Thanks John for your answer. (I've been clicking the "thanks" button on and off for days but nothing seems to happen, so I hope it worked your end anyway!)

I've now put a Direct X11 card in the PC and am continuing my evaluation. Using a (home-made) grey scale I compared my cameras and got various good RGB Parades as per:

Good so far. I then realised that there are no obvious controls available (for example functionally  similar to those described and used in http://vimeo.com/55139561) to reasonably elegantly and independently adjust the separate amplification of the R, G and B channels.

My attempts to twiddle the color wheels provided in the color and color correction subunits of the Effects system all seem very interconnected - if I move the red to make the R parade correct at the top level, for example, unwanted movements occur in both G and B.

Either Magix haven't thought this out very well, and thus the RGB Parade and probably also the vectorscope (which I've hardly played with yet) are more cosmetic than real engineering tools, or, as seems much more likely I'm seriously missing the point of how you are supposed to make use of them in Pro X6. There seems nothing in the Help system and only a fleeting reference on page 174 of the User Manual saying "Make any necessary adjustments using the video effects until the color values of the test chart are correctly displayed in the vectorscope."

I'm new to Magix as you've worked out - how please is it best to find out how these powerful facilities are supposed to be used?

Thanks

Hi,

The measuring instruments, including RGB Parade, are only for measuring, not for modifying, as you found out. You can play with the effects color, color correction, saturation, brightness and contrast, etc. to modify the colours and monitor the effect in RGB Parade and in the other instruments. That is all I know, I'm not an expert by any means. I have played around with the effects, but I don't really know what I am doing or supposed to be doing..

As you say, Magix does not give us much help and I guess that we are supposed to learn how this works on our own.

About playing with the colours, I believe that it is normal that if you increase one colour the others have to move. Try bringing in some of the backgrounds and playing with the colours. I tried bg_darkramp_red and then brought up the green. Red and blue dropped as I would expect.

BTW, the Forum guru, John E. Baker should weigh in on this. He is the expert.

Thanks for the link to the video.

Look up in Google Color Correction Larry Jordan. He has several videos and documents on the subject. Time for me to read up on this.

Next time you post something that could lead to a discussion, please use the Forum, Video Pro X. Things get buried in the Q&A part, but are easier to find and follow in the Discussion part of the Forum.

If you bought X6, maybe you could make a tutorial as to how to how to do colour correction and what to watch for in the instruments.

Did you end up buying X6? If so, take a look at the Magix Bullet Quick Looks. Using a multi-colour photo, select some wildly contrasting Looks. Put them side by side and go from one to the other to see the changes in the monitor. They are quite interesting.

There is a short video on the Pro site. 

After watching 2 videos, the one you gave the link to and the one by Larry Jordan along with the accompanying document, colour correction is starting to become more clear. I have been trying to translate the tools/jargon for other products to Magix. Still aways to go before I become saturated.

About the other colours moving in RGB Parade when you move one of them, here is what the Video Pro manual says:

Tint detection

If a vertical movement compared to the other colors is noticed for one of the three colors, a tint is present. When you regulate the saturation using the video effects, theresult is immediately visible in the "RGB Parade" measuring instrument.

I'm still researching.

There's even more information the this thread.

It seems that the instruments, being new, are not quite properly connected to the tools. We're still waiting for the patch, after 6 months.

Thanks John - I'll read that thread carefully. There's a series of excellent Premiere Pro tutorials covering amongst other things the "evils" of brightness/contrast controls, and how to color correct using colour wheel type controls on Creative Cow:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/devis_andrew/Color-Correction-1_Premiere-Pro/video-tutorial

This may be what johnebaker referred to in his post of 2014-05-10 11:00 PM you mention.

I cannot believe that Magix could afford (commercially) to half-implement such a potentially powerful set of tools and leave it at that. I sense you have doubts about the speed of any update to Pro X6; I must say that mirrors my experience on Movie Edit Pro 15 & 16, when I had to move away to another software because of the lack of any movement to correct a collection of small but annoying and limiting issues. Decisions, decisions ...........!

Many thanks.

Hi again,

Excellent video on Brightness/Contrast. I slapped my wrists. I'll watch the next ones later.

I played around with the tools and watched the instruments and I'm starting to understand. The instruments work, as do the effects tools, you just have to know which one does what. The documentation could be better. I must say though, that I prefer the work flow and feel of X6 over Adobe.

I imported the gray chart below and played with it, first using the Gamma and then Brightness and Contrast.

Here is what I did with Gamma. Opened the box and selected Lows, dragged level to -100.

No much effect on the screen, but the lows went lower and the rest went down proportionately. The whites stayed almost at the top.

Then I opened the Gamma box and selected Gamma, which set it to -100. The whites stayed almost at the top and the lower mids got crushed to black, but the upper mid grays stayed proportional. See below.

