Colour

A screen can make a picture look brighter, darker or warmer than it is. The Colour panel measures the frame instead, so you can see that a face is too dark, that the sky has turned to plain white, or that a shot is a little too blue, and you can match two shots by their numbers rather than by eye.

Open the scopes

1. Click Colour on the rail. The panel measures the frame the preview is showing, with every effect on it, exactly as it will look in your export. It keeps up while the timeline plays and updates when you move the playhead.

2. Choose a scope under Scope: Waveform, Parade, Vectorscope or Histogram. The panel remembers your choice while the editor stays open.

When the playhead is over a gap, or over a clip on a hidden or muted track, there is no picture to measure and the panel says No picture at the playhead.

The four scopes

1. Waveform. Each column of the scope is the same column of the picture, and how high its dots sit is how bright that part of the picture is: 0 at the bottom is black, 100 at the top is white, and 50 is the middle. Brighter dots mean more of the picture at that level.

2. Parade. Three waveforms side by side, for the picture's red, green and blue. Where something should be grey or white, the three should sit at the same height.

3. Vectorscope. Every pixel's colour as a dot on a circle. Grey, white and black sit in the centre; the further a dot is from the centre, the stronger its colour, and the direction tells you which colour it is. The six small boxes mark where the red, magenta, blue, cyan, green and yellow of standard colour bars land, and the dashed line is where skin tones of every complexion fall.

4. Histogram. How many pixels sit at each brightness, from black on the left to white on the right, for red, green and blue, with the overall brightness as a line on top.

Reading the scopes

• Lost highlights or shadows. On the waveform, a flat line pressed against 100 means part of the picture has turned to plain white with no detail left; pressed against 0, plain black. On the histogram, the same shows as a tall pile against the right or the left edge.
• A colour cast. Find something that should be neutral, such as a white wall or a grey shirt. On the parade, the channel that sits higher than the other two is the colour the shot leans towards. On the vectorscope, the dots that should sit in the centre lean away from it towards that colour.
• Skin tones. Faces usually fall on or near the dashed line of the vectorscope, whatever the complexion. Faces far to one side of it often mean the whole shot has a cast.
• Matching two shots. Put the playhead on one shot, note where its waveform and vectorscope sit, then move to the other shot and compare. Shots that sit at the same heights and in the same places will look alike when they are cut together.