I want to shoot a grey chip chart and use an eyedropper to analyze the chips to see how much red, green & blue is in the shot. Once I know that there is too much red (for example), I can make adjustments to neutralize the red. I see that some of the other high-end editors have this feature of being able to read the rgb values and I wondered if Vegas had this option.

I do this in photoshop with a color chart. I can put the eyedropper on a color and read the rgb values. Once I know those values, I can make adjustments as necessary. I want to do this same thing in Vegas.

Yes, you could (ab)use the Chroma Keyer for this purpose. Drag it onto a Timeline Event. Disable the FX inside the plugin window. Then use the eyedropper on the internal preview to analyse the RGB data.

Marco

What I would do is simply put the video on the T/L, then all you need to do is put a color corrector, or secondary color corrector on the clip and click drag over the area of gray that you want with the negative dropper tool, and there you go, whatever those colors were that were there are taken away for you.

This is just one of the things you can learn in the Volume 4 Training DVD for Vegas at vasst.com. I found the info in that DVD to be quite useful and it was done by our very own Glenn Chan here on the forums. I may be a little biased though, as Glenn and I are friends and while he was clearly new at training when he did the DVD, it was chock full of good info IMHO.

Dave

Apart from the above suggestions you can mask an area, even with something as simple as the cookie cutter and then use the vectorscope etc.

Bob.

Yet more options:
1- You can try the utility Takecolor and it will do this. (I mostly find it useful for other purposes.)

It doesn't average out an area of pixels though, which won't really work for white balance. So abuse the eyedropper in the chroma key or gradient map FX instead for that.

2- You can also add a color corrector FX set to saturation = 3.0, and this can help you set white balance.

And uh, thanks Dave for the plug. *blush*

Use the Vectorscope also to determine when you are neutral colors.

Dave T2

I'm not at my editing computer so I can't verify this, but doesn't the Vegas scope have an RGB Parade? If so, won't this give you what you want?

Jack