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LumaTouch just released the latest version of its award-winning video editing software, LumaFusion. This update — version 3.1 — is huge, and brings forth scopes, featuring real-time histograms, waveforms and vectorscopes.
Scopes are handy monitoring tools that pro users have been clamoring for. Critical for measuring color, highlights, and shadows, they are especially helpful when monitoring and grading HDR content. But scopes aren’t the only new feature to come, as I showcase in my hands-on LumaFusion 3.1 video walkthrough.
Scopes!
You can find the new scopes feature by double-tapping on a clip in the timeline to open the Clip Editor. While inside the Clip Editor, tap the Color & Effects tab at the bottom of the interface then tap the Scopes button in the upper left-hand corner.
By default, LumaFusion presents all three video scopes at once: histogram, waveform, and vectorsope. Each scope features a chevron button that allows you to further customize its features.
For histograms, users have the option of displaying an overlay of all three color channels, or a horizontal or vertical parade. Users can also toggle individual red, green, or blue color channels, along with a luminance channel.
The waveform graph allows you to switch between YCbCr luma or chroma values, and RGB with options to toggle individual channels, while the vectorscope is built for color correction, and allows users to toggle the skin tone line via settings.
The video scopes panel can be enlarged by using the slider at the top of the interface, which, after a certain size, will begin to obscure the video preview.
Finally, if you long-press the Scopes button in the upper left-hand corner, you can customize the scopes view. In all there are six different views to choose from, the default 3-up view, a 2-up view, a 1-up view, and a pair of 2-up views with one large scope and one smaller scope.
Overall, the new scopes feature is a welcomed addition that allows you to gain real-time insight into color and luminance values of your footage. Of course, scopes work great within SDR color spaces, but since LumaFusion already handles working with HDR content like a champ, it comes as no surprise that scopes play nice within an HDR color space as well.
The only downside, if you can even call it that, is that scopes are only viewable while within the Clip Editor for an individual clip, and disappear when closing the Color & Effects tab. In future versions, it would be great if you could keep the scopes viewable while on the project timeline and customize their location around the interface. But as a free update for people that already own LumaFusion, it’s really hard to complain about gaining such a valuable new feature for free.
Multiple LUTs and effects
LUTs provide a great way to customize the look of your footage, but up until now LumaFusion only supported adding one LUT per clip. In version 3.1, this restriction has been removed, and users can now add multiple LUTs to a clip.
In addition to the ability to add multiple LUTs, version 1.3 makes it possible to add multiple effects, even multiple instances of the same effect. You can also rearrange the order of the LUTs and effects in effects list.
Improved drag and drop and timeline lasso selection
LumaFusion 3.1 now features a visual lasso for selecting items, making timeline selection easier than before. There’s also improved drag and drop that allows you to simply drag an item like a photo, video, title, or transition and drop it to the timeline naturally without any pauses.
Reorder audio effects
A new drag handle will now appear in the audio effects lists when adding more than one effect. With the ability to change the order of the effects, users gain more control over critical audio adjustments.
Automated Project Backups
Automated project backup management now stores current backups, plus one per day for the last 30 days, and one per month for prior months.
New Import and Restore feature
Found directly within the Project Manager interface, LumaFusion 3.1 makes it easy to find and restore automatic project backups.
Expanded keyboard shortcut support
Lots of additional keyboard shortcuts have been added to LumaFusion 3.1, speeding up editing for power users. New shortcuts are available for importing media, select and deselect all items in the browser, adding transitions, viewing clip info, zoom (!) in and out, switching to the full screen viewer, adding markers, hiding and muting tracks, and switching between any of the six available UI layouts.
Conclusion
One of the biggest missing features in the LumaFusion workflow up until now was the availability of scopes. Now that LumaTouch has added this feature, it’s become an even more compelling option for both in-studio and on-the-go workflows pro workflows.
In addition to all of the aforementioned features, LumaTouch has made improvements to the UI styling, added support for personal and team folders with DropBox accounts that have Team Spaces enabled, improved clip representation on the timeline, along with dozens of additional smaller improvements.
If you already own LumaFusion, version 3.1 is a free update that’s available now on the App Store. LumaFusion is built with the touch screen iPad and iPhone interface in mind, but is also compatible with Apple Silicon-enabled Macs. New customers can purchase LumaFusion today for $29.99, and to be honest, I simply can’t recommend it enough.
