Calibrate your camera with Xrite i1 FilmMaker Kit

Published on July 5, 2017

Cinematography & Filmmaking

If you wanna take color management to the next level, the i1 FilmMaker kit from Xrite is the product you need! It consist out of a color checker passport and display calibrator. Through both production and post-production workflows you can calibrate your camera, match different camera’s or find out which colors are off.

Production

The color checker passport is mostly known for its post-production workflow, where you can neutralize your recorded clips or match them with other shots. This is great when shooting in RAW, but most video cameras or DSLR’s don’t have that option. This means the color information is baked into the compressed video file, thus it’s much harder to pull on the exposure and colors in post production.

Using a vectorscope and waveform we can actually calibrate our camera to get a neutral color while recording. Unfortunately not all camera’s have all the options we need to do so. The Sony FS7 and other professional cameras do have these options, but most DSLR’s don’t.

Cameras that don’t have all the options to tweak the details do give us an output on the vectorscope which colors are off. This way it’s easier for us to understand what to do in post production.

Post Production

DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro X have an automated option for the color checker passport to neutralize the colors. Unfortunately Premiere Pro doesn’t, but in this tutorial we show you how to go through this process manually.