Stupid White Balance Question
 

Hi.. I've been working with the xl2 for awhile now.. weddings and music videos. Its great. I have a question about the white balance with the warm cards you guys are talking about. So you just aim the camera at the card and sample the white balance? Does the card have to be the only thing in frame or do you get the card and part of the scene too?

Thanks and sorry for the low calibre of my question :-)

Yeah, just like a regular white balance. You do want to move the camera or zoom in on the card so it fills the frame.

Try white balancing on all kinds of things (just pick something with an even and uninterrupted color). You can get some interesting effects.

Not low caliber at all. Nobody was born knowing how to shoot video. :)

Careful with those cards. I used to use them with our GL1, and they were great, but when I tried it with an Optura 60 the effect simply terrible.

Pretty easy to WB, aim and manually set... no worries about the XL2 and warm cards. Some cheaper cameras get noisy and ugly when warmed up but the XL2 can handle it.



ash =o)

Is there a reason why you couldn't balance to a white card through CTB and get the same effects as the warmcards? -Hunter

CTB? Sorry, I don't follow you.

I do not like to use colored filters with cameras that employ pixel-shifting... which the XL2 (and HVX and XLH, etc) does. Messing with the green BEFORE it gets to the CCD can cause weirdness. Also, I generally shoot with some other filter as well and if you have on the 3X you can only take one filter before some vignetting. CTB is a Color Temperature Blue filter, fyi...



ash =o)

Thanks, Ash.
Ash makes a good point. In addition, the cooling effect of the filter would offset any warmth you'd gain in the WB, wouldn't it? At best, it seems like you'd just get a plain old white-is-white WB.

Balancing to white thru a CTB would give you a very warm balance as the camera would be redefining white as seen thru the blue filter. Agreed that you gain nothing by putting on the filter. Some higher end cameras like the Varicam, have these color corrector wheels built in...



ash =o)

While we are on the topic
 

What about using gels on lights to adjust the color? Everything I've read about lighting suggests there are times when you absolutely need to do this. Like, for example, adjusting the light indoors near a window where there is a lot of sunlight coming through where there might also be tungsten light sources.

Do you find that coloring the lighting isn't necessary then?

David

You are referring to mixed lighting from different sources. It's much better if your scene is lit by lighting that is all the same color temperature for the purpose of white balancing. You can place orange gel on windows called CTO to get the sunlight down to 3200 to match indoor tungsten lighting. Or you leave the windows alone and you put CTB on your tungsten lights to raise their color temperature to that of sunlight.

-gb-

Coloring the light is great, we are taling ON CAMERA color filters... which IMHO are a bad idea...




ash =o)

Sorry for the confusion but I wasn't talking about filters. I have always heard color correction filters refered to by there name(i.e. 85, 80, 81A) so when I said CTB I meant the gel (as in 1/2 CTB, full CTB). What I was suggesting was white balancing to a white source with the your chosen density of CTB (or CTO if you want to cool things down) in front of the white card. This would alter the color of the card to a light blue(just like the WarmCards). After the camera balances you would of course remove the gel to shoot. The only benifit to this metheod is the price. But my question is what if any is the flaw in this thinking. I presume there must be one to allow these WarmCards to sell.

By the way, Ash, I'm a native Tulsan. Its nice to see so many Oklahomans on these board. Out here in Los Angeles, Okie is an insult.
I think they're still upset about the Dustbowl.

True but most of us were born knowing how to really mess it up :}

You should get more or less the same effect this way as with the cards. You could also get the effect by WB'ing to any old light blue object. There's nothing really special about the cards, other than the fact that they just happen to be a really handy shade of blue. Still, it's not as if there's no cheaper (or free) way to replicate what they do.