Software waveform monitors and vectorscopes can be accurate, can they?
Yes, they can be just as accurate as their traditional hardware counterparts. But there are differences between the hardware and software approaches, so let’s take a look at how they’re used. Waveform monitors are traditionally used to look at two different aspects of a video signal: timing portion of the video signal and the picture portion. The timing portion consists of sync and blanking pulses and the color burst. A hardware waveform monitor can examine the levels and widths of these items to make sure they are within specifications. Because digitized video doesn’t contain these items–only the picture is digitized–a software waveform monitor can’t show you those items. But since most of these parameters are fixed by the video hardware in your computer, there is little need to see these in a desktop video editing environment. And in the case of DV, sync and blanking timing is generated by whatever VTR you eventually play the tape back on, not by your NLE system. Likewise, hardware
