This is the waveform monitor inside Premiere Pro. And while it may look a little confusing at first, trust me, it's an important tool to help you get the correct exposure and colors in your videos. And it comes in a variety of flavors to assist you with that. You can measure the luma, or brightness of pixels in your image, your RGB levels like this, or split up into a parade, and your luma and chroma, or color information. It's also a great place to start when you're learning about the whole color correction process because once you understand how to interpret the information from a waveform monitor, you can then take that information and relate it to why certain images appear the way they do.
So in this video, I'm going to give you a basic overview of what the waveform monitor is and how to use it. Let's dive right in. You can find the waveform monitor in Premiere Pro by going to Window, Lumetri Scopes, and all of these tools are important for things like color correction.
But to simplify this video explanation, I'm just going to single out the waveform monitor and we're going to do that by going to the wrench and clicking on waveform RGB. And currently it's displaying the brightness of the reds, greens and blues in my image. But again, I want to simplify this as much as possible.
So I'm going to right click on the waveform monitor, go to waveform type and click Luma. Now we're looking at the overall luminance or exposure of your image. Let me break down exactly what you're looking at here. Horizontally on the X axis, it's referencing the luminance of the pixels in your image from left to right. To demonstrate this, let me draw a mask on the left side of my video.
As you can see, the waveform monitor is only showing you the information for that left side of the video. But as I move the mask, you can see how it scans the pixels from left to right. Hopefully that gives you a good indication on how that works.
Now let's talk about the Y axis. Vertically, it's showing you how bright or dark the pixels are in your image in units of IRE. IRE stands for Institute of Radio Engineers, and they're the group of people that came up with this unit to measure the intensity of light or brightness.
Typically, this is on a scale from zero to 100. So looking at your waveform monitor, anything at zero IRE or below is going to be clipping black and have absolutely no detail. Anything at 100 IRE or above is going to be completely white, clipping and have absolutely no detail. Everything between 0 IRE and 100 IRE is going to have some varying degree of detail and luminance. A better way to further understand all of this for yourself is to go to your project bin, create new item, HD bars and tone, hit OK, drag it onto your timeline. We don't need the audio, so I'm going to hold Option on Mac or Alt on Windows, click this and delete.
Again, I wanna completely simplify this explanation for you. So instead of dealing with color, let's convert this to black and white. I'm gonna go to Effects, type in black and white with an ampersand, and then drag that onto the HD Bars and Tones clip.
Now let's go to the Opacity, click the Pen tool, and draw a mask somewhere on the image. You can see that this gray comes out at a brightness of 40 IRE. And as I move the mask, along the varying shades of gray get darker and you can see it step down in the IRE values on the monitor. Turning off the mask and zooming into this white portion makes it 100 IRE and then if I move this over to black it's completely zero IRE.
And the greatest illustration to showcase to you how this works is to draw a mask around the gradient in the middle of the image. As the gradient goes from the darkest point to the brightest point it's illustrated right here on this diagonal line. at the darkest point, it's black zero, and it goes all the way through to this white point where it ends at 100 and actually above it's clipping right there at that white. Now, theoretical color charts are great and all, but let's apply this knowledge to actual footage. Looking at this garage door, since it's white, we know that all of this information right here on our waveform monitor is probably the garage door.
We can see all the detail on the garage door because all of these luminance values are underneath 100. If I bring up the exposure, notice that obviously it's much brighter and we lose all of the detail on the garage door. The same thing goes for the zero and black levels. Right here, we can tell the difference between the tire and this negative space between the tire and the car. But if I were to go down here and bring this down, obviously you can't see the difference between where there's a tire and where the tire ends because. the shot is underexposed.
And I can tell you definitively why it's because all of those levels here on the monitor are at zero. Now, I know those two examples are pretty extreme, but I just want to showcase to you that if you're just trusting your eyes when you're brightening or darkening an image, even if you don't see any clipping, it's always best to maybe look at your waveform monitor and know that you're maintaining the most amount of detail in your picture without clipping. beyond the 100 and zero point, because once you hit those, you're going to lose all that information.
If this is one of your first times looking at a monitor like this, I highly encourage you to throw some footage onto the timeline and start moving the sliders around to see what they do to your luma levels. I just showed you what happened if you raise or lower the exposure. But What happens if I do contrast?
