The biggest news about this ScopeBox 3.0 upgrade is probably price - it is several hundred dollars cheaper than it used to be. While the application is capable of being used as an on-set monitoring and capture device many in the post-production world repurpose older Mac Pros (including G5s since they are supported by ScopeBox) and a compatible video card to be a dedicated ScopeBox machine.Īt $99 it's an easy decision to make if you are in need of software scopes to for any number of reasons. The only real equivalent that I can think of is the Blackmagic Design UltraScope. ScopeBox gives you a user-configurable interface with a full complement of scopes available including waveform, vectorscope, YUV parade, RGB parade, RGB histogram, audio meter, luma histogram and channel plot. While those are the most common things you'll want when using ScopeBox in post it offers a number of options for production as well (in addition to those same video scopes). There are options for focus assist, alerts and overlays that can show problems with exposure. It can transcode video in real time into both ProRes and DNxHD, among other codecs. Real-time transcode will probably require some good horsepower but oh, how your editor will love you when you hand him/her ready-to-edit files when you're shooting with some strange camera-of-the-month. Once you figure it out, it's obvious anyway.There's some cool features included in ScopeBox for those that might be using it primarily in an edit suite or color-correction bay. In the long run, this might be better since the muted colors reduce eyestrain. On my older monitor, the colors were very subtle and it took me awhile to figure out what was going on. Each palette has little circles that open for each source and the color of the window of the sources and the palettes switch to show you which one is which. With that said, there is one caveat: the way you tell which palette goes with which source is a little bit on the subtle side. A series of various palettes can be switched to your different sources. You can also have multiple sources including more than one camera and Quicktime movies. The custom still image of the storyboard overlaying the live video. ![]() All of the scopes have different options. ![]() Mono makes it a vibrant green color but it takes the mind an extra step to associate this image with the boxes for red blue, yellow, green, cyan magenta and then translate that to the colors that are being affected. Of course, you can also set the mode to weighted and mono. I like to use the vectorscope with the mode set to color as it gives little colored pixels that show you what you are getting. It's great fun to point a video camera around and watch the picture change on the scopes, even if you don't know what they all do you can figure out most of it by watching the changes. Each different palette also has several choices for mode, sampling, colorspace and intensity. There is a nifty solo palette that enlarges the top palette to fill it's area of the screen, another click of the same keys gets rid of it. You can open all sorts of things in Scopebox 2.0 including a waveform, vectorscope, rgb parade, yuv parade, vu meters, luma and rgb histograms and timecode. With that format in mind, it works pretty well. However it is well set up for a single screen laptop which would be most commonly used by location filmmakers. The interface is a little awkward for Mac users and, for studio use, you can't drag the windows around to other monitors. The custom image well containing a storyboard image. ![]() ![]() (I understand that PC users can utilize Adobe’s OnLocation with similar features, but Scopebox 2.0 is the only sub-$1000 Mac program that I’ve used that will do so.) I haven't found another Mac program that I or any of the people I usually work with owns that can combine a matte with a live camera feed. If you don't have an alpha channel you can use the opacity to line things up and click it on and off. You also adjust the opacity before you see anything there. You have to drag a Photoshop file or other picture file in from the finder into the custom image well which is a black area slightly below the custom image button. But it does so much more: including recording video from your camera directly onto your laptop while you are checking your zebras, your scopes, adjusting the focus and even viewing an overlay picture for your visual effects.Īlthough probably not intended as such, the overlay feature is a great tool for visual effects as I can see the matte area thru my live camera and adjust lights, perspective action and color in the camera to match. Scopebox, now in it's 2.0 release, basically puts all the color, lighting, and other scopes you'll ever need to analyze the quality of your camcorder's image on your laptop.
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