Blackmagic Design POCKET ULTRASCOPE

If you’re tired of hard-to-use and ugly waveform monitoring, then you’ll love the Pocket UltraScope. Blackmagic has included all the features you need when editing or color correcting, and combined it with an elegant user interface that looks great when added to your studio. UltraScope is engineering accurate and includes 3 Gb/s SDI to USB 3.0 conversion. The Pocket UltraScope plugs into USB 3.0 computers and is perfect for portable notebook use.

When adjusting video levels or matching black background levels when keying, the waveform display is ideal for this task. Waveform view has a setting that’s luminance only or composite. Composite video is synthesized from the SDI input, and is a much better view for aligning traditional equipment such as decks.

A vectorscope is the only way to truly see what color you have. When color correcting video, sometimes you need to know color has been removed or nulled out for accurate white balance, and vectorscope view is perfect. Sometimes when color correcting you also need to apply a tint, and vectorscope lets you see exactly how much tint you’re adding, and what color it is.

Almost all video needs to be color corrected at some point in the post production process, so you never want to clip video whites or blacks when on a live shoot. If you clip the blacks and whites, you lose all detail later in post production when you try to adjust blacks up or whites down. Histogram view lets you see where the pixels are in your video, and how they are distributed from black to white. You can see if video is clipping, making it easy to adjust the camera to keep all black and white detail in the image. Later in post production you then have the full contrast range of video for easy color correction that lets you keep all details no matter how extreme the color grade is.

Keep track of your audio levels at all times with 8 channels of audio metering, plus a stereo phase meter. The stereo phase meter plots left and right audio, as an XY scope display so you know exactly what your audio is at all times. Audio scope lets you see mono audio as a vertical line, or when you have stereo audio the scope puffs out in all directions. Audio problems such as clipping are easily seen, and out-of-phase audio can be seen as a left- or right-leaning display. If you don’t get a perfect vertical waveform, then you know your audio channel balance is out.

The picture view lets you keep track of the video input so you always know what’s going on and what video input is connected into your Pocket UltraScope. Input video is selected from the single SDI input, and the video standard is automatically detected and displayed above the video image. VITC timecode and RP188 HD timecode are also detected and read into a timecode counter on the top right of the video image.