White Balance with XL-2
 

One of my biggest gripes with my original XL-1 was the camera's inability to white balance properly. Using an ordinary white object or 18% gray card left me with colors that were very blue. I tried Warm Cards and all manner of gels placed in front of the lens while setting white balance but I never could quite get it.

I won't upgrade from my DVX-100 unless this has been fixed. So can you place a gray card in front of the XL-2 and get a good white balance?

Greg

Greg

I think the manual white balance produces a very neutral result....some may consider this "cool"...as in "not warm"...The nice thing about the xl2, is that you have a lot more color control in the menus to adjust a white balanced image...similar to the DVX color controls...so you can white balance...and then warm the image up as needed.

Barry

Barry,

If the XL-2 will allow me to tweak the image to get white balance right, then I won't complain. I just hate messing with gels.

BTW, do you know of anyone who has real full resolution 16:9 XL-2 footage on-line somewhere? Everything I have seen is MPEG4 or WMV. At 3.6 megs per second it is easy to see that a 30 second clip that is only 40 megs in size is not real DV.

Thanks for the reply.

Greg

<<<-- Originally posted by Greg Matty : do you know of anyone who has real full resolution 16:9 XL-2 footage on-line somewhere? -->>>

Greg, I posted couple sample files at

http://www.luontovideo.net/XL2-lens-test.html

but it's a PAL video. In additon, the files are rather big ones --the other is more than 200 Mb and the other more than 40Mb.

Lauri,

I'll try those out today. I believe my U.S. version of FCP can handle PAL as well as NTSC. Thanks.

Greg

There is no US version of FCP. All NLE's will handle both PAL and NTSC.

I've found that by using the RGB channel adjustments, coupled with a Vectorscope, I can set quite acceptable white balance on my XL2. I usually end up setting the Red channel up +1. The neutral WB setting still appears a little blue.

Bill,

I have spent time color correcting XL-1 footage but was hoping to get a satisfactory enough white balance so as to avoid this step. I'll try to demo one to find out for sure.

Greg

This may seem obvious, but, setting cinegamma helps a great deal in getting a warmer look without fussing with individual color channels.

Greg--

For what it's worth, having spent many, many years in both film and video, I haven't seen anything come straight out of the camera that didn't need some color correction (in film it's called "timing").

Jay

Jay,

That does sound about right. Still there are times I am doing something for a friend or family member and a good enough white balance would save me the post production hassle. It isn't that big of a deal to do with today's faster computers and sophisticated software.

Greg

Greg--

Okay, now I see where you're coming from. There are so many variables involved, it's hard to say where the problem lies. I've used the XL1, the XL1s and now the XL2 and (excluding my comment above) I can't say that anything I've shot was so far off that is was unacceptable or in dire need of color correction, especially when it comes to "good enough" white balance.

Jay

Jay,

That good enough comment of mine was for the family/friends stuff. When I am doing a more serious project, I am pretty particular. That is why I tried all manner of gels with my XL-1 in an attemp to get the XL-1's balance as good as I could. I now shoot a Gretag Macbeth color chart at the start of each shot to aid in CC work.

Greg

Greg--

Yes, I fully understood what you were saying and I'm in total agreement with you. I've just never run into the level of frustration that you seem to be having when it comes to white balance.

What kinds of things do you normally shoot?

Jay

Jay,

My first real project was several years ago. I was in Costa Rica and Belize for 7 weeks and ended up leaving my XL-1 in auto mode as far as white balance went. Any one frame seemed to be "close enough" but as you know, auto means continuosly varaible and I hate to see the subtle changes in color. When I tried using a white card or white t-shirt, the colors were always too cool and I never really could resolve it. Two trips to the Canon XL-1 owners club did me no good as Canon always claimed to have returned the camera to factory specifications.

Indoors I had the same trouble. If I went so far as to gel my window full CTO and use Lowel 500 watt lamps at 3,200 kelvins to make sure I had only one color temperature light I still would get a funky white balance. This indoor stuff is/was more the friends and family shooting so I wasn't too worried.

Currently, my DVX-100 is easy to get good enough. A straight gray card and maybe a slight software tweak via one of the setups and I am pretty much happy. I am sure the XL-2 works in a similar manner given the newer technology.

Lastly, maybe my XL-1 came from a bad batch of camera's. Most people never had the troubles I had and they probably think I don't know a good white balance when I see one. But every once in a while, I run into someone who had the same problem I did so I know at least a few XL-1's had that problem.

Probably the worst conditions are the gray overcast days that Seattle gets so many of. I don't even try to get a perfect white balance. The same goes with my Canon digital SLR.

Thanks for all the tips and have a good night.

