Tips & Best Practices

Vector ships four pages and five slots.

Colorist: HML Balance, Preview and 3D Color Cube on top, Waveform, Vectorscope and CIE Plot below.
HML Balance: place it where shadows and highlights differ. Its three plots take the tile’s size and place.
Every pixel: the shipped HML Balance, Vectorscope and CIE Plot boxes are off, sampling every other pixel, the 1080p default.

DIT: Preview takes two thirds, False Color, Skintone and Neutral stack in the right third, Waveform above Vectorscope.
False Color: the exposure tool. The Preset row offers 36 ramps in four families, stock R3D under Monitors, and ARRI LogC4 runs EI800 to EI6400.
Skintone: shows skin-tone pixels over a desaturated picture. The picture is untouched. Wide measures ±60°, the other setting ±22°.
Neutral: Band is Full, Shadows, Midtones or Highlights, and Tolerance runs 0.0 to 0.5 from a stock 0.05.

QC: eleven tiles, checks along the bottom, Audio Meters a thin strip.
Luma limits: the band starts at 0.0 and 100.0 and takes every level, so narrow it first.
The checks: they run whenever the scope does, so switch to QC for a verdict.
Chroma arm: finds a hue or saturation flip that does not change luma, and builds a second plane while it is on.
PSE analysis: the panel shows the current frame, and its thresholds are the declaration a measurement is checked against.

Broadcast: Preview, Timecode and Surround Meters on top, Waveform, Vectorscope and Goniometer below, Audio Meters as a strip.
Waveform scale: IRE and Percentage are shown as BT.1886 SDR. On 8-bit the legal pair is 16/235, and 64/940 elsewhere, as two lines.
Targets: the 75 % set is always on, the 100 % set is a switch, so a bar check needs no setup.
Timecode: the tile shows the bound source’s embedded count or a free-running clock, and a drop-frame source shows its ;.
LTC Timecode: the scope whose readout is live LTC timecode, added from the Designer’s own button.
Unity: -12 dBFS, -14 dBFS or -20 dBFS, stock -20 dBFS, and Peak hold is on at stock.

Fewer, bigger tiles win. A picture tile is 16:9 on the canvas, whatever the window size.
Caption bar: a tile smaller than 48x24 px loses it, and that is where the kind and source number appear.
The caption bar is over the picture, so Min / Max puts its readouts at the tile’s foot while the pane shows the top.

Level legality: Waveform with Legal range on, or a histogram with Luma band only to count part of the frame.
Exposure: False Color, then Min / Max for the envelope, then Neutral for the near-neutral pixels.
Balance: Vectorscope, HML Balance where shadows and highlights disagree, CIE Plot for a chroma reading, hue and saturation histograms.
Framing: Preview, with Mask, Title safe and Thirds. Zebras, Peaking, Chroma boost and Clip moved onto it, and Title safe replaces Safe area.
Audio: Audio Meters, Surround Meters, or Goniometer for the stereo phase.
Loudness: Audio Meters on the LUFS scale, for momentary, short-term and integrated loudness and true peak against the -23.0 LUFS target.

Channel Plot: choose from R, G, B, Luma, Cb and Cr, the six axes a saved layout has.
Zoom: the Vectorscope wheel magnifies about the tile from 0.5 to 8.0, and the CIE plot’s Zoom row does the same. A double-click or the Scope Zoom Reset dial returns it to 1x.
Global brightness: a dial brightens a scope’s traces over 0.0 to 4.0, and nothing else does.
Gamut Scope: paints the picture against your target, and shows “Out of gamut cannot be measured: {target} contains {source}” when no pixel can fall outside it.

Discovery: a snapshot every 2 s means a late camera shows up on its own. Refresh Sources is the manual nudge, and a rescan picks up a DeckLink device.
Sources: add a feed from the Sources Palette’s + menu or the Sources menu, then refresh when a camera appears.
A slot whose source has gone shows the offline slate, one that answers nothing the grey placeholder.

NDI® is a trademark of the Vizrt Group.

DeckLink and UltraStudio are products by Blackmagic Design Pty. Ltd.