Audio and Timecode
Vector has three audio scopes — Audio Meters, Surround Meters, Goniometer — and two timecode scopes, Timecode and LTC Timecode.
Audio Meters
Section titled “Audio Meters”Audio Meters shows one level bar per channel on the dBFS scale.
dBFS is the stock scale, its floor -60 dBFS. Green is below -18 dBFS, orange to -6 dBFS, and red above it. Each bar changes color part of the way up.
- Unity puts a marker per channel at the level you pick: -12 dBFS, -14 dBFS or -20 dBFS, stock -20 dBFS, showing over the fill.
- Peak hold shows a near-white tick at each channel’s highest level. It is on at stock and does not change the level bars when off.
- Channels sets how many bars you see. 0 is stock and shows every channel the source has. A positive value restricts the meters to that many, up to the source’s count and the ceiling of 16.
Surround Meters
Section titled “Surround Meters”Surround Meters is the same meter with a layout. Layout offers 5.1, 7.1 and Quad, starting at 5.1.
| Layout | Bars | LFE |
|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | 6 | the 4th bar |
| 7.1 | 8 | the 4th bar |
| Quad | 4 | none |
The LFE bar has a dimmed lower half and a purple fill.
Unity, Peak hold and Channels work as they do on the plain meters. Channels is capped by the layout, so a larger number adds no bars. The surround meters show no channel labels.
The Goniometer
Section titled “The Goniometer”Goniometer plots every stereo pair as a point, so the cloud’s shape is the phase relationship. Mono collapses to a vertical line, fully out-of-phase sound to a horizontal line, and uncorrelated sound to a cloud. The trace clears every frame.
- It takes PCM samples, interleaved
L R L R …, and ignores a trailing sample with no partner. - The grid is the level circle, both diagonals, the centre pair and the channel names, and the shared Crosshair box moves the crosshair.
- The readout is the block’s correlation coefficient, PHASE +0.00 with the sign always shown, or PHASE — with no pair to measure, and only while Grid is on.
- Zoom is the only row of its own and scales the whole plot, so the level circle, the diagonals and the L and R labels grow with the trace and a fully magnified plot overflows the tile.
An empty audio block shows the grid and PHASE —, with no trace.
Timecode
Section titled “Timecode”Timecode shows HH:MM:SS:FF. The value is the bound source’s own count where it has one, a free-running clock otherwise. For an NDI® source that count is its 100-nanosecond timecode. The clock runs at the frame’s declared rate, or 25 fps where the frame declares none. With no timecode at all the tile shows 00:00:00:00.
The LTC Scope
Section titled “The LTC Scope”LTC Timecode is a scope the Designer adds. It shows LTC while the decoder is locked, and the system clock otherwise, tagged LTC or SYS. Its input is one application-wide preference, on the Preferences window’s Timecode tab.
The LTC Input section has:
- Device:, listing None or each device as {name} ({channels} ch), with a ↺ button whose hover text is Refresh device list.
- Channel:, listing that device’s channels as Channel N.
- A status line showing Locked · HH:MM:SS:FF · NN.NN fps, with DF appended for drop frame, or - widgets show system time, or Device not open, green while locked and amber otherwise.
The Picture Tile
Section titled “The Picture Tile”The Designer’s picture widget is the Preview scope. It shows the real picture, fitted to the tile at the shape the frame declares, centred and never cropped.
Its rows are Aspect and Mask, the switches Blue gun, Title safe, Thirds, Centre and False color with Ramp, and the rails Zoom, Pan X, Pan Y, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast. The values and the rest of the picture tools are on the Gamut, Legality and Exposure page.
Loudness
Section titled “Loudness”A meter has two scales, dBFS and LUFS. On LUFS both meter kinds show the programme’s loudness, in four columns and no per-channel bar. The names are at the foot of the tile: M momentary over 400 ms, S short-term over 3 s, I the gated integrated loudness, TP inter-sample true peak in dBTP.
The three loudness columns run against EBU R.128’s -23.0 LUFS target, the zero point of the scale. TP runs in dBTP on the level meter’s -60 to 0 dB scale, against R.128’s -1.0 dBTP ceiling. A column is green below its line and orange above it, and TP goes red over the ceiling.
With nothing measured — a window not yet full, a gate that found nothing, a digital silence — the meter shows its four columns and their lines and no bar. Silence is not zero: 0.0 LUFS is a real programme loudness.