As I move the slider up, you can physically see the luma values expanding to the extremes on the monitor. If I go the other way, you can see my luma values compressing towards the center. Hence why we get a flat image right here. It's because the dynamic range of the lightest luma values and the darkest luma values isn't as extreme as when we went like this, where they're basically at the clipping points.
When I move the highlight slider, you can see how it's fine tuning. the upper portion of my luma values. Compare that to when you move your white slider. Notice how much more I'm pushing the levels up and down by moving the whites as opposed to when I was fine tuning with the highlights. Same thing goes for the shadows.
If I move this, you can see how it's fine tuning the lower end of my luma values. And then if I adjust the blacks, notice how it's only really dealing with that extreme low portion of my luma values. Another neat thing to notice is how you can physically see my body moving on the waveform monitor. And this is because my skin and clothes are much darker and blocking those brighter pixels. If I put a mask on just my body and clothes, you can see that this is roughly where my body's exposed to luminance wise.
And if I move it, this is roughly where all of the luminance values of the garage are sitting at. Now, another example of this is if I were to hit play and let's say for instance, this ball that's in front of the garage door represents the the realization that you can use the waveform monitor to properly expose your shots in post-production. And here is the hypothetical physical example of that revelation hitting me in the face the first time I realized that you could use a waveform monitor to properly expose your shots.
For example, one way to achieve perfect exposure in your shot is to use one of these, and specifically the top part of this. It's an 18% gray card. Now you can get one of these for cheap off Amazon.
The one that I have is more expensive, but it does come with a couple more features. It's the color checker passport. I'll have a link to it in the description below.
But what you do is expose this 18% gray card to 40 IRE. And if you're filming with a higher end video camera or a higher end video monitor, it's going to come with some sort of waveform monitor in it. What that typically will look like is an overlay of the waveform monitor on your image. So you'd actually be able to see this gray card on your waveform monitor in real time and know the exposure. And a quick tip here for anybody that doesn't have access to a waveform monitor while they're physically shooting on set is to use zebras.
On my A7S III in the menu, I go to zebra display, zebra level, and I can set the range. All of these numbers for the zebra display correspond to the IRE that I was just talking about. I can set the specific IRE that I want zebras to appear on my monitor. So right here it says 40. I've already set this and I could also do a range of plus or minus one from 41 or I could make this even more.
So if I were to do 10 right here it would go from 51 all the way down to 31 is where I would see zebras. But I want this to be very specific on where I see these zebras. And now when I go back to sit down, you can see that my gray card has those zebras when I'm holding it right by my face. Now this shot was already preset up, but if I were to go here and let's say I was underexposed, I could just adjust my light accordingly until I saw zebras appear on my gray card.
So right there, we can see that my lights are adjusted correctly using the 18% gray card and zebras. But the beauty of all of this is that we can double check it inside Premiere Pro using the waveform monitor. Now, this is a little different on my specific shot because I'm shooting in S-Log3 and in order for the LUT that I'm going to be applying to this to work correctly, they assume that I'm going to be exposing an 18% gray card to 41% IRE.
So in order to make sure that I've exposed this shot correctly before I add that LUT, I'm just going to draw an opacity mask on the gray card. And there we have it. I'm sitting right around 41 IRE. So now if I add that LUT, it converts it over to Rec 709. And then I'll start adjusting the levels of my image to fill out the luma in the monitor. So maybe I'll start with bringing my exposure and whites up to make the image brighter.
And I'm okay with the light clipping a little bit because that is the brightest thing in my image. You can see it right here. Now, if you notice, there's room for me to bring down my black levels just above the zero mark, which I could do like this right here.
And you can see it reflected in the image. But it's recommended that you keep your video signal within the 7.5 to 100 IRE levels to be broadcast safe. So I'm going to stick with this and I might bring up my shadows and bring down my highlights a little bit, because personally, I like a flatter image like this. But there is much more room to push this if I wanted to. If I bring the contrast up and bring my shadows down.
Notice how we have a much more dynamic shot here, but I like something more like this. There's a couple other parts of the waveform monitor inside Premiere Pro that I think you may find helpful. The first being the second unit of measurement on the Y axis.
We explained what IRE was, but what are these numbers? They go from a scale of zero to two hundred and fifty five. And these numbers will correspond to your bitrate.
