Has anybody used this product:

http://www.warmcards.com/

It sounds like it does a great job of helping to set the white balance on your camera. From what the web site says, it "warms up" your video.

Love to hear some feedback on this product.

Hi Paul,

They do work, but you could also save your money and make your own.

Be careful about overdoing it, sometimes less is more.

Check out the following url:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4840&highlight=warm+balance+values

- don

Don,

Thanks for the reference to the thread. I'll give it a go and see how it turns out trying to make them.

You don't need to make actual cards...
Just buy a white card, then buy some gels you like (like 1/4th or 1/2nd to warm it up), hold the filter in front of the lens, point the lens towards the whitecard, whitebalance. There you go!

I've been using these for a little over a month now and love the results - just as advertised. I almost always use the Warm 1 card but I haven't found a need for Warm 3 yet. I'm going to order the Warm 1/2 and Minus Green cards soon.

There isn't much to them and you could probably make your own, but they sell for a fairly low price.

G

Greg,

Thanks for the response. Several others have suggested making them. With a price tag of $60 bucks, I would prefer to do that. What are they made of?

Paul,
These are nothing more than sheets of colored paper that are laminated with non-glare plastic. I'm not exactly sure how they were printed but it almost looks like photo paper.

Are you familliar with Pantone colors? If so, I tried to match them as close as possible to my color wheel which is a few years old and could be off.

Here's the approximate Pantone colors in daylight:
Warm 1 = PMS 290 C
Warm 2 = PMS 2707 C
Warm 3 = PMS 283 C

Hope this helps!

G

<<<-- Originally posted by Greg Vaughn : Paul,
These are nothing more than sheets of colored paper that are laminated with non-glare plastic. I'm not exactly sure how they were printed but it almost looks like photo paper.

Are you familliar with Pantone colors? If so, I tried to match them as close as possible to my color wheel which is a few years old and could be off.

Here's the approximate Pantone colors in daylight:
Warm 1 = PMS 290 C
Warm 2 = PMS 2707 C
Warm 3 = PMS 283 C

Hope this helps!

G -->>>

Greg,

Thanks for the information. I am familiar with Pantone colors. Will give it a look tomorrow. It would be great to save the money and do it myself.

You should be able to do the same thing in post and not modify the original footage.

I bought the set, and the first time I used them, I was pleasantly surprised.

It's hard to describe how they work, but the shots shown on their website are an accurate depiction of how they can help.

I haven't used them enough to really make a worthy contribution to this thread, but so far, I'm impressed. Time will tell. So far, I have only used Warm 1.

They aren't too expensive, and the complete set comes with both large and small ones (which are tethered to a neck strap) and a carrying case.

If you are planning on making your own, I would recommend that you laminate them using a matte finish laminate. Reflections on the laminate will undoubtedly give you an unreliable result.

I printed my own warm "Card" on my home HP printer on BEST quality and it worked like a charm. Made the colors a little more vibrant, which if you you know me I'm all about vibrant colors. I can't see any draw back of doing this except when you'll be shooting outside maybe? I did test it against the 18% gray and didn't like that look at all. I'd just use white instead of gray. As for now, i'm sold on the blue!

Does anyone know if using warming cards of any kind degrades the image quality? What I mean is, using a warm card will not introduce any kind of artifacts or somehow lower the resolution of the footage, right? Because, from what I understand, processing your footage in post can result in lower quality video for, say, transfering to film later on. Is this true?

Jamie asks if using will degrade the image. Not in the sense that you are referring to, Jamie, but there are other things that can happen. When you "cheat" a white balance, by using a warm card, or any similar technique, you are making a "global" change to the white balance. In other words, all colors in the picture will shift according to the cheat that is applied, so that if you are using blue to warm the skin tones, it will also shift other colors in the same direction. So, the blue suit the subject is wearing, will shift to brown, depending on the degree of the correction used. If you wait until post to apply color correction tools, you will be able to be more selective/subtle in your corrections.

In regards to making color corrections for a film transfer, this is best left to people who are skilled in this area. Color correction is a very deep subject, and best left to those who have studied it and are skilled in the application. At least this is what I am certain the majority of transfer houses will tell you. You should always begin a dialogue with a transfer house long before you shoot any footage, for projects that are intended for transfer to film.

Good call, Wayne. I was planning on talking to a couple of DV to Film transfer houses before shooting. My main reason for asking is because most of my project will be shot in a school where most of the lighting is fluorescent. I saw that WarmCards.com has a card that corrects for fluorescent lighting, so I thought I'd ask about image degradation.

