Owner/Colorist
AlphaDogs, Inc.
Burbank, CA
WHY I LOVE IT: Color correction is challenging enough without the added uncertainty of what your eyes are seeing on any given monitor. That’s why we professional colorists heavily rely on our scopes. Tektronix has long been the leader in this area, and the WVR7100 has been a real workhorse for me.
"I spend the bulk of my days color correcting features and television shows. My clients trust me to give them an end product that will look great wherever it is shown. I couldn’t do this without a reliable point of reference which never drifts, and that wouldn’t be the human eye.
Our eyes are automatically "color balancing" all the time. This is very noticeable when going from the warm indoors to the cool outdoors. The same science affects how a monitor looks to us throughout the day. So how one adjusts a person’s face at the start of a correcting session, may not be the same as at the end of the session. Fortunately, using scopes let an operator see what’s really happening in spite of their eyes.
The WVR7100 uses an external LCD display to show four different views at once. This means I can monitor different representations of the video signal at the same time, giving me a better picture of where I’m at without having to cycle through display types. This is really necessary when correcting HD footage, which has a different color space than SD footage.
The other function of this scope that’s become irreplaceable for us is error logging. We can run a show through the WVR7100, and print out a timecode accurate log at the end that will show where any errors occurred. These can be anything from tape damage to illegal levels."