To explain this, you have to understand that a computer is limited to the amount of luminance values it can assign to a specific pixel. What I'm really just saying there is there's only so many ways that a computer can tell you how dark or how bright a specific pixel is. And we know that computers speak in a binary language of only ones and zeros, right? So if your camera is recording in 8-bit color, or better yet, the waveform monitor that we're looking at here in Premiere Pro is set to 8-bit. It's referring to how many digits of ones and zeros are grouped together to define exactly one value.
So hypothetically, if you were to see all zeros, think of that as a zero on the scale and that would be completely black. If you were to see all ones, think of that as completely white. And all other combinations of these ones and zeros will represent some degree of luminance in between completely white and black. dark and completely bright. So ultimately if you add up all of the different ways that you can combine ones and zeros in this group of eight you have 256 ways that you can do it.
Another way to come to this answer is to take two to the power of eight or two times two times two times two times two times two times two. Yeah, which is 256. And since zero is considered the very first value, it will go all the way up to 255, not 256. And that is how you get the numbers over here on the right. They are the digital number assigned to luminance of those pixels on a scale from zero to 255. The same concept can be applied if I switch this over to 10-bit, which means two to the... power of 10 is a thousand and twenty four. Zero is still considered completely black, but the big difference here is that with 8-bit we only had up to 255 values to distinguish between darkest and light and with 10-bit now you have from zero to a thousand and twenty three different shades of luma.
Now if you understand all the concepts of what I've been talking about in regards to luma, that whole scale of brightness from black to white, let's take all of that information and apply it to color. or chroma. To remind you, we've been looking at the luma waveform monitor.
If you want to switch this to color, we're going to right click, go to waveform type and RGB. And now we can see the levels of our reds, greens and blues. Besides seeing this in color now, one of the first things I want you to notice is that the range of our numbers has changed on the side.
We now have a hard stop from zero to 100 on the IRE units. And then over here, everything that I was just talking to you about the zero. to 255 limit has a hard stop.
When we were looking at the Luma monitor, there's actually numbers beyond those points. So right here you can see negative numbers and above 255, it goes all the way up here to 306. And over here on RGB, we have those hard stops. So just like before with Luma going from zero to 255, now instead of going from black to white, we have varying shades of red, green and blue going from zero at the darkest shade of that color all the way up to 255 being the brightest shade of those colors. Again the best way to showcase how this monitor sees color is to start moving some sliders around.
So as I move the temperature notice how you can see the colors shift on the waveform monitor. It's really trippy. As I bring down or up the exposure it moves the waveform just like it did in the luma.
I add contrast it spreads the waveform out You can see specific items on the monitor if you know what to look for. For example, here's the light at 100 IRE. You can see the palette of colors right here in the monitor. In fact, if I scale this up, now you can see all of the different values of the palette.
For example, if I were to draw an opacity mask on just this green, let's see what we get. And there you have it. There's the green. Let me move this across. Right there we have the red.
and the blue. Now, sometimes I think that the blue is a little bit hard to see. So one way that you can help with that is go down to the wrench and go to your brightness. Now, this isn't going to change the brightness of your image.
It'll just brighten or dim your monitor. So if I go to bright, I don't know if you'll see that on the screen recording, but it has brightened up the appearance of the levels here on the monitor for me. Now personally, this version of the waveform monitor is actually kind of hard for me to understand compared to what we were doing with the Luma.
So how I actually like to view this type of information is right click and parade RGB. So here we have the same information that's on this monitor. It's just split between your red, green and blue channels, which I think is much easier to read. For example, you can physically see the levels shifting as I move my temperature and tint.
Now that's the parade. Let me go back to the waveform monitor and show you the last waveform type, which is YC. So the Y right here stands for Luma and the C stands for Chroma.
So all of the green information on here is your Luma and all of the blue information on here is your Chroma or color information. And again, this scope represents the same thing. If you don't want your video clipping, make sure that the information stays below 100 and above zero. If this video was helpful in any way, shape or form, don't forget to leave me a thumbs up.
I do plan on doing more videos about color correction, so let me know what topics I should cover in the comments down below. If this is your first time here and you like my teaching style, you can hit the subscribe button or you can check out some more of my videos. You can click them, they're pretty cool. I did them, I like them.
All right, until next time, my name is Javier Mercedes, and I hope you're out there living a life of abundance. Bye.