Using scopes to evaluate exposure - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- As we work our way through the color page, you might have one question, which is how do I know if I've gone too bright or too colorful? Like how do I evaluate my image to know that I'm within acceptable realms or if I'm clipping out detail and that's where wave four monitors and vector scopes come into play and that's what we're going to take a look at in this movie is we're going to start with wave forms, which is essentially evaluating brightness. Now our scopes are down here on this scopes palette and there is an expand button here. So you can go ahead and expand that out. And after I've expanded out, notice it disappears from down here and it has a little orange box showing you that it's broken out. If I click on the orange box, it pulls back into its position down in the lower right-hand corner. I can also press Command + Shift + W or Ctrl + Shift + W on a PC, as a keyboard shortcut to pull up my scopes. You can change and configure your scopes in terms of how large they are. You can change how many scopes are showing at a single time. So I go with single scope, dual scope, four up or six up view. Six up view does something that's new individual resolve, which it allows you to pull up different versions of the same scope. So here I've got my vector scope in the middle tile, I can go down and pull up my vector scope in a secondary tile and change the option. So if I want to do a 2X zoom on my vector scope, so I have my normal vector scope and then my zoomed in vector scope, I can do that. And I could also do that, say on the fora pallet, where now I have these two versions of the same scope. This is new and resolve 17 you won't find this particular functionality in earlier versions of resolve. Each of these scopes does have an options menu, a settings menu so you can change different views as to how they work, you can change how bright the traces are, so we call these traces, showing you where your pixels are, and then there's the gratisQLs, which is the scale. And you can change how bright or dim those are. And if you get lost on this, if you've been making a bunch of changes and you're trying to get it back to default, just click on reset view, and it'll give you your default. Now I can change any of these at any time, so if I want to get rid of this secondary vector scope, I can click on the pull down and pull up what I want. Well, we're going to focus on for the rest of this movie is the wave form. And really there are two forms of wave forms. You've got the parade, which is what we're looking at right now. So the parade is red, green, and blue, a popular option that a lot of colors like to work with is not just the RGB, but the YRGB. So this shows me the Y channel, the brightness channel shows me a sum of the red, green, and blue. When red gets added with green and blue, green and blue don't have the same weight as red and so it's not just a straight 1, 2, 3, adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three. And so the why only shows you that weighted summation of the three channels to show you really what that final brightness value looks like. The parade view is fantastic for showing you things like color imbalances, so for instance, without even looking at this image if I just cover it over this image, and let's also cover over the thumbnail which shows us our image, so just looking at this, I can take a look and say, oh, okay, so my red channel is slightly weaker than my green channel, which is slightly weaker than my blue. By weaker I mean, the blue channel goes up higher than the red channel does, and it has more shadow detail than the red channel does. You'll notice on the left-hand side, we've got this scale. It starts at zero and goes up to 1023. That's because this has set up for 10 bit. I can come up to the overall options pallet and change the scale style. If you're an old school editor or colorist, you may be more familiar with millivolts or maybe you're familiar with percentages. So zero, would be 0%, that would be pure black and a top would be a hundred that would be pure white. But if we take we'll look at the wave form, the wave form is just a single view. In this particular wave form, this is the RGB overlaid on top of each other. So if you were to take that parade view and take these three channels, red, green, and blue, and super impose them on each other, you end up with your wave form display. And again, you can see that there's imbalance. So the blue is brighter than the green, which is brighter than the white and the highlights, but where they're equal on all three channels, they get some together and you see this white trace. That means red, green, and blue are balanced with each other. Typically where you see balance, you're not getting any particular bias towards one color or another. In the shadows down here, you can see that as we approach black, we're getting a lot of blue kind of tinting going on in the shadows, and that can help us inform what changes because we want to make in our three-way color corrector or in our custom curves, in order to balance out this image. If you're not using the wave form to help you determine color balance, and you just want to look at brightness, you can come down to this option here and just go Y only. Now some people prefer not seeing the colors on their wave form, and you can turn that off and not colorize it. So you're just getting a pure look at the brightness values and that really worrying about the RGB balance. Why? Well, because you can always come up with a two of you and then you could have your wave form in one view, and then you pull up your parade and the other and if I go ahead and change my parade just to RGB, now, I've got a full display showing me my brightness and I've got the RGB parade showing me my relative color balance between the three main color channels. If you're coming from another system where you have experienced color grading, you may want to go ahead and turn on the low pass filter and this kind of cleans up the wave form and shows you a pure brightness only view of the scopes. It's how I tend to like to view the scopes, it makes it nice and neat to look at. You may also find depending on your display, that rather than this kind of shape, and let's go up to the forum view. You might want to more of a 16, nine views, so you can come down a ratio and change this to 16, 9 and that'll help you fill up your screen a little cleaner if you have a 16 nine screen, if you have a secondary display, you can grab this and put it over onto your secondary display. You can also adjust the quality here. So if you find that you want your scopes up, but they seem to be slowing your computer down, you can either flip it into auto and resolve will change the quality depending on whether or not you're playing down the timeline and I'll drop reduce the resolution as it needs to, or you can force it to always be in high-quality and give you kind of the cleanest looking scopes possible. And it really makes the traces look a lot cleaner. So in the next movie let's take a look at this down here, the vector scope to show us what that's telling us.