If the warmcard is such a fantastic gadget, why is it that the pictures on the warmcard website showing the "difference", are exactly the same, so obiously not made with different white balances, but in Photoshop (i.e. Post)?????? Ha!

Thanks for the info on this thread. Pantone colors are available in Photoshop. Just select the colors mentioned above as your background color for a new document and print it. I just printed mine on matte photo paper. I think it will work fine. I enjoy the technical information I recieve here and the cost saving ideas.

Hi all,

Trying to print my own 18% Grey Card from Photoshop 4.0. Would this work ?

Image>Mode>Grey Scale then Image>Adjust

and set the levels to 0 & 1.8 & 255, would this give me a 18% grey scale. I assume the middle number is a percentage as it's adjustment rate is 0.1 to 9.99.

If this works how do I print one of these warmcards? What values of Red, Yellow and Blue should one use. Or is there an easier method for both, other than buying them?

Cheers
Andrew

Hi Steven,

we must have posted at the same time so I only saw your post when I posted my.

Must be thick as two bricks but can't locate the pantone colours, could be my Photoshop is too old?

Cheers
Andrew

Andrew,

I am using Photoshop 7, I don’t know if 4 has Pantone colors or not. Go to File/New/check box for Background Color/Custom/drop down arrow and Pantone Colors are in the drop down menu. The same dialog box is also available when you click on the background color box in the standard view.

Here's the approximate Pantone colors in daylight:
Warm 1 = PMS 290 C
Warm 2 = PMS 2707 C
Warm 3 = PMS 283 C

These are the Pantone colors recommended in a post above for warm cards. I don’t know enough about this to answer your question about printing your own grey card. I am very skeptical about using a grey card to white balance a video camera. Warm cards or gray card, I will tread lightly and expect differing results in every situation.

One of the reasons I enjoy this site is to learn tips from those that know the tricks that make video shine. Knowing when to tweak something or when not to is part of the art.

Steve

Here's how the Warmcards look when using an HDV camera http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid275887224/bclid184432313/bctid900554631

Guy, you've dug up a four-and-a-half-year old thread... I think that might be some kind of record.

Well someone was yelling to use the "Search" function :)

If you're printing out a card and expecting it to actually match the Pantone color chosen, you may want to reconsider.

Most printers, like most monitors, are not very color accurate. So one printer's PMS 2707 C could differ significantly from another's.

We started experimenting with the “warm look” in television with the earlier ESPN Classic Sport Century shows. Those early shows were really yellow-orange and over the years we tone them down to just a warm look. With today’s NLE editing systems creating the overall warm tone in the camera is unnecessary as it can be easily created in post but once you have it on tape is hard to get it back to normal.

I always prefer to selectively pick are of the image to be warmer by placing CTO or any warming gels on the individual lights. As example a piece of wood furniture or brass items such as trophies will look much better with some warm light on it. The added color, even if very slight, will make the objects in the image stand out from the rest thus creating dimensions and depth, a much better result than an overall tint.

These are nothing more than sheets of colored paper that are laminated with non-glare plastic.

Ah yes, but there's paper, and there's paper. And how many shades of white?

I've got a set of CamAlign Warm cards after doing a workshop a few years back. We used Z1s to compare

- Standard Daylight/Tungsten settings
- White setting off a bit of photocopier paper
- White setting off a notepad
- White setting off the Warmwhite cards (white)

The difference between the standard WB settings and a proper AWB was, of course, huge. There was far more reach to the colour tonality in the reds. It was a 'rounder' setting (once you used multiple sheets of the photocopier paper).

There was a subtle but 'quality' difference between white setting off the paper and off the card. Like the above, but especially apparent when doing tricky stuff in mixed light situations (e.g. office with fluorescent and daylight) - the CamAlign looked better than the white paper.

I was sold on what I saw. Now I regularly match my PDX-10 to a brace of Z1s very accurately using the CamAlign cards (in mixed Fluoro/Tungsten/Daylight too).

FWIW I've never used anything stronger than CamWarm 1, just to address the overexpression of blues rather than a look or an effect. Notwithstanding, the subtle warm effect does cheer up dull grey English days - when you feel like you're enclosed in a tupperware sandwich box.

Yes, it was expensive for what it appears. Yes, IMHO it has been totally and utterly worth it, and if mine got trashed, I'd buy them again.

