Making my own Blue Cards

M

Mezzanine

Member
I'm making my own blue cards to white balance against. Can anyone suggest some CMYK pecrentages to achieve the best quality of blue for this purpose?
 
As an alternative, consider that you can accomplish the same thing with using the COLOR TEMP menu setting in the scene file. Just adjust it a little one way or the other and you can tint your scene warmer or cooler when you do a manual white balance.
 
I have a set of warm cards and use them frequently with both my DVX and digital still camera. Barry is correct, you can use the menu option to change the camera, but I still prefer the warm cards as they are really easy and fast to use and give me an absolute reference under varying lighting conditions.
 
John_Hudson said:
I tend to make adjustments in post. My white balances are done off of white only.
Click to expand...

I like the control of post also and usually do white only. I still have film habits and like a grey card, chip chart (or other standard color.). The grey scale is not as useful with video, but I still feel naked without it.
 
The great thing about post, IMO, is that you have so much control. If all you want to do is tint the entire frame a certain color simply shoot your stuff clean and then add a color overlay on the footage and adjust the opacity to your liking. It will be absolutely clean as the footage is not manipulated either in cam or out (via color correction tools that is).
 
The idea of doing it in post is fine as you do have the ability to make your choices after the fact. The only real advantage of doing it in camera is that you don't end up throwing out some of your dynamic range by a using a large color shift in post. If you really "know" what you want it to look like, then in camera or warm/ cool/minus green cards (or special reference) will preserve the greatest dynamic range.

I just finished 9 days of principal photography & pickups on a horror short film and I knew exactly what the look was that we wanted for a lot of the setups so I created a set of specific color reference cards that I used in each setup (there were 185 different setups with over 640 shots) to ensure that I got the most consistent footage to the editor possible. These special cards that I created allowed us to preserve the "look" we wanted under a number of different lighting conditions. Since this project had a lot of interior night locations, most of which were to simulate a near zero light (other than flashlights) look, we really needed to be careful to not give up too much dynamic range as we had to paint a night time look to a 21,000 square foot facility and only had a 100 kVA genny and distro system to work with. The specially created card and "white balance" method gave us the best possible footage with the lighting budget and crew size that we had to work with. Just saw it projected last evening on a 30' screen and I was pretty happy with the results (still a bit of ADR and sound design issues to be corrected and only about half of the CGI effects were up to par, but overall, it worked out).

I would advise that you test your settings / balance method first to know that you will get what you want, if not, then just use a basic “white reference” balance.
 
I don't have warming cards, but warm my white balance all the time.

I just stick a piece of 1/4 or 1/2 ctb in front of the lens when white balancing. Or I place the white card in a spot with mixed light, the more daylight I allow on the card the warmer the tone.
 
These are all good ideas, and I definately validate the practice of making color tone corrections in post. But, I'm still interested in experimenting with warming cards and welcome some ideas about how to generate one of the "standard" blues.

So...bump ;)
 
So in other words, would someone please just answer the freakin question? Right Mezzanine? Sorry, I don't know any exact formulas, I also use a "jungle book" (Rosco's color correction gel sample pack) for this purpose. I don't think it's an exact science though, you can probably just print a few cards, ranging from a very light blue, to something a bit darker for a warmer more sepia effect. I once worked with a Korean crew that white balanced on an old 1" tape box (they were a light blue color) to get a sepiatone color balance for a music video.
 
Here are the settings that I used when I made mine. I found this information somewhere on the Internet, but I can't remember where. They work great:

Warm 1: C/15 M/2 K/5

Warm 2: C/20 M10 K10

1/2 Warm: C/7 M/1 K/2

Minus Green: C/10 Y/10 K/2

1/2 Minus Green: C/5 Y/5 K/1
 
Yes, the minus green cards are for getting rid of the green spike that you sometimes get with flourescent lights.
 
Make sure that if you are intending on using blue gel, you use a piece that is not insanely wrinkled/bent etc. You may end up with less than predictable results than you want. If you use an inconsistant surface, you can end up with varied coloration in post. I would suggest using a color chart in coordination with your warming car. That way, even if you have some variation, you can use the chart to balance of the look that you want.
 
I definitely want to explore using the cards; one of the things I don't like about doing everything in post is that for me it feels more creative and inspiring to view the scene through the camera with the color/lighting as close to what I want in the finished product.

As an aside, I tried picking up one of those kids packets of colored coloring paper but obviously the shades of colors weren't very gradual and only created wildly dramatic color schemes, so, I guess I either experiment with printing shades of blue, etc, or buy the 'warmcards' (EVS carries them, so perhaps there's a small discount for DVXUSERS)

.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top