X-Rite ColorChecker Video

Colour Balance and Control for Filmmaking - from Shoot to Edit

The X-Rite ColorChecker Video is the ideal colour chart for your video workflow. This two-sided target provides chromatic colour chips, skin tone chips and gray reference chips on one side and a spectrally neutral white balance card on the other side. This larger color target is perfect for pre-camera checks and wider shots.

Get to your ideal colour place faster!
The ColorChecker Video will get you to a worry-free colour balanced and consistently neutral place, with ideal camera exposure, faster than ever before – giving you more time to spend on your creative look. It’s an essential colour tool you won’t want to be without, saving you valuable time from capture to edit.

ColorChecker Video is an all-in-one full size durable and rigid colour target, specifically intended for video production. It includes a newly designed video colour chart on one side and a large spectrally neutral white balance card on the flip side.

ColorChecker Video charts make your workflow faster, more consistent and more colour balanced. They allow everyone on your team – from producer to cinematographer to editor to colourist – to work with consistent colour information. They save you time, from pre-production through production, and help you get to your creative look faster. Sounds pretty ideal, doesn’t it?

Achieving the proper colour balance and exposure for video can be challenging. F-stops in cameras don’t always match. Ambient lighting conditions change. Multiple cameras and lenses have different looks, even if they are the same brand and model. All of this adds up to quality control challenges and increased workload in post-production for your colorist or editor. Here’s what ColorChecker Video offers:

Video Colour Target
Speed up your colour grading workflow by achieving ideal exposure and colour balance, whether shooting with one camera or multiples. This colour chart includes a series of chromatic colour chips, skin tone chips, gray chips and illumination check chips. The layout is designed for ideal performance when used with vectorscopes and waveforms, whether on camera or in software.

• Chromatic Colours: two rows of six chromatic colour chips, both saturated and desaturated, specifically designed to align with the colour axis on a vectorscope. These colors provide two levels of color information to more quickly achieve an ideal color balance.
• Skin Tones: ranging from light to dark with subtle undertones to better reproduce accurate flesh tones. This row of chips is positioned on the outer edge of the target for easy alignment.
• Large Gray Levels: four larger steps for even gray balance, including white, 40IRE gray, deep gray and high gloss black. These levels are ideal for determining proper exposure whether you use a waveform, zebras, or false colours. Use these levels to align the exposure and contrast of cameras you are matching and ensure that mid-tones are rendered accurately. These chips are positioned in the center of the test target for maximum exposure, even on a wide set.
• Linear Grayscale: six colour chips for achieving even gray balance. This row addresses highlight and shadow regions.
• Illumination Check Chips: black and white chips at two corners to better assist in determining even illumination across the target

White Balance Target
Starting with an accurate white balance ensures the colours you capture are true and provides a point of reference for post-shoot editing. The White Balance target found on the reverse side is a spectrally flat target that provides a neutral reference point across mixed lighting conditions that you encounter during a video shoot. Since the target reflects light equally across the visible spectrum, creating an in-camera custom white balance can properly compensate for varying lighting.

With this chart, you’ll be able to:

• Eliminate colour casts
• Improve the colour preview on your camera’s display so your histograms are more reliable
• Make post production colour correction and editing faster and easier by eliminating the need to neutralize each frame individually

Why can’t I use just any white object for white balancing?
White balancing on a piece of paper or other gray element in the scene may seem like a simple workaround, but most objects are not actually neutral under all lighting conditions; and they’re certainly not consistent. An inaccurate white balance will result in color casts, and a lack of consistency between lighting conditions, making color corrections extremely time consuming.

Video Colour Target includes:

• Chromatic Colours: six saturated and six de-saturated colour chips aligned with video production
• Skin Tones: six colour chips from light to dark with different undertones
• Gray Levels: four larger steps for even gray balance, including white, 40IRE gray, deep gray and high gloss black reference patches
• Linear Grayscale: six steps for even gray balance, including highlight and shadow regions
• Illumination Check Chips: black and white colour chips at two corners to better assist in determining even illumination

White Balance Target
Create in-camera white balance to start at a neutral point for all the footage you capture.
With this chart, you’ll be able to:

• Eliminate colour casts
• Make post production colour editing and grading faster and easier by eliminating the need to neutralize frames individually

Use for a variety of applications, including:

• colour grading
• colour balancing
• gray balancing
• setting perfect exposure
• colour matching multiple cameras
• shooting and editing for mixed lighting

3rd PARTY SOFTWARE SUPPORT
ColorChecker Video will soon be supported by 3rd party software solutions for improved colour grading and monitor calibration efficiencies.