As far as scopes go, I was thinking about more about scopes with SDI input (digital). Your scope needs to read the SDI output off the VTR. Like I said before, stuff can happen between your computer and what ends up on the tape. You need to monitor at the end of the signal chain to catch stuff upstream. Now it's possible that only your scopes are erroneous, but that is ok since a false alarm is not as bad as uncaught errors (when it comes to non-low-end professional broadcast anyways; quality control is important).

Analog scopes kind of aren't dead because many people are delivering on betaSP. It'll probably be that way for some time.

*Note: the broadcast I'm thinking about is the kind where the facility has well over $100k invested. At the very minimum they have a digital betacam and betaSP deck. Not that many people work in 'broadcast' in this sense.

The software is measuring the binary values that will be written to tape or encoded using some other codec.
Vegas' scopes do not do this. It doesn't know what the codec is doing levels-wise (what levels the codec expects).

Information about what Vegas is doing is in my levels article. I checked some of the information on hardware scopes (SDI input)... it let me pick off the Y' values for the bits coming over SDI from a miniDV tape.
If you had scopes (and a miniDV deck with SDI output... expensive), then you could figure out this stuff for yourself.

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Anyways... the articles on my website should have the information you need to know to get levels right. If you are making DVDs and not doing professional broadcast (with expensive VTRs and all that jazz)... then I wouldn't get scopes.
If you are doing professional broadcast, then you should know that you need scopes (and uh, how to use em).

As far as using scopes on a shoot goes, that is a different application and I don't have too much of an opinion about it.

Though I would point out that many beautiful movies have been shot on film without using scopes. And really, the monitoring is very primitive as the DP is using a light meter, inaccurate video tap, etc. to guess where exposure should be set to yield a final image that is good. It's guesswork, and not WYSIWIG. But this primitive system has worked.

Scopes are useless for film, of course. You need a couple of meters and an experienced eye. Some of the legendary DPs could light everything by eye. A contrast filter to pop over your eye is a nice thing too.

Scopes in the field are useful for an engineer or for the gaffer but I've had situations where a field engineer with a scope and a paintbox would drive me nuts. I'd drop a scrim into a light and the bastard would undo it with a knob twist. I'd keep working for a look until I finally figured out that the idiot was trying to light the shot from his cart. Argh!

Scopes can show you quite quickly what's wrong with a green screen but you could do the same thing with a spot meter or a viewfinder with zebras. Often, you have to light a scene while the camera is elsewhere and that's where meters are most useful.

Rob

Worth checking the codec properties. For example I once put EX footage through VirtualDub to Cineform, wondered why the levels changed. Was tempted to fix in Vegas Levels FX but more wisely inspected the codec properties (from Vegas Render Propertes and deeper, into Cineform codec's "Configure") discovering that the Cineform codec was not decoding to the levels-space I expected. A quick un-check of the codec's relevant check box fixed that. Had the same issue earlier in my history with DV codecs.

Yes. For example, Microsoft's DV-AVI decodes differently from Vegas' DV-AVI in some circumstances.