The Audio Meter displays the level of the audio signal in dBFS. It provides both an instant meter and an averaging peak meter. Every spike is displayed, even if very brief.

Controls

Channel Count

By default the Audio Meter will show all channels currently reported by a source. However, many devices report a fixed number of output channels, which can waste valuable screen space displaying empty channels. If your capture device always sends eight channels to ScopeBox, but you are only using two, you can set channel count to 2 to only present the first two channels.

Scale

Different source formats require different peak audio levels. This level is often referred to as Unity. When working with bars and tone, or when trying to set your mic volumes at the proper levels, you want to know exactly where unity lies in the Audio Meter. ScopeBox provides a set of Scale markers for each of the three major unity levels found on professional video devices -12, -14 and -20 dB.

Peak Hold

This shows you the highest level achieved since the peak hold was reset. Click the "reset peaks" button at any time to reset this value.

The channel plot allows you to map two channels of a video signal on an X/Y axis. The box drawn within the scope helps you determine when your signal will be clipped by a colorspace conversion (gamut errors).

Controls

Axis Controls

There are six different channels which may be plotted on either the X or Y axis. These are Y, Cb, Cr; R,G,B; X Y Z; and x y. The channel plot is primarily useful when plotting values within a single color format. For example, you'd generally want to plot R against G or B, rather than against Y,Cb,Cr. By plotting R versus G, and in a second palette, G versus B, you'll be able to quickly judge whether any data will be clipped during the YCbCr to RGB conversion.

The CIE plot provides a standard display allowing you to see how your signal fits within a given colorspace. The CIE Plot by itself shows the gamut of all visible chromaticities. Within the CIE Plot palette, you can enable additional colorspaces to determine whether your signal is within gamut for these. ScopeBox comes preset with Rec 709, P3, and Rec 2020 primaries. You can also enable custom primaries and set your own values.

The HML Balance palette can be thought of as three distinct vectorscopes, displaying information about the "high," "mid," and "low" components of your signal. This can be helpful for identifying color casts in specific luminance regions of your image, like shadows or highlights.

Because the crosspoints between the three vectorscopes are configurable, this palette can be filtered in a variety of ways to allow you to focus on just one component of your signal.

Many of the controls are similar to those found on the vectorscope, but there are some HML-specific controls as well.

Controls

Zoom

The Zoom control is a variable zoom, allowing you scale up the scopes to see even the most minute detail. Keep in mind that with an 8-bit signal, the amount of resolution available in the display is inherently very limited.

Luma Threshold

The "low" and "high" values act as low- and high-pass filters, respectively. Everything below the value entered in the "low" field will be displayed on the low scope, everything above the value entered in the "high" field will be displayed in the high scope, and everything in between will be drawn in the mid scope.

Traditional scopes only show you what's happening right now. The Luma and RGB TimeTrace palettes continuously refresh, showing you your luma (or RGB) history over the last 300 frames. You can use the TimeTrace to catch an excursion or to get a quick glance view of how your signal changes over time.

The signal draws in an endless loop along the X axis. The Y axis shows a histogram of your signal, each line being one frame of video, with black on the bottom and white at the top.

The Luma Histogram displays the range of luminance levels in the video signal, with black on the left and white on the right. The height of each line corresponds to the percentage of the image that occurs at that luminance level.

Controls

Scaling

The Luma Histogram can be toggled between "log" and "linear" scaling. In log mode, each horizontal graticule represents an order of magnitude - 10, 100, 1000 and so on. This means that even luminance levels with relatively low frequency within your signal will be easily visible within the palette.

Linear scaling causes the vertical axis to be scaled to the height of the most populated luminance level.

HDR Overlays

HDR overlays show a lower fidelity histogram of common ST2084-specific luma ranges, along with a total coverage percentage.

The Preview palette displays video source output and can replace a traditional field monitor for checking focus, framing, and color calibration.

Controls

When you select the preview palette, the following controls will appear in the sidebar.

Changes made to the image in monitor calibration only affect what you see in the preview palette. They are not reflected in any other scopes. Monitor Calibration should only be used to ensure your preview accurately reflects the video signal. You can do this by calibrating to color bars sent from your source device.

Aspect

Controls the aspect ratio at which the video source will be displayed.

Standard Definition video uses rectangular pixels whereas computer monitors use square pixels. This can result in video images that are stretched when displayed on a computer. If you're shooting HD, the 16:9 option should be selected by default. For SD sources, you can either view the native "rectangular" pixels, or the corrected "square" display. When you choose a new source, ScopeBox will automatically set your preview's aspect to match that of the incoming image.

Zoom

Zoom sets the size of your image. 100% and 200% set the video image to the corresponding magnification no matter the size of the preview palette. This gives you a pixel-for-pixel view of your image with no interpolation from the graphics card or video re-size, which is especially useful when trying to set focus. However, if your palette is too small you may not see the whole image. "Fit to Size" fits the video to fill the palette, but does so by re-sizing the image which may introduce minor sub-sampling interpolation - leading to a slightly blurrier image. When zoomed in, you can click and drag to pan within the image.

