Curly query re. White Balance
 

Hi.... I'm a newbie. I,m using my Canon XM1 (just bought 2nd hand)to transfer all my 8mm cine movies to DVD. I am videoing an image projected on to a large size lens by way of a synchronised
projector which completely eliminates "rolling bars and flicker", which means I am really shooting straight off the emulsion. The results are very satisfying except for some weird colour aberrations! I seem to have a problem with what to set the WB on!.The projector bulb is Tungsten,which is also the camera set, but there is a predominent red cast which I tried to compensate by using an 80b blue filter.The end result is not as good as I feel it could be if I had the correct WB. Friends have suggested.......Grey card,Pink card,White card,clear orange emulsion(from cine film)......I'm a little confused! If anyone has an answer to this dilemma,I
would be very pleased to hear from you...

Cheers Mike W

Mike, not sure about this but have you tried the custom presets in the menu. As it is a Canon I suspect you have the same feature on the XL1.

Mike,
In an ideal world, you could just run the projector without any film and take a white balance off the clear screen.
The only fly in the ointment then would be if the colour balance of the original film material is off.
If it is, and if the result is too orange for your liking, you could try white balancing by fooling the camera that what it sees is white by using a very slightly warm coloured card - again in the projector beam, with no film in the gate.

Robin.

Robin's on the right track here. Find some clear film base...(overexposed film, runout, or that polar bear you saw that summer you spent on the icecap 30 years ago), and do a manual white balance to that. This should get you pretty close, although you may still find some fluctuations depending on film base, processing etc....but If it's still consistently off a little in one direction, you can do a custom preset with an adjustment to the color gain to clean it up some more.

Barry

Re Curly WB Query
 

Many thanks Alan/Robin/Barry for the advice.I am now balancing off the clear orange celluloid film and the improvement in the end result is definately the best to date........Thanks once again!!!!!......Mike Watteau