Basic White Balance question

[Mark-P]

Is it a problem to zoom into a white balance card and press the white balance button when the white balance card does not take the entire frame of video? So part of the frame has whatever is in the background and not the white balance card. Is this not going to properly calibrate the WB?

Thanks.

 

[Barry_Green]

Most cameras will be fine with that. Fill as much of the frame as you can; I don't know of any cameras that would choke on a partial white screen.

 

[Al MacLeod]

That's a good question! Shooting news and white balancing on my sneaker always gave me an incentive to keep the footware in good shape.

Is there a central spot for wb or is it the whole frame (hvx) averaged?

 

[KevinP]

Yes good question - I always just make sure the white balance card fills as much as possible of the screen.

But doing a quick test with a warm card and a white balance card side by side you can see for yourself (by panning across so that increasingly more of the warm card is in the frame in between pressing the white balance button) that it appears to be at about 50% of the screen when the "warm" becomes noticibly "white".

So this would also support an "average" function being applied to the frame by the camera.