I am a proud owner of a SONY EX1 ....
My problem is that when I shoot indoors with white or off white walls I get a bad green tint to my video.

I use a grey card and or a white paper to white balance and i still get a bad green tint to my videos.

What can I do to get the proper white balance in doors that have white or off white walls??

Standard indoor lighting is not balanced, they have major peak on green. You need to place filters (which will reduce the light also) over the normal lamps if you wish to have perfect light, or replace whole lamps with balanced ones. Alternatively you can try fixing your camera's settings to compensate for the greenish tint.

eddie
does this green tint show up on several monitors?

were there flourescents lighting the walls?

have you looked at your camera settings to see if anything is offset that would shade your picture?

I love this board! You guys are GREAT! I realize now that the EX1 does not do well under daylight florescent lighting.

You guys have been so helpful through out the entire XDCAM boards here.

Yes, i even went in the PP settings to attempt to fix and reduce the green tint
as I was shooting with new daylight balanced florescent lights on white walls the
undesired green is still there unfortunately.

So I broke out my 1000watt tungsten lights bounced them from celling and the white balance was perfect dead on with no green tint!
I used a Kodak 18% grey just the same as with the florescent light which produce a green spike.

So in my opinion and experience, the EX1 and EX3 do not do well with perfect white balance under DAYLIGHT balanced florescent lights.

My kitchen is all white, white walls, white fridge, white microwave, ect.
But the above light source is a very warm florescent light, that when i use the grey card to white balance does not produce a bad green tint at all!
The EX1 only produces the green tint when i shoot with the professional DAYLIGHT balanced florescent lights.

Nothing does well under mixed light sources. Every single video camera on the planet would give the same result.

Agreed. Fluro lights are really pumping out the green. Its just that our brain colour compensates.
However, doing a white balance would fix the problem.

Ben

Wow! The bad green tint is back and i am not using any type of florescent lighting!

I wonder if i have a bad EX1 ???

I have not messed with any of my settings from factory. I use an 18% grey card or a flat white paper to do custom white balnce, and i still get a bad green tint when shooting doors with white walls.

I do not shoot under mixed lighting, all my lights are tungsten, hot lights.

Any help would be appreciated

I have had a similar thing happen and its quite unusual.

For instance: My house is painted white and out the front I have both white weatherboards and white painted concrete render.

If I point my EX1 at the weatherboards and white balance to them, I get a really strong green tint. If I turn around and point the camera at the white render and white balance to that..no problem!! Quite unusual and the same result has happened both times I have tried it.

I was on a shoot a couple of weeks ago and a similar thing happened but I cant remember what I tried to white balance off. I used something else in the room and no problem. I think the white that produced the green on the shoot was using the back of a white poster that had been laminated and was glossy/reflective. Im not sure if that was the reason I got a green look.

To be honest I hadnt thought much about it as its easily fixed ie I white balance to something else. Its worth noting though that the first time it happened I was outside with natural light, and the second time I was inside with flourescent lights. It appears it can happen regardless of what lighting is being used.

cheers

Jamie

what's the big deal?

manually balance to get it close, in-camera, then tweak color in post using a good calibrated monitor.

oh yeah, I turned off my color matrix, to keep things un-altered as possible to start with.

not all whites are the same and perhaps there is a magenta tint that you aren't noticing that is sending you into green.

Its always been common for video cameras to slightly tend toward green white balances. Just go into your PP menus and set for a slight tilt toward magenta. That rarely bothers anyone. I always had my HVX200 set that way and often white balance through a 1/4 blue and 1/8th green gel on many cameras just to push toward a balance that is warm and not too green.

By the way are you sure its not your monitoring. Many monitors tend toward green as well. The $3500 panasonic 17" is notorious for green blacks.

When its happened for me, its hasnt gone just a little bit greenish, its gone completely super saturated green..like everything is very very green!

Its quite unusual..thats the big deal. Thanks for your valuable input

Sounds like something is wrong then. I'd send it to Sony.

Naah. Im an optomist.

Its only happened a couple of times and its easily corrected by finding something else to white balance to.

Ive had other video cameras do funny things occasionally when white balancing. I once had a GS400 (loved that camera) that would occasionally make everything look like it was made out of gold!. I had it for ages and wasnt a problem.

Cheers

There's been a long debate about 'warm cards' for white setting. I'm regularly shooting under mixed lighting conditions, and where possible I use a DSC-Labs 'warm card' set - though I now ONLY use the pure white card in that set.

As others have mentioned, there's white and there's white. The best results have been from my DSC white card, though I've resorted to using presets in Picture Profile setups when in an emergency and there's nothing to WB to. Anything's better than AWB! As an editor who shoots, I prefer 'consistently off' (within reason) to 'variable'.

Get yourself a 2" square gel sample book (Rosco or Lee, etc) that includes CTO, CTB, + and - green gels (it will also have a bunch of theatrical color samples.

Instead of the warm cards just use the Blue 1/8 , 1/4 or 1/3 in combination with + green 1/8 or 1/4 when neccessary. This should give you full control over off-color white balances and its free. Just carry it in your pocket.

However you have really been balancing under odd conditions or very off whites you should not be getting such saturated greens.

I've gotten very green balances from white T shirts that I'm guessing had more magenta than i realized maybe from bleach though. Ever since I've been wary of fabrics.

When its happened for me, its hasnt gone just a little bit greenish, its gone completely super saturated green..like everything is very very green!

The exact same thing happened to me when white balancing just before a shoot last Sunday. I had my back to a bunch of floor-to-ceiling windows in a restaurant. Inside the restaurant was incandescent lighting that was active but quite dim. Outside was mixed clouds and sun. I used a pure white foam board to balance on and when I did the image in the EX1's LCD screen turned a bright green. And I mean bright. Never seen anything like that before on any camera.

- Don

Now I am using flur lights 5600k... No mixed light at all. My walls are a off white / tan color.

I manually white balance with an off white paper or 18% grey card and i still get this
unwanted green tint.

The green tint is not that bad, but very unwanted.

The skin tones and everything in the shot looks great except the off white walls.

Weird

The amount of green in "professional" 5600 K fluo lights varies from brand to brand. Taking out all of the mercury (the source of the green spike) cuts the output too much, so manufacturers try to balance with other elements, with varying degrees of success.

Printer/copier paper has gotten "whiter" over the last several years. Some of these extra "white" papers photograph magenta under correct 3200 K tungsten, but look very white to the eye. Setting white balance on these magenta papers will give a slight green cast.

Some days it seems almost everything is harder than it looks. Buy a DSC labs white card.

Seconding what others have said here about using a DSC white card, or if you can't, at least find a good substitute and keep it with you at all times - and use that same card consistently. Balancing on whatever I can find lying around (t-shirts? eegads) that looks white to my eyes has gotten me in trouble in the past, and I now always have my "real" cards in with my camera wherever it goes.

I'm not near my gear at the moment, but isn't there a matrix setting specifically for fluorescent lighting? Has anyone here found that matrix setting useful?