To show what happens with the Brightness, I reset Gamma and raised Brightness to 75. The blacks all move up, lost.

The inverse happens when Brightness is moved down. The whites move down and are lost.

Thus using Brightness, the blacks or the whites are lost.

Using Contrast moves the result of the Brightness up or down.

Below is Brightness again at 75, contrast at 80. The uppers (lighter grays) move up to almost white, crushing them, the lower grays move slightly up but remain more proportional to show more contrast.

Below is Brightness 75, Contrast 10.

I should have posted this shot of the instruments with no effects.

I couldn't find any control (or combination) that would allow me control over where black was set. I could indeed modify the darkest grey step, but not the black level.  This image may make it clearer; you have to set the monitor display and the waveform to slightly different widths to get them to line up. True blacks are within the green guides.

Black level (within the red ellipse) stays obstinately at 0, although the first dark grey step (yellow ellipse) does indeed respond to various controls.

Have I missed something please?

Incidentally I have been using X6 a lot today and I find it is a bit prone to freezing and announcing it has errors, although there was only one actual crash. Is this par for the course? I find this a tiny bit unsettling for a commercially released product....  I imagine as a new user pressing wrong buttons in sequences the testers may not imagined needing checking out I'm stressing it a bit, but nonetheless!  Do Magix do external beta-testing or is it all done "in the hive"?

Hi,

For some reason, your reply didn't register in my messages. I was looking back a bit and just noticed it.

I don't have an image with pure black bands on the outside like yours. Does playing with the contrast not move that outside bottom level? It should. Isn't the black in the next band pure black and pure white?

I presume that you bought VPX6?

Yes, it does freeze occasionally, and sometimes often, depending on what I am doing. MEP is also prone to freezing. I occasionally start up Pinnacle 17 (patch 6), and it freezes. It seems that they all do. So, save often and with different revision numbers.

There are still many unresolved problems with VPX6 and we haven't had a patch since February. Magix says that they are still working on the next patch and can't give a date. Not good for a "professional" program.

I don't know if they use outside beta testers; I would hope so. However, it seems that marketing takes precedence over quality. Take a look in the Discussion Forum for Video Pro and also some of the Q&A's for it and you will see some of the problems.

In case you're still there, an update to VPX6 has come out.

I took another look at your image. Are the 2 black bands on either side of the gray scale image actually the background? That is, are they outside of your image? I believe so. I have an image that does not fill the screen and I noticed that I had 2 black level indicators at the left and right, as did you. This is actually the screen background and modifying the controls has no impact.

To confirm this, I put a gray scale image behind my image and the 2 black levels immediately moved up. Of course, in order to impact the bars, one has to select the underlying image. Without an image or object where the black bars are, nothing can be selected and thus the controls cannot be used. The only way would be to import a black image as I did with the gray image.

First image is Gray-Scale image with black bands on either side. But the black bands are the background.

Second image is the above image in the waveform monitor.

Third image is the Gray-Scale image with a gray type image added behind it that covers the area where the black bands were.

Fourth image is the associated waveform. Note the outside bands have moved up. They can be modified by selecting the associated image. Note that the controls only affect one image at a time. Even selecting both does not allow a control, like contrast, to affect both at the same time.

John:

Thank you very much for your two responses; sorry, I've been away for a fortnight.  As a result I've run out of my trial 30 days on Pro X6, so I cannot comment further on your suggestions about the shoulders of my test waveform actually being the background - but I suspect you may be right.

Here in the UK, Pro X6 is around 350 GBP, whereas MVP 2015 Plus is only 80 GBP. The only thing I would like that is in Pro X6 but not in the cheaper version is the vectorscope and RGB Parade tools, so I'm agonising about my eventual choice!

 Was there any improvement to the vectorscope/RGB Parade toolkit in the Pro X6 update?  (That might sway my choice!) Or was it mainly tidying up small bugs?

John: (if you're still there!)

I've made my choice and bought a licence for MEP2015 Plus since this gives me at a reasonable price one of the two things I was specifically looking for (a workable multi-cam facility).

The other thing I need, and that was the central issue of this thread, was some element of colour correction/grading. I discovered that there is a free version of the terryingly powerful DaVinci Resolve available (Resolve 11 Lite) which  requires a graphics card with certain minimum capabilities, but otherwise seems to be happy on an ordinary PC - it doesn't require a work station. I doubt I will ever need to use all the facilities this provides, but although the program takes some getting used to there are a considerable number of help videos available on the Internet from users.

I also discovered a couple of possibly useful tools (one free one relatively low cost) from ClipToolz which allow some elements of colour correction, and are less powerful than Resolve but probably more intuitive in use. (ClipToolz Convert V2 and ClipToolz Color).

Thanks for your help over the last couple of weeks during my exploration!