Color Card? « Videomaker Community Forums

MazdaMan
Member

I was going to make a basic color card for some simple color correction in video. I was thinking about just cutting a piece of poster board about 4"x11" then taking some card stock and making a white/grey/black area with my printer and glue it on. Are there any better recommendations? I'm guessing I want to stay away from anything glossy to avoid glare. This is for very low budget tech videos, some of it will be inside with lighting some of it will be outside.

Posted 2 years ago #
MazdaMan
Member

lol, no comments...?

Posted 2 years ago #
Tom Skowronski
Staff

Why not just use a big white poster board? It is much thicker and better for white balance

Associate Editor
tskowronski@videomaker.com
VM Customer Support: 1-800-284-3226

Posted 2 years ago #
MazdaMan
Member

lol, well I figured I would use the posterboard backing for the white, the black I'm not too concerned about, if I find something darker to use than what my printer can print I'll use that instead. My biggest worry is the grey tones, my tech videos end up being mostly grey tones and about the only way I know to get an exact shade of grey is to print it with my computer.

Would mixing white and black paint exactly 50/50 be a better way? I have a burret and could measure the volumes within .2 cc or I could mix them by weight.

Posted 2 years ago #
composite1
Moderator

Mazda,

If you haven't already, take a look at some actual color cards to see how they're set up. One way you may be able to 'make your own' is to get some Pantone color swatches and try to match them up with the colors in the color card. Trying to mix your own colors according to the specifically calibrated industry standard color cards might get expensive and may be tough to duplicate.

Another way to change your color calibration is using 'Warm Cards' to calibrate your white balance with. Warm Cards will add various amounts of 'video red' to your scene thus warming up your videos. However, if your camera doesn't have manual white balancing capability or if you're using auto white balancing, none of this stuff is going to work for you. Lastly, auto primer is as close to an 18% gray as you can get without having to make it yourself.

H.Wolfgang Porter, Composite Media Producer
Dreaded Enterprises Unlimited, Inc.
http://www.dreadedenterprises.com

Posted 2 years ago #
MazdaMan
Member

Yea I just watched the tech video on turning day into night and had some ideas. Right now most of my tech videos have a lot of grey tones so I made a bar with 20 sections starting with black on the right and decreasing the RGB evenly by 6 on each bar. On the left this gave me some grey tones that were lighter in color that what was in the video. Above the grey bar I made 3 sections, one white, one grey, and one black. I then printed it onto a piece of card stock. This had mixed results, probably since the print has some granulation to it.

The color swatches are a neat idea, I'll have to go see what I can find in those.

Posted 2 years ago #