Scopebox, now in it's 2.0 release, basically puts all the color, lighting, and other scopes you'll ever need to analyze the quality of your camcorder's image on your laptop. But it does so much more: including recording video from your camera directly onto your laptop while you are checking your zebras, your scopes, adjusting the focus and even viewing an overlay picture for your visual effects.
Although probably not intended as such, the overlay feature is a great tool for visual effects as I can see the matte area thru my live camera and adjust lights, perspective action and color in the camera to match. It even works with alpha channels. You have to drag a Photoshop file or other picture file in from the finder into the custom image well which is a black area slightly below the custom image button. You also adjust the opacity before you see anything there. If you don't have an alpha channel you can use the opacity to line things up and click it on and off. I haven't found another Mac program that I or any of the people I usually work with owns that can combine a matte with a live camera feed. (I understand that PC users can utilize Adobe’s OnLocation with similar features, but Scopebox 2.0 is the only sub-$1000 Mac program that I’ve used that will do so.)
The custom image well containing a storyboard image.
Ease of Use
The interface is a little awkward for Mac users and, for studio use, you can't drag the windows around to other monitors. However it is well set up for a single screen laptop which would be most commonly used by location filmmakers. With that format in mind, it works pretty well.
You can open all sorts of things in Scopebox 2.0 including a waveform, vectorscope, rgb parade, yuv parade, vu meters, luma and rgb histograms and timecode. There is a nifty solo palette <apple=> that enlarges the top palette to fill it's area of the screen, another click of the same keys gets rid of it. Each different palette also has several choices for mode, sampling , colorspace and intensity. It's great fun to point a video camera around and watch the picture change on the scopes, even if you don't know what they all do you can figure out most of it by watching the changes. I like to use the vectorscope with the mode set to color as it gives little colored pixels that show you what you are getting. Of course, you can also set the mode to weighted and mono. Mono makes it a vibrant green color but it takes the mind an extra step to associate this image with the boxes for red blue, yellow, green, cyan magenta and then translate that to the colors that are being affected. All of the scopes have different options.
The custom still image of the storyboard overlaying the live video.
Depth of Options
You can also have multiple sources including more than one camera and Quicktime movies. A series of various palettes can be switched to your different sources. With that said, there is one caveat: the way you tell which palette goes with which source is a little bit on the subtle side. Each palette has little circles that open for each source and the color of the window of the sources and the palettes switch to show you which one is which. On my older monitor, the colors were very subtle and it took me awhile to figure out what was going on. In the long run, this might be better since the muted colors reduce eyestrain. Once you figure it out, it's obvious anyway.
