Adobe Creative Suite 3 - How to Calibrate a Camera with OnLocation

Now let's quickly go back up to the Menu bar. You can see it's actually very small. Pull down the Components menu and this is where you can select any of the different components included with OnLocation and these components are what your are actually seeing in the user interface right now.

So let's go ahead and click away from this menu to deselect it and let's talk about the different components. At the very top is your Shot Clock and go ahead and scroll down using the scroll bar on the right side of the interface. You will then see on the left your Field Monitor and this is a software representation of an actual hardware Field Monitor. It works the same exact way over to the right you will see a Waveform Monitor and a Vectorscope. So if you are experienced reading these type analysis devices, you can actually see the signal on your camera, and then make any adjustments on your camera such as the luma or white balance to make sure your video looks its best.

Now if you don't know how to read a Waveform Monitor or Vectorscope Monitor, there is no need to worry because OnLocation also includes something called the SureShot camera setup assistant, and this is a very easy way to calibrate your camera without having to know how to read these scopes. The whole idea here as we are going to use OnLocation as a tool to monitor our camera's input and then by using the feedback OnLocation is going to give us, we are going to adjust the focus the iris and the white balance on the camera to make sure our camera is properly calibrated and we get the best footage possible.

Now to hide any components of OnLocation, you simply click on its Power button. So let's come over to the right to the Vectorscope. You will find its Power button here in the upper right-hand corner and simply click the button to turn it off and you will see that it disappears. Let's do the same exact thing with the Waveform Monitor. Go ahead the up to the top in the upper right-hand corner and click Power button.

So basically each of these components works exactly the way you would expect it to. Let's go back to the Components menu for one moment. I just want to point out that right now what you are seeing in my interface is the 4:3 Field Monitor. So if you are capturing footage in 4:3 format, this is what you want to select. If you are using your own camera for this exercise, you may need to select a 16:9 Field Monitor or a 720p Field Monitor depending on your particular camera.

Let's go ahead and select the next option down which is SureShot Camera Setup, go ahead and click and you will see now the interface is scrolled all the way to the bottom, because when you add new components to OnLocation, it adds them at the bottom. So let's go ahead and grab our SureShot Camera Setup Module, just click anywhere inside the interface and then drag up and you will see the user interface starts to scroll over several other components we will also take a look at in just a moment, and once it reaches the area over here, you want to place it to the right of the Field Monitor. Maybe scroll down a little bit, because you want to see these two things side by side as we go through the next lesson.


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