3Prong's WaveScope™ plug-in for Avid

Using 3Prong WaveScope™ with Avid Written by: Leo W. Mahoney

I am a huge fan of 3Prong's WaveScope™ plug-in (3Prong) for AXP and Media Composer. I'd like to share how I use the plug-in for adjusting video levels on the fly in the color correction mode. By following these simple steps you can easily control your levels using color correction. Lets begin:

Add a new video track to the top of your timeline.
Drag the plug-in into the empty video track you just created. You'll see the scope in the composer monitor when the track is activated. Set the plug-in to display the Background of the image being measured, waveform monitor, vectorscope and True Color in quad display.
Scrub through your timeline and park at a scene that needs video correction (where you park on the time line determines the image that WaveScope™ will measure. It should be a frame that is a good representation of the scene.) In our example the white in this scene is 110 IRE and needs to be reduced by 10 units.

Here in Source/Record mode, we can see video track 8 has the WaveScope™ plug-in and we will do the correction on track 1.

Patch to the video track that needs correction. It's important not to leave the WaveScope™ track patched or the levels correction will be on the wrong track. Keep the plug-in track monitored so you can see the scopes on the composer monitor while your adjusting levels.

Here we see video track 1 is patched

Video track 8 is the track to monitor

With the track that needs adjustment cued and patched, switch to color correction mode.

Notice that the window in the video has blown away the white level.

In the correction monitor you will see the quad 3Prong display. Switch to "the "controls" tab in color corrector and use the slider to reduce the "brightness". While watching the 3Prong display, you will see the video level drop in real time as you lower the slider. The same holds true for black levels as the "set-up" control is raised or lowered. Saturation and hue can be measured on the vector scope.

By lowering the brightness control we have brought our video back to 100 IRE.

When you are done making levels adjustments you can remove the 3Prong plug-in or simply un-monitor that track until level correction is needed again. If you leave the plug-in active when you play the sequence the display switches from the quad display to full screen and back to quad display when the sequence is stopped. Media Composer has the same scopes built into the color correction tool, however if you leave the 3Prong plug-in on the last video track you can check levels from source/record and not need to switch into color correction mode.

I hope you found these instructions easy to use and understand. If you have any questions please drop me a note and I'll do my best to lend you a hand. For $60.00US you can't beat this plug-in for measuring and controlling your video inside of Avid. If I left something out of these instructions please drop me a line and I will make the corrections.