Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Gold
was wondering what you guys do on a film set.
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Well, you won't find a film camera that will tell you the color temperature in a readout!!
I think you meant "narrative-style shoot" rather than literally shooting on film so I won't go into the much-more complicated process of the latter. For high-end digital acquisition I'll usually use the presets, but if shooting with two cameras I'll first make sure that the presets match closely enough, otherwise I'll look at white balancing as that will generally deliver a better result. If I have concerns about the footage being color-corrected properly I'll try to "bake in" the look, i.e. adjust the color temp to taste. Believe it or not many pro-level cameras do not have the ability to dial the color temp up and down like the little camcorders do (or if they do, it is buried in menus) so I sometimes use the tried-and-true cheating method by holding a piece of color correction gel in front of the lens while white balancing.
Bill mentions using a color temp meter (or using the camera to read color temps)--one aspect of color temperature that is not addressed by cameras that show kelvin temperature is the mired shift, which reads the magenta-green axis. This is also harder for the eye to judge accurately than the Kelvin scale (blue-orange axis, if you will). Fluorescents are notorious for going off in the mired shift, especially the dimmable type and it can be hard to see this happening, especially if you are using a not-so-reliable LCD to monitor the image. A color temp meter can tell you how many points of green or magenta are being seen as well as the Kelvin readout of a given light source, however the scale given for the appropriate correction has to be interpreted for video as it is tuned for film, which has a different response to the mired shift (it's much more sensitive).
With color correction being as robust and ubiquitous as it is these days it's not as much of a concern to nail the look on set any more, which is especially true with cameras like RED that capture the raw data.