ATW White Balance Slow

[GuyS]

I do a lot of run and gun type shooting. I find that indoors especially, the auto tracking white balance is slow to react to the different colour temperatures. I notice in situations where the sunlight is flooding the room and there also reflected daylight or light from practicals to deal with.

Maybe my expectations are too high for the camera. Perhaps there is a technique in shooting that minimizes the problem.

 

[Justin Kuhn]

Auto functions generally hinder more than they help. Why not just take the time to white balance when you enter a new lighting situation?

 

[MalcolmOng]

He's right. Its a practise i quickly adapted to when i got my dvx. I havent made the jump to manual focussing yet, but maybe in future when i'm more competent and confident i will. It wont take 3 seconds to find a white wall or soemthing and white balance

 

[GuyS]

Here is the scenario: It is a documentary. The subject walks from outside the building to inside the building talking about and recreating the events that led to the final action. The last shot is of him sitting down on a couch. There is only one camera and since it is a documentary there is only one shot available.

I find that if I quickly toggle the ATW switch (I have assigned this to the A button on the white balance switch), then to PRST... then back to ATW, the white balance updates right away. Otherwise there is a long lag for the ATW to update the white balance.

It may be too much to ask the hardware to handle this situation so there may be a work around that effectively handles this common shooting situation. Saving the interior white balance to the "B" button before hand is one way. But I find it gets more complicated sometimes. The late sun shinning in a west window is orange cast, then the light shinning in from an east window is blue cast. Then there is the light from the interior lighting!