Using the Waveform Monitor

When it comes time to work with exposure and footage, you really need to be looking at the footage accurately. Now conditions like the lighting of your room or the brightness of your monitor can throw things off. To get around this, we rely instead on the Waveform Monitor, which is a built-in scope that helps us accurately read the exposure of the image. Here's how it works. Let's go ahead and change workspaces here to the Color Correction workspace and we'll open up a sample project.

Now as I drag through, you'll notice that we have the Program Monitor and the Reference Monitor. You're going to want to click the Output button of the Reference Monitor and change that to YC Waveform in order to see the waveform. Another thing to keep in mind here are a couple options across the top. You don't want to uncheck both the Setup and the Chroma options. The Setup is only used for standard definition analog video, and Chroma is going to show you color details mixed in. With today's training, we're just focusing on Luma.

So I'll go ahead and uncheck Setup and Chroma to make that a little bit easier. Now we can go ahead and drag to resize if we want and that gives a little bit more details in the scope. That's working pretty well, and as I drag through here, you'll see things update. Make sure this little button here called Gang stays clipped. Otherwise as you drag, the scopes won't update. So as we drag on through here, you can actually see like when the car enters the frame, how it creates a brighter spot in the middle of the waveform.

Conversely, if we look at the shot here, you'll notice that the bright sky cuts down when it hits the building area. So here's the bright sky and then it drops on the Waveform Monitor for the darker building. And as we continue to go through there, you could see things like the bike moving on through and the car rolling down the hill. So this makes it really accurate to judge your exposure. Unlike the Monitor Brightness which can be tweaked, the Waveform Monitor is absolute and gives you a better representation of what's happening in the Program Monitor.