On the last video I shot, there were two black children and five or six white children. When editing I corrected the skin tone on all the white children but the black children looked fine with just a little brightening. I am getting ready to shoot a documentary which will be shot largely in Africa, and want to make everyone look as good as possible.

If you go to warmcards.com, the examples with a regular white balance card look exactly like what I am getting on my white person interviews. The color on the black person interviews I shot recently looks fine, but I ended up having to brighten the image a bit so as not to have them look too dark. I find with HDV that the image seems to deteriorate with color correction a little whereas in XDCAM you can correct with much less damage. On this documentary, we will be shooting so much footage that we pretty much have to use a tape format like HDV and I want to get the color as good as possible while shooting.

I'm leaning towards using a warm card on the light skinned people interviews and regular white balance on darker skinned interviews. I am also looking at using a bit more light. I just wondered if anyone had any insight into this sort of thing.

I have noticed on TV that skin tones of dark skinned people often look wrong to my eyes and I really want to get it right on this project.

Your eyes tell you more than what meters or other gizmos can tell you.

Black balance your camera first. This will help you from crushing the blacks.
White balance next using a pure white, not a warming card.

Then I would look at specular highlights using same color temp as your
key light. The beauty of dark skin talent is light hitting moist skin. Mostly
I don't have them powder.

I will use a soft blue gel on the hair light to give a small amount of color, especially
if your talent has some grey. You can try yellow gels on fill but sometimes it makes
the talent look jaundice.

Again you are using your best sense when you feel it does not look right.

Spend some time out in a public area looking at how sunlight plays off dark skin. One of the things I notice about many shooters is that they simply don't have much experience in actually observing how light plays on dark skin, and thus have unrealistic ideas about what is "normal".

Depending on where you will be in Africa (you don't say", the skin tonalities can range from what you might see on a tan southern Italian, to a deep hue that has significant blue undertones. Gold reflectors tend to help brigten and warm this skin tone a bit, but I would still white balance to neutral. Do your color work in post where you have a ton more flexibility. Especially with these kinds of issues

I would also look into a filter or two. Maybe a VERY light black diffuser, or a light low-contrast filter. The tonal range of skin from very fair to very dark can be too much for most video cameras, and pretty darn hard on film. I remember reading about many of the challenges from when actors like Sidney Portier were breaking into leading roles and had to play on screen often against white actors. The tonal range of film wasn't what it is today, and was much closer to what video cameras have today.

Best of luck with your shoot!