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Which is the best Color Chart?


Dave Bourbois

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There are a number of color slates and charts to use to so that when you use a telecine transfer they'll match up. Is there one that is considered an industry standard? Will one of those sync slates with color bars on them do just as well?

 

Just Curious.

-Dave

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Most people use a gray scale or card for telecine, with a face next to it. The trouble with color charts alone is that none of us would agree on what shade a color should be, but we can see if a gray field has a color-cast to it.

 

But for testing an emulsion, a MacBeth color chart is most common.

 

Probably the fanciest chart for telecine transfers of dailies is the Gamma Density chart.

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A simple gray card should do just fine for most work. If you're planning to test some new stocks, odd filtration or special processing such as pushing or bleach bypass then a MacBeth Chart will tell you a lot more. Kodak makes a gray card that costs maybe $20 at a decent photo store, and many motion picture labs sell them or even give them away to repeat clients.

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I'm not sure if they're giving them out anymore, but Fuji use to provide some very nice cray cards for free; they come in a nice folder, I've been using mine for the past two years.

 

Another option (though incredibly expensive) is the Picscan Film Leader System designed by James Bartle - a bit complicated, but very thorough. However, it's in the hundreds of dollars and for most of our purposes, a well shot gray card is fine.

 

For those who are interested, info about Picscan can be found at www.picscanfls.com

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Hi,

 

I just went through an "graded" (well, as much as you can from DVCAM) a short corporate on the general subject of New York. Can't think of a single shot where a grey card would actually have ended up grey... I really question the usefulness of this in a situation where people tend to tweak until it looks right rather than to any technical standard!

 

Phil

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You don't need the gray card if YOU are going to be the one doing the tweaking, but for unsupervised transfers, you need some method of communicating intent to the lab.

 

If a gray card shows up on the camera roll and the NEXT shot has a Coral 1 over the lens, the timer isn't going to see an orangey picture right off the top and balance the telecine for it, correcting out your orange effect to neutral.

 

And while you could say "make the scene orange", the colorist won't know HOW orange you mean. But if you had a gray card and then a specific pre-tested shade of orange on your camera or lights, then the results should be much closer to what you want than if you had NO gray card and let the colorist make a guess.

 

Of course once you start color-correcting the image yourself, the colors go all over the place as you tweak to your own heart's delight.

 

If EVERY shot was under neutral (white) lighting and at normal exposure, then you could just tell the dailies colorist to make it look "normal" and forget the gray card or scale. But most movies use color and exposure to create mood.

 

Another advantage to a correctly exposed gray card is that if YOU screw up when shooting the following scenes by exposing them incorrectly (let's say you put the wrong ND filter in) then your mistake will show up in dailies. Otherwise the colorist would have "fixed" it for you and make it look normally exposed and you might have thought nothing was wrong until you struck a print and found out it was printing in the low 20's and looked grainy and milky.

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