joe12south
Veteran
The way I pay for my gear habit, which allows me to do my own narrative work, is to shoot weddings. Weddings can be hard. And stressful. I am very often relying on an inexperienced second shooter. There are a lot of opportunities to screw-up, and no chance for a second take.
Something that has almost always proven problematic is white balance. The typical wedding day (10-12 hours) takes place in a variety of environments. Some incandescent, some daylight, some flourescent, some sparklers, some an unholy mix of the above.
Auto WB is sheer madness in post, and manual white balance almost always gets screwed-up...especially between multiple shooters. You might be able to salvage a low light incandescent scene accidentally recorded with daylight balance, but you will never be able to push that image far enough to make it look good.
In a perfect world I would manually white balance every scene, so would my second shooter, we'd never make a mistake. Never forget. That world doesn't exist. The most important thing is to be in the right place at the right time to get the shot, not worry about fiddling with the camera.
With the GH5 in hand, I decided to retry an idea that I had experimented with on the GH4, but found not quite satisfactory: manually set all cameras to a "compromise" color temperature and leave it there. All day. No matter what. Just forget about it. My hope was that the extra color information in the 10-bit signal would allow room to white balance in post, not dissimilar in process to post-balancing a RAW file.
Spoiler alert...it works. Here's my process:
1. Set camera(s) white balance to 4500º kelvin. Lock-in using custom settings dial. (For me C1 is normal shooting, C2 is VFR.) Now there is no chance of it changing throughout the day.
2. Get one shot of a color chart in each lighting set-up. (This little sucker is a great choice if you don't already have one: http://xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo) This is surprisingly easy to do, even on the most hectic of shoots. If possible, expose middle grey exactly where it should be, but if you can't don't sweat it too much.
3. Shoot. Worry about everything other than WB.
4. Bring the color chart shots into Resolve.
4.a. Make sure your scopes are visible. You don't want to try to eyeball this.
4.b. Create node. Adjust scale, position & rotation to fill the frame with the grey bars of the color chart.
4.c. Adjust exposure to roughly center middle grey.
4.d. Create new node. Adjust white balance to get red, green and blue as close together as possible.
4.e. Adjust tint to get it even closer
4.f. Use curves to correct more localized errors. (Good strategy is to not touch green and to adjust red and blue as necessary to match across the curve.)
4.e. Turn off the first node.
4.f. Export LUT. Name it according to the lighting condition.
4.g. Rinse and repeat for each lighting set-up.
5. Apply the LUTs to all of the shots according to your preferred workflow. If you make optimized and proxy clips, that's a great time to bake in the LUT.
Making the LUT's is really straightforward, and only takes a couple of minutes to dial in. The middle ground color temperature combined with the 10bit file leaves enough room to push the image where it needs to go, in either direction. (Mixed lighting scenarios hardly need pushed at all.) I used this technique on a shoot last week, and not only was there not one single shot with a WB problem (even though my son filled in as a last minute shooter and had never used the GH5 before) but I was able to focus more on other things, like, well, focus.
Anyhoo...I encourage you to consider this little trick. Would I do this on a controlled shoot where you can take the time to set-up shots and do multiple takes? No...you should get a "proper" white balance. But, for any kind of event shooting, I think it's something to consider. I'm certainly going to make it my default practice for such scenarios.
Something that has almost always proven problematic is white balance. The typical wedding day (10-12 hours) takes place in a variety of environments. Some incandescent, some daylight, some flourescent, some sparklers, some an unholy mix of the above.
Auto WB is sheer madness in post, and manual white balance almost always gets screwed-up...especially between multiple shooters. You might be able to salvage a low light incandescent scene accidentally recorded with daylight balance, but you will never be able to push that image far enough to make it look good.
In a perfect world I would manually white balance every scene, so would my second shooter, we'd never make a mistake. Never forget. That world doesn't exist. The most important thing is to be in the right place at the right time to get the shot, not worry about fiddling with the camera.
With the GH5 in hand, I decided to retry an idea that I had experimented with on the GH4, but found not quite satisfactory: manually set all cameras to a "compromise" color temperature and leave it there. All day. No matter what. Just forget about it. My hope was that the extra color information in the 10-bit signal would allow room to white balance in post, not dissimilar in process to post-balancing a RAW file.
Spoiler alert...it works. Here's my process:
1. Set camera(s) white balance to 4500º kelvin. Lock-in using custom settings dial. (For me C1 is normal shooting, C2 is VFR.) Now there is no chance of it changing throughout the day.
2. Get one shot of a color chart in each lighting set-up. (This little sucker is a great choice if you don't already have one: http://xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo) This is surprisingly easy to do, even on the most hectic of shoots. If possible, expose middle grey exactly where it should be, but if you can't don't sweat it too much.
3. Shoot. Worry about everything other than WB.
4. Bring the color chart shots into Resolve.
4.a. Make sure your scopes are visible. You don't want to try to eyeball this.
4.b. Create node. Adjust scale, position & rotation to fill the frame with the grey bars of the color chart.
4.c. Adjust exposure to roughly center middle grey.
4.d. Create new node. Adjust white balance to get red, green and blue as close together as possible.
4.e. Adjust tint to get it even closer
4.f. Use curves to correct more localized errors. (Good strategy is to not touch green and to adjust red and blue as necessary to match across the curve.)
4.e. Turn off the first node.
4.f. Export LUT. Name it according to the lighting condition.
4.g. Rinse and repeat for each lighting set-up.
5. Apply the LUTs to all of the shots according to your preferred workflow. If you make optimized and proxy clips, that's a great time to bake in the LUT.
Making the LUT's is really straightforward, and only takes a couple of minutes to dial in. The middle ground color temperature combined with the 10bit file leaves enough room to push the image where it needs to go, in either direction. (Mixed lighting scenarios hardly need pushed at all.) I used this technique on a shoot last week, and not only was there not one single shot with a WB problem (even though my son filled in as a last minute shooter and had never used the GH5 before) but I was able to focus more on other things, like, well, focus.
Anyhoo...I encourage you to consider this little trick. Would I do this on a controlled shoot where you can take the time to set-up shots and do multiple takes? No...you should get a "proper" white balance. But, for any kind of event shooting, I think it's something to consider. I'm certainly going to make it my default practice for such scenarios.