Mask

The mask overlay draws blue bars as a framing guide when shooting at an aspect ratio other than the destination ratio. Using this will allow you to frame shots not only for the acquisition format, but for any other formats you may have to deliver to as well. For instance, if you know the video you are shooting in HD (16x9) will be used in an SD production, setting your mask to 4x3 will allow to see where by default the image will be cropped in the format change.

Monitor Calibration

The Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast sliders provide simple correction of the Preview image. These corrections are used to compensate for differences in computer monitors. Calibrating the Preview palette ensures that the image accurately represents what the camera is shooting. Any changes made do not affect the video captured to disk or the video monitored in any other scope.

Blue Gun

When checked, the Preview palette displays the blue channel as black and white, ignoring red and green. This simulates the "blue only" button on many CRT monitors, which is useful when calibrating a monitor with SMPTE color bars.

Title Safe

Title Safe adds two overlay boxes to the video. The outer box shows the graphics safe region and the inner box shows the title safe region. Make sure important action happens inside the title safe box, as older televisions may crop beyond it.

Rule of Thirds

Provides a 3x3 grid to assist with composition.

Center

Provides center cross-hairs to assist with composition.

Overlays

False Color

False color colorizes the preview monitor with a color mapping based on the signal's luminance value. ScopeBox ships with the Red, Arri and ST2048 profiles.

Image Overlay

Overlays allow you to layer an image, movie, or live source on top of your source. This can be used for custom guides for framing around your productions lower thirds, a background that will later be chroma keyed into the shot, or video footage you need to match framing or exposure in.

After enabling the "image overlay" option, you'll be shown a list of sources. To learn about loading image sources, see the loading stills section.

Below the image well is a slider to adjust the opacity of the overlay.

The RGB Histogram displays the intensity of the Red, Green and Blue signals. Similar to the Luma Histogram, the leftmost column is the lowest intensity and the rightmost is the highest intensity.

The RGB histogram is particularly useful when working with chroma key shots. The key color should be as even as possible for clean keying. Doing so produces a very tight clump of long bars rather than a wider clump of short bars.

Controls

Layout

The layout control allows you to adjust whether you're viewing the individual R, G, and B components separately, or overlayed as a single composite.

Scaling

The RGB Histogram can be toggled between "log" and "linear" scaling. In log mode, each horizontal graticule represents an order of magnitude - 10, 100, 1000 and so on. This means that even levels with relatively low frequency within your signal will be easily visible within the palette.

Linear scaling causes the vertical axis to be scaled to the height of the most populated intensity for a given channel.

The RGB Parade displays individual waveforms for each channel (Red, Green and Blue) of your video signal.

You can use the RGB Parade to gauge separation between the color channels. For example, when setting white balance, all three channels should be equal horizontally, indicating that you have equal amounts of red, green and blue, thus creating white.

The RGB Parade is also useful when trying to determine the cause of a color cast in shadow or highlight areas. Such casts can be caused by clipping (overexposure or underexposure) in one particular color channel. It is often difficult to diagnose this issue without a specialized tool like the RGB Parade.

Controls

Layout

The layout control allows you to display your RGB parade as either "R,G,B," "B,G,R," or "Overlay." Overlay mode will stack each channel, and composite their values.

Zoom Blacks

Often colorists want to get a detailed look at the darkest parts of a signal. The "Zoom Blacks" slider magnifies just the lower values of the signal.

Mode

The Mode dropdown allows you to choose the method ScopeBox uses to render your scope. Each mode offers you different information:

Weighted mode looks like a traditional scope and expresses the number of pixels at a given value by varying the brightness.

Mono mode displays every data point at full intensity, which can be useful in ensuring complete legality. With weighted views it is possible to miss a small pixel region that is out of range.

Instantaneous Envelopes

Instantaneous Envelopes help ensure that you don't miss any data within your monitor, even when it's just a single pixel. Checking the box will cause two bounding lines to be added to your trace, one showing the maximum values for your trace, and one showing the minimum values for each vertical line.

Peak Envelopes

Peak envelopes show the maximum and minimum values for each channel over time. This allows you to look away from your scopes, and still know whether you exceeded a target threshold. The reset button will clear the peak values.

The Surround Meters give you a way to visualize your audio signal in a surround sound context. This allows you to quickly analyze the surround components of your audio mix, even in environments that don't lend themselves to proper audio monitoring.

Because audio inputs do not inherently pass information about how to lay out each channel in a surround environment, ScopeBox provides a variety of popular channel layouts. Select the layout which matches the input layout you are feeding ScopeBox.

The palette settings also allow you to set the scale, and enable a "peak hold" option, similar to the Audio Meters.

The Timecode palette displays the timecode as sent from the video source, generally when playing a tape or recording. Some devices operate in "free run" mode, which generates timecode without a tape present. Timecode is formatted in SMPTE standard format - Drop Frame timecodes have a semicolon (;) between the seconds and frames place whereas Non Drop Frame timecodes have a colon (:).

The Vectorscope displays chrominance (color) information. Saturation is indicated by distance from the center, while the position around the circle indicates hue.

