Video Tutorial is in the works!

Waveform

This is the most useful of all the scopes.

The most important thing to know is that top to bottom is the brightness level in your video clip. Down is dark, up is bright. See? Not so bad right?

If your shadows go below zero its completely black. A common term used is “crushed" as in crushed shadows or crushed blacks.

If the brightest areas (highlights) go above 90 (left side) or 921 (right side), they are too bright and are pure white. Sometimes this is unavoidable when you are filming outside. You can see at the top of this waveform graph, a green and red line showing that some of the highlights are “clipped.”

Left to right is the color of the video clip from left to right. You will notice when you hit play the scopes will move. In this case you see a lot of blue on the top right. In this example that is the sky.

The waveform is split into Red, Green, and Blue. Often when you film indoors the florescent lights give your footage an orange tinge. Yuck! When this happens you will see a lot of red and green showing higher than the blue as shown on the right.

To correct the orange tinge, take your temperature slider and push it closer to the blue. You want your red, greens, and blues, to line up as best as possible like the waveform above.

Vectorscope

This is primarily design for people using a “color checker” which is shown in the image below left. There will be a separate tutorial on this in the future.

What is most useful, is the skin tone guide line. See lower right image.

You can isolate the skin tones using the Pen Tool, the Crop Effect, or HSL Secondary. This will allow you to see if your colors are out of balance.

Parade

This is something you see on the 4th of July but also in Premiere. It’s basically the same thing as a waveform (above) except the Red, Green and Blue are displayed side by side rather than overlayed on top of each other.

Histogram

This is basically a sideways waveform.

It’s only somewhat unique feature is that is shows the pixel count found for each color: Red, Green, Blue.