For those who have printed these cards out. What size did you find adequate? The Warmcards.com sizes seem to be 6x10, is 5x7 good enough?

The idea is just to zoom into the image so that it fills the whole frame, right?

I'm going to get my friend to print them on his professional photo printer with matte paper, and get them laminated with non-glare plastic, as suggested.

I'm sorry, but like others here I just don't get this.

Why would you pay for something to alter the accuracy of a step (white balance) that is designed to provide an ACCURATE BASELINE of what a scene objectively looks like in reality?

EVERY decent NLE today allows you to do all the "warming" or "cooling" or other color correction you'll ever need in post - up to and including taking specific colors or groups of colors (like fleshtones) and apply specific, targeted corrections to them in post.

So the usefulness of a "purposefully WRONG" White Balance card just TOTALLY escapes me.

It's as silly to my brain as that "should I overexpose or underexpose all my shots" thread.

Expose properly - Always!

And White balance properly - Always!

Save the tricky stuff for post where you can un-do it if you screw up.

My 2 cents anyway.

A small set of warm cards had been kicking around in my camera bag for years, unused, because basically I believe what Bill wrote above.

Then I volunteered to shoot a HS band competition last year in a local stadium. Brand new facility, the lights had to be mercury vapor or sodium pressure, whatever. They didn't look bad to the eye.

I could not get close to accurate color in the viewfinder with any combination of preset or custom white, until I pulled out the warmcards. Perhaps I should have tried AWB.

I might not use them again for another 6 years, but they've earned a permanent place in the bag...

BTW, I was immediately handing off the tape to a parent volunteer, so, couldn't depend on good post color correction. But in this situation I probably would have done the same thing even if I were posting it.

Bill, in both theory and practice, I understand what you're saying. But every once in awhile...

First, trusting electronic WB. Having engineered flypacks and matching multiple cameras, white balance is not always consistent. Usually close, but I've often found myself having to paint cameras a bit.

Also, I've often found under bright lights that some people, while their skin colors might be 'accurate', get bleached out. Given that many indoor types have only a fluorescent tan to begin with, adding some warmth really does help keeping talent from looking like death warmed over. And certainly for these big corporate show speeches, and for many other applications, nobody is going to take the time to do color correction in post.

And as a last thought; while I tend towards going for accuracy and playing in post, because most projects I work, I work as both shooter and editor, there are a lot of cameramen and women who strongly feel that whatever looks are to be created should be done in-camera; most cinematographers have operated this way for years.

Just some thoughts.

Why would you pay for something to alter the accuracy of a step (white balance) that is designed to provide an ACCURATE BASELINE of what a scene objectively looks like in reality?

If we can back up a step, maybe reality isn't quite right when seen on a CCD.

Doing a white balance on a warmcard in lighting that's really blue-rich (sand, snow, shade) is like turning up the reds on your Proc-Amp in the truck if doing an OB. Perfectly acceptable.

And I'd like to wave the 'white balance of a decent white source' flag again. My CamAlign cards have a standard white card that's been used 90% of the time.

For those advocating the fixed daylight or tungsten settings, they serve a useful function, but nothing beats a proper WB (with proviso above), but hey - consistency is better than variability. For those advocating Auto Trace Whitebalance, I, as an editor, curse you and your heathen practice, and condemn you to manually correct your camera's wierding ways at 3:00AM whilst listening to in-depth presentations on accountancy practices. Grrrr.

EVERY decent NLE today allows you to do all the "warming" or "cooling" or other color correction you'll ever need in post

And not every shoot has a budget for grading. A bit of buffing here and there, may be, but not necessarily full-on LOTR-style look generation.

If shooting on the basis of significant 'look generation' in post, then your shots will have to look bland, neutral and - quite frankly - flat; yet it must contain the seed of the DoP's vision so the Colorist can fertilize it and bring it to life. OTOH, if shooting a Talking Head for insert into a package, and all you've got is a bald patch of shade to shoot in, then a WarmCard is going to make the subject look healthy and vital, and it won't look like it's -20 Degrees out there.

DoPs don't use warm cards, Videographers do. DoPs can't do what videographers do - no rehearsal, no second takes, no re-lights (hey, you get lights? If only...), and you don't have to edit what you shoot.

Above meant in good humor.

I'm clearly not doing a good job of communication here.

I'm not advocating any sophisticated color grading in post. For most video projects that's overkill.

