Color Temperature Wrong

D

Deaniweenie

Active member
I Have a 3 year old HVX 200. I use the daylight (56k) and tungsten (32k) presets most of the time and I set a manual white balance when necessary. I use a Photon Beard Reahhead kit with 3 redheads. I have a variety of Lee daylight correction gels: 218 1/8th, 203 1/4 and 201 full CT Blue.

If I film outside with the 56k preset everything is OK colours are fine. When I film indoors (56k preset because of windows etc.) with the redheads with any of the CTB gels, daylight and outdoor scenes through windows are fine but the talent and the room is orange. I've been lighting for years without any problems but I just can't fathom where I'm going wrong here. Could I have a bad set of gels? Unlikely.

Anyone see what's wrong here.

Thanks
 
It's probably not bad gels, but simply not using the right ones for that time of day, or variance in the redheads' outputs -- or just that the outdoor light also varies. It's actually pretty hard to match outdoor light exactly with gels, because it does vary quite a bit.

Also, dimming light, as you do with gels, tends to emphasize the orange.

You may be better off trying to go the other way - conforming the outdoor light to your indoor light.
 
Well, the 1/8 and 1/4 gels won't turn an orange light blue. They'll barely impact the orangeness of the tungsten light. The full CT should of course make that orange light compatible with daylight.
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Let's ignore the time of day for a moment and also ignore the fact that the outdoor scene through the window in the background looks fine. Take all that out of the equation. So, I have 3 redheads lighting my talent. For this experiment all 3 lights have full blue gels. The camera is set to 56k. My subject shouldn't look orange under those conditions?

I bought some low-cost bubbles for my redheads from the internet, could this be the source of the bad light?
 
A few of the shows I've shot favored 4400K for day interiors. It is worth a test to see if it is acceptable for you. 1/2 CTB should be adequate to get your tungsten fixtures into that territory.
 
You shouldn't be getting the results you are, but just out of curiosity, what happens if you manually WB on the gelled light?
How does the window light compare to the subject light?
 
Ya, Manual White in front of talent, there is nothing wrong with your gear. The color temp on the talent is nowhere near 56k.
 
Yes, I will test that next time I'm out with Talent and report back. It does look like I'm going to have to go back to manually setting white balance on the talent. What I don't want is for the scene outside the window to be blue.

Thanks guys
 
The only way around that is to either bring the windows down toward 3200 or the interview lighting up to 5600. You may find splitting the difference acceptable as I suggested above. Lots of network shows are balanced at 4400K for daylight interiors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top