Given the little boxes distance from the traces of most shots of average saturation, one needs to essentially “eyeball” a given trace’s relative position to the angles of absolute red, or blue, or yellow. While the little standard box targets do a fine job of suggesting the direction of each of the primary and secondary hues, I’ve long wished there was a more concrete guide showing the actual vectors of hue for reference at a variety of intensities of saturation. However, what I find I’m missing within the sparse landscape of the modern vectorscope is some kind of a scale of hue to aid me in the process of signal comparison.
I’m sympathetic to the goal of freeing the colorist’s eye from the unnecessary clutter of legacy scopes. Furthermore, a lot of the lines and indications from the analog days just aren’t meaningful anymore when examining a digital signal.
Folks with software Vectorscopes are likely using them for creative and comparative analysis, rather then as tools for signal alignment. I understand the idea of simplifying the visuals of the scope. The graticule presented by a Harris VTM-4100 vectorscope Other then that, you’re looking at a big black area with a blob of a graph at the center that shows you all the data.
Once you learn to read the graph of a Vectorscope, there’s a lot you can see.ĭespite all this utility, the average HD vectorscope graticule in this day and age of graphically drawn software scopes shows nothing but boxes to indicate each of the target hues found in the 75% color bars test pattern, sometimes a second set of 100% bars boxes, usually a small (tiny) crosshairs to indicate the very center of 0% saturation, and maybe an In-phase indication line ( or skin tone indicator line, depending on who named it). Speaking as a colorist and not a broadcast engineer, they’re useful for comparing saturation levels between clips, for comparing the angle of hue of specific features appearing in multiple clips, for QC checking to make sure the signal is within tolerance, checking for overall errors in hue, and creatively they’re useful for evaluating how much color contrast you’ve got in your image, and in what direction the average color balance or dominant color temperature of the scene is leaning. I’ve used several different hardware and software-based Vectorscopes over the years. Older hardware-based Vectorscopes had the graticule silkscreened on a plastic overlay, so it was fixed and unchanging. The graticule, (sometimes called a reticle), is the overlay that presents targets, reference lines, crosshairs, and other guides to help when interpreting the trace or graph of a Vectorscope’s analysis. It’s time for a new Vectorscope graticule.