And I'm definately NOT not talking about scene by scene correction here...

A "pushed" warm-card or cool-card color balance is a GLOBAL change that affects the totality of EVERY frame thereafter.

My contention is that with a modern NLE - there is simply NO advantage to doing that in the field.

As long as every frame is consistent as to camera white balance - the post white balance tools are so incredibly easy and simple to operate in an NLE, that the effort to dig out and use so called "warm cards" or any other artificial color alteration method is as silly as using a hand crank to start an automobile.

If you want ALL your footage a touch warmer or cooler - just park your playhead on a still, call up the NLE's color corrector - correct to taste, then copy that setting and paste it to the rest of your timeline.

It's maybe a 15-second UNDOABLE process.

Look, in this brave new world where all our video images are streams of numbers, my opinion is that futzing with color in the field is a waste of time. ANYTHING you can do in the field regarding color correction, you can re-create simply and easily in post - because you're computer will have WAY MORE processing power than whatever white balance electronics can be shoehorned into your camera body. So why not use the better tool?

Take the minute you'd use for warm card use and apply that to getting a better EXPOSURE. Or re-thinking your framing. Or re-considering the worn out icebreker you want to do to get to know the nice lady/gent doing craft services --- you know - something you CAN'T CHANGE as easily after the fact in post.

FWIW.

My contention is that with a modern NLE - there is simply NO advantage to doing that in the field.
There are two reasons I can think of off hand:
1. Time. Depending on how long the video is, there's an additional half hour to several hours of rendering time when making global changes in the computer.
2. With native HDV isn't it advisable to re-encode as little of the footage as possible to maintain quality?

I'm clearly not doing a good job of communication here.

I think you are, we've got similar points of view. We're both advocating spending time doing a proper white balance, but sometimes, one may need to push the reds a little.

If you don't push the reds at acquisition time (i.e. shooting) you'll have to take what you've got and pull it at post production.

Any 'filter' REMOVES data in post. A filter or effect in the camera should be about optimising what gets put onto tape.

Formats such as DV and HDV (8 bit 4:2:0/4:1:1) lack a lot of chrominance detail. Boy, it needs all the help it can get.

Therefore, IMHO, with these low end formats sometimes it's best to record something that's close to what you want in post, because to yank what you'd otherwise get to where you want it to be will stretch the limited data too far. I'm not saying Warm Cards should an 'effect', just a useful kick in the right direction like (maybe) a ProMist or Daylight could be.

And please one day just try using the lowest version on a cloudy day or in shade some time, and compare with even an adjusted preset WB. More pleasing, more rounded colour balance...

But the nurse says I must rest now...

Look, in this brave new world where all our video images are streams of numbers, my opinion is that futzing with color in the field is a waste of time. ANYTHING you can do in the field regarding color correction, you can re-create simply and easily in post - because you're computer will have WAY MORE processing power than whatever white balance electronics can be shoehorned into your camera body. So why not use the better tool?


Well, "better" is subjective, but people with a lot more credibility than I have argued the exact opposite of what you're saying here. Scott Billups has a write-up in his book "Digital Moviemaking" about color timing and how doing this in-camera vs. in post can actually be much higher quality; he includes histograms to make his point in a very scientific way for those who are skeptical- but I didn't believe it until I tried it.

It really makes sense, because before your video is compressed and recorded to tape, you are theoretically working with unlimited information (variables like sensor size, glass and operator skills notwithstanding). When your signal is compressed down to HD, HDV or DV etc. then you are actually losing information that can't be restored. So color correcting your footage in post in the NLE certainly isn't the same thing, unless you are recording full uncompressed video which most of us aren't. For people who know the look they want and know what they're doing, warm cards are a smart and fast way to get great-looking images from harsh formats like DV. They've done it well in in "Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on FX, so it's like any effect or technique, it's all about how it's used.

>Any 'filter' REMOVES data in post. A filter or effect in the camera should be >about optimising what gets put onto tape.
>
>Formats such as DV and HDV (8 bit 4:2:0/4:1:1) lack a lot of chrominance >detail. Boy, it needs all the help it can get.


Perhaps I don't understand DV storage data correctly, but I've always understood that that digital video typically stores pixel color values as RGV values in a range of 0-255 each for the three color values.

If a "filter" merely takes all the red pixels in a scene that have a value of 200, 40, 40 - and shifts them to perhaps 220,20,20 - how does that "filter" the data?

