Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 321

Mike Most on Scopes versus Eyeballs
Mike Most, senior colorist at Next Element by Deluxe in Burbank, California, explains
that getting a good black balance is usually about using the scopes. “The reason for
using scopes is that—although I can do it largely by eye—depending on what time of
day it is, where I've been in the last 20 minutes, what I've just seen and my mood, I'm not
going to be as exact as the scope is. Scopes don't lie. So for times that you're absolutely
looking for pure balance, a scope is your best friend. I know a lot of people who tend to
stay away from the scopes, and personally I think it's kind of a mistake. I think you get a
certain sloppiness that you don't need to have by doing that. I don't think you need to
be a slave to scopes, because a lot of it is just feel. But there are a lot of absolutes, and
black balance is an absolute. Either the blacks are balanced or they're not—and scopes
don't lie. So that's the one thing that I really do.
“You'll see me glance over to the scope on my first correction almost all the time. I
trust the parade display. The vectorscope is a good rough guide, and when I first started
learning how to do this stuff was back in 1979; we did it with joystick panels on the fly
on Ranks. The beauty of the vectorscope is that you could walk yourself into something
with a quick, sideways glance while you're still looking at the picture. So you were able
to keep yourself relatively balanced with a relatively quick glance to something, and over
the years I tend to regard it kind of the same way. It kind of tells me an overall. If I'm
trying to push a little greenish-yellow toward a little reddish-yellow, it's actually kind of
a nice guide. Out of all the scopes, it's the best guide. But for black balance, the Parade
display has to be the bible.”