Canvas, which is now available to all the VB440 customers, allows users to completely customise their workspace, combining video and audio previews with a vast range of graphs and visualisations in order to let production professions – be they camera painters, audio engineers or network technicians – even quicker and easier access to the tools that underpin their roles.

In essence, the VB440 gathers network data in an IP production environment, and converts this to usable, intuitive information that can inform almost every part of the production process. Most importantly, it makes this available with next-to-no-latency, using only an HTML5 web browser. Allowing up to eight users simultaneous access to the VB440’s extensive set of features, a range of production professionals can use the features of the VB440 to guide their work, simultaneously, live, from anywhere in the world.

Previously, the various aspects of the VB440 were broken down into tabs, according to the role and function being performed. Users could click-through to access elements including (but not limited to) Gonion, LUFS and room meters for audio; HDR-on-SDR-screen previews, colorimetry with CIE, vectorscopes and waveforms for video (which now includes both YRGB parade and overlay view), and an extensive range of modifiers that allow users to save their selected scopes together with their own designs.

Now, with Canvas, users are instead given a single screen option in which they are able to fully customize what is displayed to them, adding as many scopes, meters and displays to the page as they desire, re-sizing, and arranging in a way that makes most sense for the user’s specific workflow. Importantly, users can group together video previews and associated scopes to correspond with one channel input (using colour coded markers) and set these to either lock to a specific channel, or automatically change with the channel selected. Visualisations can be stacked separately, or imposed as overlays on the video preview, with adjustable transparency, scale, gridline density, etc. All these new features add an invaluable level of precision in viewing scopes which specifically addresses colourists and their need for a heavily detailed and full-screen scalable display.

Configuring one’s Canvas takes a matter of seconds. Each block on the user’s constructed workspace can be added, moved, toggled, locked in place or deleted in seconds using a mouse or keyboard paddle shortcuts. The interface has also been optimized for use on a touchscreen basis with an iPad. Users can create multiple Canvas screens with varying arrangements depending on the task they are focusing on, which are displayed as changeable tabs. Users are then able to copy and paste any of these tabs out of the VB440 – for instance, into a Slack chat or email – and then use them to automatically access the preconfigured screen on another device, allowing users to quickly jump between a fixed monitor and tablet when on the move, for instance. Alternatively, users can also save their entire Canvas – with multiple tabs – and then export it for use on a different VB440.