And as to chrominance detail, isn't that a fixed aspect of the color encoding step? No matter WHAT white balance you set, doesn't the color information always get "Mapped" to one of those 255X3 steps?

Are you saying that shifting white balance at the encoding stage somehow expands or shifts the tonality of the colors that the RGB data can describe and reproduce? That seems counter-intuitive to me.

Then again, I'm not a digital video engineer, so I'd welcome someone who knows how this works to set us all straight.

If I have time over the holidays, maybe I'll drop a note to Adam Wilt and see if this RGB value shift via white balance idea makes technical sense. But right now it seems pretty suspicious to my lay mind.

>Any 'filter' REMOVES data in post. A filter or effect in the camera should be >about optimising what gets put onto tape.
>
>Formats such as DV and HDV (8 bit 4:2:0/4:1:1) lack a lot of chrominance >detail. Boy, it needs all the help it can get.

Perhaps I don't understand DV storage data correctly, but I've always understood that that digital video typically stores pixel color values as RGV values in a range of 0-255 each for the three color values.



You are not properly accounting for the effect of compression. Having 0-255 for the three color values of each pixel would take 1,488 mbps, but HDV is just 25 mbps. Applying filters to such highly compressed data *does* result in loss, although you and your audience may not notice it because of your circumstances.


It's as silly to my brain as that "should I overexpose or underexpose all my shots" thread.

Expose properly - Always!


Overexposing a low-light scene by three stops and darkening it in post will yield far less noise than one exposed for 18% grey.

Perhaps I don't understand DV storage data correctly, but I've always understood that that digital video typically stores pixel color values as RGV values in a range of 0-255 each for the three color values.

DV and HDV use a YUV colour space - ack, yes, there's supposed to be teeny little 1s in there somewhere to signify something about being logarithmic, but what you describe is uncompressed RGB video at 8 bits per channel (10 bits per channel yields - correct me if wrong - 1024 steps per channel). And then there's something about not using all 256 steps for video - so really only using 16 to 235 or thereabouts...

It's at this point I rapidly start gesticulating towards such luminaries as Adam Wilt and Graeme Nattress who have published some great articles on this stuff that explains far better and with rather more authority:

http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html

http://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_chroma_sample.html

As the late John Peel once said: "It may not blow your mind, but it will breathe somewhat heavily on it".

I'm clearly not doing a good job of communication here.

I'm not advocating any sophisticated color grading in post. For most video projects that's overkill.

And I'm definately NOT not talking about scene by scene correction here...

A "pushed" warm-card or cool-card color balance is a GLOBAL change that affects the totality of EVERY frame thereafter.

My contention is that with a modern NLE - there is simply NO advantage to doing that in the field.

As long as every frame is consistent as to camera white balance - the post white balance tools are so incredibly easy and simple to operate in an NLE, that the effort to dig out and use so called "warm cards" or any other artificial color alteration method is as silly as using a hand crank to start an automobile.

If you want ALL your footage a touch warmer or cooler - just park your playhead on a still, call up the NLE's color corrector - correct to taste, then copy that setting and paste it to the rest of your timeline.

It's maybe a 15-second UNDOABLE process.

Look, in this brave new world where all our video images are streams of numbers, my opinion is that futzing with color in the field is a waste of time. ANYTHING you can do in the field regarding color correction, you can re-create simply and easily in post - because you're computer will have WAY MORE processing power than whatever white balance electronics can be shoehorned into your camera body. So why not use the better tool?

Take the minute you'd use for warm card use and apply that to getting a better EXPOSURE. Or re-thinking your framing. Or re-considering the worn out icebreker you want to do to get to know the nice lady/gent doing craft services --- you know - something you CAN'T CHANGE as easily after the fact in post.

FWIW.What NLE are you using? I ask this in all seriousness, as I'm still learning Avid and I don't know how to do what you're saying as a change that takes seconds.

From my experience with DV/DVCAM and FinalCut Pro, no quick NLE adjustment to color has the same quality as an in-camera correction.
Apart from the visual quality, there are a lot of traps, the best example would be an overexposed part of the sky - the whole frame is exposed correctly, there's just one part of the sky that blows out. It doesn't matter in the original frame (because it's white), but try to color-grade that frame and every change you make to the the whites will color that part of the sky accordingly. Suddenly you have a yellow/orange spot in the sky. You'd have to mask the sky to avoid this behaviour - not possible if it's 5 p.m. and the piece has to be on air in half an hour.