vectorscope / waveform monitor ?

[Peter Moretti]

Bill, no doubt that Avid fully understands and gives full control over color mapping. I would actually think that Edius does so as well, given Thomson Grass Valley's broadcast business.

BTW, when you use an external (either physical or software) waveform monitor, is there a way for it to place markers that you can jump to on areas where colors are illegal? Or do you have sit there and watch the waveform realtime and hope to catch each frame where luma, R, G or B go below 16 or above 235?

I've always thought that Avid's color safe warning would be a lot more useful if it had an option to add some kind of indicator to the timeline, sort of like what's done for incomplete render ranges and areas that may not playback RT.

[Bill Ravens]

Yeah, Edius is somewhere between vegas and MC in its color mapping, but, as you surmised, grass valley seems to get it right.
The external software scopes I'm using are Hamlet's VDSCOPE. VDSCOPE has an option to show zebra patterns on illegal color values. One has to watch the timeline playback to spot when zebras appear. It will not flag a sequence for later reference, you have to watch the entire timeline playback and make manual notes of T/C. In my experience, illegal values are chronic on a sequence. That is to say, they don't flash come and go, they are fairly consistent across a sequence.

[Matt Gottshalk]

$695 from Blackmagic.

Welcome to NAB 2009.

Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic UltraScope

[Paul Cascio]

The DVRack scopes function was reduced in OnLocation. Also, metadata is fine, but it's not much more than note-taking, not worthy of great praise. Also, it wasn't added, it was copied from other Adobe products. How about giving us some new functionality, like real time color tweaking, more scope functions, camera matching, or providing for multiple camera switching. Now that would be an improvement.

OnLocation was an awesome product, but it's languished. Now that we're shooting tapeless, OL's greatest benefit has become commonplace. Also, the newer cameras even have built-in scopes. What can OL do for me now that I can't do already? Not much.

OnLocation needs to evolve. It also needs to be offered as a seperate product, as should Ultra. These are very specialized products not generic tools. How about adding some new magic?

As for Ultra, that too was a great product whose only fault was the fake looking CG sets that lacked detail. Everyone is doing keying these days, why not bring back the one product that let you do it while shooting, rather than in post. I owned every SM product almost, including Ovation, another inventive product. Adobe has either killed every SM product, or allowed it to wither on the vine. Please bring back the magic. Seriously.