White Balance

[Tommy Davis]

Hi Everyone:

On a recent documentary I shot I had some trouble with white balance. As the sun would move throughout the day, the light it provided would change. Every so often I would re white balance. However, now in the editing phase the differences in the color (or temperature) are quite dramatic. Is this going to be very difficult to correct in post?

Best,
tommy

[Scott Jaco]

You can only do so much in the way of color correction. The more you tweak the original picture, the more noise you add. If your editing system has a decent color correction tool, you should be fine. USE AWB next time!

Scott

[Paolo Ciccone]

Tommy. It depends on the software that you use. FCP has a pretty sophisticated color correction tool. You can match the color from one clip to the other. The Synthetic Aperturte Color Finesse plugin also provides a lot of conrtrol.

For the future you might want to consider shooting a white card at the beginning of each clip so that you have a common reference point.

[Jiri Bakala]

Le't's look at the whole thing from a different angle:

If you are shooting exteriors daytime - you may want to consider using WB preset. The reason is that the colours will be more realistic and in reality, they will match better from scene to scene. Also, you cannot capture that nice morning light and the warm evening, and pinkish magic hour light if you white balance every time. That way you are getting rid of all these nice nuances and 'sterilizing' you image. Think of it as if you shot film; you'd never switch correction filters every few hours. You'd load a daylight balanced film negative and stick to it until you move to interiors or night. Subtle nuances that naturally happen during the day are okay because they are natural and they are also fairly easy to correct. Think of an actor that is back-lit by the sun. In a reverse shot, if the actor turns to look over his shoulder, his face will be lit by the sun, hence much warmer then the first shot, which will have much more blue contained in the skin. You don't want to correct this - it is natural and it adds to the realism of the scene.

If you white balance all the time you become a victim of clouds, sun, shooting in different directions, etc. There are simply too many variables and they will inevitably lead to a huge job in CC.

[Tommy Davis]

Jiri:

Thanks that gave me a great reference and explained a few questions I had trouble articulating. I did use a white board, I just white balanced too much it seems. At any rate, we plan on using Da Vinci in post, so hopefully that can save some of the footage.