C300: C300 'flat' profile yellow cast

M

Marc Lucas

Active member
Editing some footage from C300 it was shot on a custom 'flat' profile. The cameraman said to me the profile gives a slight yellow cast to the footage (image called Yellow)...anyone hear of this is this right?? Also just noticed that on the start of one of the clips there is some kind of distortion on the footage (image called Pixel)
 

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Spoke to the cameraman and it was the built in Canon Log profile in camera. The camera was set to 56k because we were using HMI daylight lights, however, there were a number of store lights that were at different temperatures. Is the C300 very sensitive to a mixed light sources?
 
Indeed, but I was just curious as to why this has happened.I run a Flaat profile on my D800 and it just produces a flat image with no colour cast at all so when I saw a yellow cast on this footage I was surprised.
 
Ill echo mraaron. Should be completely fixable in post. C300 is not anymore prone to mixed lighting than any other - those store lights are simply yellow looking so, completely baffles me as to why your op said the profile made it look yellow.

D800 in flat mode is simply stripping all the info out of the image. Canon Log has the info, but you need to know how to shoot with it.
 
There was indeed a mixture of lights in the around the store but the talent was solely being lit by 56k HMI's so my personal take on it would be even though the camera was set to 56k internally the external light sources were having more of an effect of the camera than the op thought. In retrospect he didn't do a white balance he said just setting the camera internally to 56k would be enough. The only saving grace is that all the footage looks or has the same yellow cast so it will indeed be easier to grade.
He also mentioned that the C300 didn't give any colour casts when he has shot outside that leads me to believe the camera is more sensitive to certain light sources than others??
 
Again, regardless of what your key light is, if you have mixed sources and if the white balance isnt given the opportunity to see what colour the light is i.e. a manual white balance which for the record would most likely have pulled you down from 5600K. Mix blue and yellow paint you get green? Mix 5600K light source with tungsten and you get something in between, same principle except the part where cameras us RGB as primaries.

And of course in broad daylight if the camera is set to 5600K its not going to have any colour cast given the sunlight at the time of day you're shooting is around 5600K. Try it right on dusk set to 5600K and you'll see a different result. The same principle applies to all cameras.
 
Yeah, this is caused by a contamination of the lighting at your location. Looks like warm fluorescent light with a bit of green spike. This isn't a problem with camera, just a problem with mixed color temperatures and not doing a custom white balance. Any camera would give similar results. The D800 image doesn't appear to have the color issue because far more color saturation is removed with the Flaat profile vs the Canon's CINEMA preset.

The pixelated frames at the start of your clip are just the mpeg-2 codec catching up it's GOP frames; it's perfectly normal.
 
Thanks Noel & Brian (don't have to post on twitter now Brian:-) I fully understand the comments and thanks for the help on this!
 
I've found the C300 naturally has a tendency to cast yellow if not corrected in a Custom Picture or a custom white balance. White balance is also a lot more of a mystery on the C300 than any other camera I've used, I'm not convinced the dialled in Kelvin settings can be fully trusted.

On other cameras I've used dialling in 3200K had a similar result to setting the standard tungsten option but not so with the C300, the results from each are quite different and I've yet to find a good technical reference as to why that's the case... perhaps its one of those mysteries that needs to remain a mystery :)
 
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Yep I agree with jagstang. At our work we rented the C300 a few times and there was a yellow cast under certain lights and the much talked about green cast would pop up too. On some shoots the c300 was shot with a 5d and the 5d did not have the yellow or green cast. I am not saying it wasn't op error or there possibly could have been a way to dial that out in camera but the camera does have some mysterious colors going on at times.
 
"White balance is also a lot more of a mystery on the C300 than any other camera I've used, I'm not convinced the dialled in Kelvin settings can be fully trusted."

I couldn't agree more! This may just be another way the C300 is "film like." It's response to mixed color temperatures is more like film stock than any video camera I've ever used. It is not always ideal. Haven't bothered to carry around a color temp meter in years.
 
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