The markers on the Vectorscope (R, Y, B, etc) indicate colors. The boxes show where the signal should land when displaying the standard SMPTE color bars signal, providing a guide for evaluating saturation. The targets are plus and minus 5 degrees and 5% saturation.

The rings represent saturation percentage in 20% increments (the innermost circle represents 20% saturation, the next 40%, etc).

Controls

Colorspace

The colorspace option provides three different colorspaces with which to view the vectorscope. These are Rec. 601, Rec. 709, and Rec2020/2100. By default, ScopeBox will automatically set the colorspace based on your source. These colorspaces will adjust the color targets and scaling of the vectorscope.

Mode

The Mode dropdown allows you to choose the method ScopeBox uses to render your scope. Each mode offers you different information:

Weighted mode looks like a traditional scope and expresses the number of pixels at a given value by varying the brightness.

Mono mode displays every data point at full intensity, which can be useful in ensuring complete legality. With weighted views, it is possible to miss a small pixel region that is out of range.

Colorize mode replaces the traditional green in a scope with the actual color that it represents. For example, if someone is wearing a bright red shirt, there will be a bright red streak where the scope renders those pixels.

Instantaneous Envelopes

Instantaneous Envelopes help ensure that you don't miss any data within your vectorscope, even when it's just a single pixel. Checking the box will cause you to draw a boundary around the maximum values of your vectorscope.

Peak Envelopes

Peak envelopes show the maximum values for your vectorscope over time. This allows you to look away from your scopes and know whether you exceeded a target threshold. The reset button will clear the peak values.

Flesh Line

The Flesh Line is an industry-standard reference line along which skin tones will generally fall. It's most useful as a static reference between scenes or cameras.

Grat Style

The default graticule style for the vectorscope is a standard set of concentric circles, representing saturation.

ScopeBox also offers a "hue vectors" graticule style, which provides a more modern, color correct and camera matching specific overlay. This view gives more contextual information for hue adjustments across the entire range of saturations, while removing unneeded clutter more appropriate for signal-analysis and legality monitoring. The perpendicular hash marks on each line represent a 75% target.

Show Targets

See the Target Values section to learn more about how to set targets. You can enable or disable them within a given palette.

Hue vectors graticule by Alexis Van Hurkman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

The Waveform scope provides a view of the luminance in the video signal. The vertical axis corresponds to luminance while the horizontal axis matches the horizontal axis of the video source.

Controls

Mode

The Mode dropdown allows you to choose the method ScopeBox uses to render your scope. Each mode offers you different information:

Weighted mode looks more like a traditional raster scope and expresses the number of pixels at a given value by varying the brightness.

Mono displays every data point at full intensity, which can be useful in ensuring complete legality. With weighted views it is possible to miss a small pixel region that is out of range.

Colorize replaces the traditional monochrome tone in a scope with the actual color that it represents. For example, if someone is wearing a bright red shirt, there will be a bright red streak where the scope renders those pixels.

Zoom Blacks

Often colorists want to get a detailed look at the darkest parts of a signal. The "Zoom Blacks" slider magnifies just the lower values of the signal.

Filter

The Filter dropdown allows you to select between the two commonly found filter types found on hardware waveform monitors - Luma and Chroma. Luma is the default, causing the waveform to display only the luminance (Y) channel of your video. Chroma will display only the chrominance (C) channel of your video.

Instantaneous Envelopes

Instantaneous Envelopes help ensure that you don't miss any data within your waveform monitor, even when it's just a single pixel. Checking the box will cause two bounding lines to be added to your trace, one showing the maximum values for your waveform, and one showing the minimum values for each vertical line.

Peak Envelopes

Peak envelopes show the maximum and minimum values for your waveform over time. This allows you to look away from your scopes, and still know whether you exceeded a target threshold. The reset button will clear the peak values.

Scale

There are five different Scale options available for measuring your waveform. These are IRE (the traditional scale for a waveform monitor), 8 bit, 10 bit and mV (millivolt). The 8 bit and 10 bit options allow you to measure your waveform according to the actual sample values in the signal. Millivolt allows you to compare against the signal shown by a traditional hardware waveform monitor or oscilloscope. ST2084 is the Dolby PQ Standard scale.

The YCbCr Parade displays individual waveform monitors for the Y, Cb and Cr components of the signal.

The YCbCr Parade is useful for signal chain diagnosis since most video devices process in the YUV colorspace.

Controls

Mode

The Mode dropdown allows you to choose the method ScopeBox uses to render your scope. Each mode offers you different information.

Weighted mode looks like a traditional scope and expresses the number of pixels at a given value by varying the brightness.

Mono mode displays every data point at full intensity, which can be useful in ensuring complete legality. With weighted views it is possible to miss a small pixel region that is out of range.

Instantaneous Envelopes

Instantaneous Envelopes help ensure that you don't miss any data within your monitor, even when it's just a single pixel. Checking the box will cause two bounding lines to be added to your waveform, one showing the maximum values for your waveform, and one showing the minimum values for each vertical line.

Peak Envelopes

Peak envelopes show the maximum and minimum values for each component over time. This allows you to look away from your scopes, and still know whether you exceeded a target threshold. The reset button will clear the peak values.