However, if the drop-down has been set at 100% then both of these little targets change with the inner box now being the 75% point and the outer box being the 100% (or total saturation) point. For typical broadcast systems you should not go over that 75% limit as that will probably take you into what is called ‘illegal’ colors or ‘ non-broadcast safe’ colors.Īs always, you should check with your customer for their delivery specifications, but as a rule of thumb don’t go over 75%. What this means is that when you look at the two little targets in the vectorscope, the little box in the outer most target represents 75% saturation of a given color. These vectorscope points are linked with a little drop-down that has is essential to reading the scope: Target Points on a Vectorscope (Magenta and Blue) The longer the line, the stronger (or more saturated) the color!Īll vectorscopes have small color targets: The vectorscope shows us how strong a particular color is by the length of the line out from the middle of the wheel. This information is essentially the ‘Hue’ (or the specific color) and the ‘Saturation’ (or the strength of that hue) of the colors in your shot. So when we see a line or dot in the vectorscope we can quickly see that it is giving us information about the color or ‘ chrominance’ of a shot. The vectorscope is also displaying color in the same places as seen in this color wheel, with red to the top left, cyan to the bottom right etc. OK, so what are we looking at? The first thing to point out is that a vectorscope has similarities to a color wheel (as can be seen from this color wheel from the Fast Color Corrector effect):Ī color wheel shows ‘Hue’ in terms of 360 degrees starting at red and going around the circle to end up back at red again. Obviously, your vectorscope will be different than mine, as you will be looking at a different piece of footage. However, if you click on the small icon (shown below) you can access the setting for the panel and then choose from a wide range of video scopes.įrom this – about a third of the way down – click on the word ‘Vectorscope’ to get the following circular graph: Then access the reference monitor (it should be directly below your program monitor unless, of course, you have customized your workspace in some way).Īt first, the reference monitor displays composite video. To get this setup go to Window > Workspace > Color Correction.
Probably the best way to look at the ‘Vectorscope’ (apart from launching the ‘Reference Monitor’ as a floating window) is to use the Premiere Pro Color Correction workspace. Let’s jump in… Accessing the Premiere Pro Vectorscope
In this post, we’ll focus specifically on the vectorscope in Premiere Pro – where to locate it in the app and how to use it to improve your video image. Plus, everyone sees differently, so using a video scope is the only way to get an accurate assessment of the color and exposure of an image. Video scopes provide quantitative data about the properties of a video image – much more detailed information than we can garner with our own eyes. Like most video editing apps, Adobe Premiere Pro offers several video scopes to aid in post production.
In this post, we’ll examine how to use a vectorscope in Premiere Pro when tweaking skin tones and color correcting footage.
The vectorscope is an essential video scope for color grading or color correction work.