Robert, what do you use as a target when setting a manual white balance? I have a Canon HG20. Should I use a white balance card like I would with my Canon 30D DSLR camera? Or are there camcorder-specific white balance targets I should look for?

Thanks!

A piece of decent white copier paper usually works quite well for me - simple, cheap and practical.

When you stop and carefully consider the practical realities of shooting video, in the vast majority of circumstances, the end result difference between balancing to a piece of good copy paper, as opposed to balancing to a "true white" (or gray) card is, most likely, utterly insignificant.

The nature of shooting motion pictures is that there is movement of some sort (if not, you are simply shooting a stream of stills that are duplicates of each other, in essence), whether it's camera movement, subject movement or movement in the background (often in combination). Almost invariably, movement of any sort (even outside of the framing) will result in a shift in the defacto color temperature of the lighting (even if it's incredibly minor). Way more often than not, I've got to think that the shift in defacto color temperature of lighting, while shooting video, will dwarf the difference in color between a piece of good copy paper, and "true" white.