It's vital to have a good set of scopes to analyze your video signal, but quality hardware scopes are often beyond the budget of colorists just starting out or weigh too much for lugging around set. While software scopes offer a good solution, they are sometimes less accurate, and always eat up bandwidth on your machine. You could set up a second machine with something like ScopeBox, which is a great tool, but in addition to the cost of the additional computer, you would need the hardware to get an SDI signal into that machine.
Enter ScopeStream, from Flanders Scientific, which enables the creation of real time video scopes on your computer over your network, saving you money in hardware expenses. It's now no longer limited to just DM monitors and is also available with Flanders' BoxIO color management hardware.
Credit: Flanders Scientific
We first talked to Flanders about this product in our NAB interview in April, and were excited. Now that the beta is live, we can't wait to hear from users how its working. ScopeStream works over your network, either ethernet or wifi, and sends waveform and vendor scopes from your monitor or BoxIO to a nearby computer. It's as simple as that. You no longer need an SDI cable out of the monitor or LUT box into your second computer, and then an SDI ingest board. If you have your BoxIO or DM series monitor on a network, you just launch the ScopeStream utility and it should work.
This is a great reason to hang on to an old iMac or Macbook from a few years ago that you were considering getting rid of after upgrading: you can now use it as a scope platform.
Expect to see this on sets and in color suites near you soon. If any of our readers out there have fired up the beta, let us know about it in the comments.
Download the open beta here.
Tech Specs:
- Supports Flanders DM series monitors and BoxIO color management boxes
- Works on PC and Mac
- Delivers Waveform and Vectorscope
- LAN and ad hoc WiFi