Greg

Greg,

Here are some thoughts:
1. Check out getting some premade white balancing cards from warmcards.com. They have field sizes and studio sizes and I've had great results from these (but keep them in their case so that the sun doesn't fade them). Essentially, they offer a compact variety of increasingly cooler and warmer cards from which to white balance. In practice, that means if things are showing up cooler than you'd like, white balance on a slightly blue surface or on a white surface that has bluer light reflecting off of it. Your result will be a warmer look. This is all essentially tricking the camera into what you are saying is 5600K. Follow me?
2. So, without the cards, you can also do this. The old way was to hold up a guerilla book infront of the lens and do it. Pain in the hinney. A quick field shoot way to handle it, perhaps useful in the Pacific NW especially, is to white balance off of some clouds. They may appear white to your eye, but in fact they have loads of cool color temps bouncing in and around them and they will result in a warmer white balance. You just have to do it over and over until you get exactly what you'd want.
3. In Costa Rica, the light is very white, being so close to the equator. I shot there, too. So, you might have tried the cloud technique or you might have the person with the white shirt hold it up to point to the sky. Get on a rock or something and look down on it, that will warm it up even more. Better yet, go to warmcards.com and drop $65. I think they have minus green available, too (for flourescent lighting issues).

Does that help?

Ramsey

Ramsey,

Many thanks for the well thought out response.

I have the warm cards but have only ever used the minus 1/2 blue. I'll try the idea of the sky white balance the next I am shooting under the clouds.

With so many people puzzled as to why I have never gotten a good white balance, I am now convinced my XL-1 was defective.

Greg

Greg.

I know what your saying. My xl1s was always balancing10-15% more yellow than it should be...some might like the warmth, but I always felt it was just inaccurate. My xl2, on the other hand seems dead neutral, even more so than the gl2, which I always felt had a better white balance than the xl1. I've found that if you white balance correctly and then up the color gain 1 or 2 notches, use cinegamma and cinematrix...you get a natural scene rendering with baywatch skin tones...something the xl1s would never do. If you want a more filtered look, then start tweaking the individual color channels (similar to the controls on the DVX).

Barry

It's relatively simple to check the white balance on your camera. You need something that is neutral to do it with. A grey card is fine as long as it is a new one of good quality and you light it flatly. An Expodisc, a device which fits over the lens with neutral transmission (calibration data is included with it) is ideal and a bright white coffee filter will serve as well. Fix Epodisk or coffee filter (coffee filters have been reported as being neutral and the one brand I have checked is but this does not guarantee that the one you buy will be) over the lens, point at the light source you are interested in and push the balance button. After the balance operation is complete, capture a frame and open it in Photoshop. Be sure to indicate to Photoshop that the source was from NTSC space. Now use the eyedropper to examine the uniformly gray field using the Lab slider option for the color info. If the camera, disk and balance algortihms were perfect you would read the same luminance everywhere in the frame and a and b would both be equal to 0. In reality you will find (or at least I found with my camera) that there are lots of regions where you read (use 5 x 5 pixel averaging) 0,0 but there are others where you'll get pairs like (0,1), (-2,0), (-1,1), (1,0) and so on. Take the square root of the sum of the squares of a and b. Where this is 1 or less (pairs with two zeros or a zero and a 1) the color is considered identically neutral. Where this is 3 or less (e.g. 2,1 or 2,2) the color is considered indistinguishable from gray. On my camera I find that the colors are indistinguishable from gray until I get out to the corners of the picture where I suspect the Expodisc is vignetting because the luminance is dropping off there too.

Thus I conclude that my camera does a very good job indeed of setting white balance. If you do this experiment and get a similar result don't fault the camera if you don't like the color balance. It is doing what it is supposed to do. If you consider the result too warm or too cool that is because your taste or preference is different from what the camera provides which is true neutrality. Tweak the color settings until you get what you want. This is not a reflection upon your taste. De gustibus non disputandem est!

A.J.

I remember having this sort of problem when I originally bought the XL1 (about six/seven years back - I"m now a committed XL2 freak...without the troubles you're having I might add)...is there any chance your camera might've got damp while shooting - I remember shooting in mist in South Africa when I first got the XL1 and somehow this had got back to the CCD's and the white balance would run rabid as a banshee...ok maybe that's an exaggeration but it didn't behave itself as it should've...

By experimenting with my Xl1 I found that it was often useful not to focus on the white card when adjusting the white balance. The out of focus creates a kind of averaging process A.J mentioned about in his post.

In my experience Xl2 is indeed more accurate in setting the white balance than Xl1 although never had significant problems with the Xl1. I notice the difference now especially when filming sunrise of sunset. The color tone on video is very close to what I observe by eye; This is something which I never quite managed to end up with the Xl1 (or with a Sony Betacam camcorder before the Xl1).

Hi, have you tried using one of those "Shooters Blues" white card from e-bay. Should warm up the color a bit.