pure hue of blue, same thing with the next shot. If we move to our our winter shot notice that there's a preponderance of blue, though it is not as bright as that blue circle we just looked at, but I also see if this is the centre. I've got a little bit of yellow on a little bit of gold, which is common from principally from this reflection here, because this is starting to get pretty dark. We can see that we're picking up a little bit of yellow, a little bit of gold here, but most of it is varying shades between blue and sayin and pretty, pretty monochromatic it's blue when it's all pretty much the same shade, we'll see the different shades in the next picture. Now again I still have the blue of the sky that's despite right here I've got a strong amber that's coming from the grain I've got something which is yellow green which is the trees here they have a yellow cast their green ish but they're more yellow ish than green ish but the bulk of the color is blue of the sky this spike and the yellow that's bike and none of these air particularly saturated there about fifteen to twenty percent saturated measuring from the center out to the color target by the way you remember I said that a there are three fireable offenses for an editor there's audio levels that exceed zero d b well we measure those with the audio meters they're quite levels that are over one hundred percent what we measure that with the way for monitor and there's over saturated color because a grapefruit is a sphere I have the widest amount of saturation at the equator and the least amount of saturation of the north and south poles so as a grayscale value gets brighter or darker I have to saturate it less but I have the most saturation room at the equator that's where the grapefruit is the fattest this measures saturation at the equator and the general rule of thumb slight variation but the safe rule is if the color is inside a six sided polygon that connects the tops of these six targets if it's inside a boundary connecting the tops of the targets, then you're chroma levels are considered safe. If the chroma levels exceed that boundary, like the yellow would be over here, that's excessively saturated exceeds the line connecting the top of the yellow target with the top of the red target, and that warns me that I need to pull my saturation back an absolute point of fact it's not quite that cut and dry, you got a little bit more latitude than that. But a really safe rule to follow, and especially because of the way camera shoot today is that you're almost never going to exceed saturation from the camera. You will almost always succeed saturation on graphics you create inside photoshopped so cameras are almost always safe, not a hundred percent but ninety five percent and photoshopped graphics just because of the way we like to create them are almost always out of spec. So you wanna look at your photo shop graphic and make color adjustments to it so that your saturation keeps all the colors that you're using in that photo shop graphic inside a boundary connecting the tops off each of these six targets. Let's, keep moving on looking how saturated this year's look at how there's no blue anywhere to be seen. There's no sayin there's, no green there's, really? No magenta it's all orange going to yellow and look at how far saturated it is way past sixty close to sixty five percent and the the spike here. I mean, this is this is just a really remarkably golden picture represented by this shape. Look at the lack of gold in the next shot. There is no saturation, barely saturated toward blue or look here I've got this green grass. The green grass is maybe, I don't know thirty five, forty percent saturated. We've got plenty of room to run there's, a huge clump of green there's, a little bit of blue, which is reflections of the sky off the metal of the fans we got live in a yellow, which is some interior stuff in the wicker basket. Look at our balloons. The balloons are dark, but the colors have pretty saturated. I've got a nice solid red on its way to being a saab pure red, a solid yellow on its way to being a pure yellow and blue leaning little bit towards sayin, but even though the image is dark from a grayscale point of view, there's a lot of richness in the hues

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a Creativelive Student
 

Absolutely one of the best & easy to follow teaching / learning sessions for this product. Larry has a great approach & insight into delivering a wealth of information from his years of experience that budding video engineers will certainly benefit from with a product that is powerful & great to use. I'm enjoying the journey to better understand & use this great product, expanding my experience in producing awesome video presentations. Great work Larry, & also huge fan of creativelive Keep up the great work you all do to assist budding producers in mastering their skills. Noel Blake Melbourne Australia

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Final Cut Pro with Larry Jordan has been of enormous help to me just stating in FCPX. Larry has a unique way of getting the message on the basics across in an easy to understand manner. I have not yet looked at the entire course as I am practicing the steps as I go through the course. Many programs of FCP are not presented in the easy to follow manner thatL array does so well. I am 100% delighted with my purchase. I am in Sydney, Australia, and, due to the time difference it is impractical to view courses live. So I had to purchase on trust which in this case was a good choice. It would be good if Creative Live could perhaps rerun programs so overseas folks could view them at a convenient time. The courses still need to be purchased as I find it best to run it on another monitor and put what is taught into practice. Well done and thanks for the special offer in July.

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Attending this class was really a life-changing experience. Larry is a wonderful teacher and clearly on top of the program and methodology, and the way he structured the course, did frequent reviews and constant technique reminders (naming keyboard shortcuts as he did them, for example) really added a lot to the presentation. The depth of the class was very much appreciated, and his command of a complex subject showed that it was possible. I have wanted to understand FCP for several years and have only gotten the beginnings of a handle on it in the last 6 months or so. This class was an exponential knowledge upload and I hope will allow me to do lots of things I've only wondered about. I thought Jim was a good foil for Larry and did a nice job keeping things together, even when there was a technical problem. The value for me of being able to sit through the class before deciding to purchase was huge, and I am very much looking forward to reviewing the videos as questions come up. The class was very thorough and I didn't feel anything was being left out. Thank you so much for making it available.

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