Green Tint

C

Chris Macdonald

New member
Does anyone have a green tint in their footage under indoor lighting conditions? I'm using Barry Green's Scene 4, White Balancing, etc. but I still get a slight green tint in my footage. I don't see it with outdoor use. Any solutions?
 
I never have a green tint on any footage with the DVX200. What kind of lighting are you using? What are you using to white balance? What color walls? Does it happen every time you shoot indoors? Does it happen at every location you shoot when indoors? Does it happen under various types of lights. Fluorescent lighting can give off a green tint. But you should be able to adjust white balance. Are you sure you are adjusting the white balance correctly? The DVX has multiple white balance settings. I believe the stock scene file 2 is good for fluorescent. Is it green when using any other scene files? How green is it? A photo or a video sample would be helpful.
 
Chris Macdonald said:
Does anyone have a green tint in their footage under indoor lighting conditions? I'm using Barry Green's Scene 4, White Balancing, etc. but I still get a slight green tint in my footage. I don't see it with outdoor use. Any solutions?
Click to expand...

Florescent lighting and some low end LED lights can cause a green tinge. In mixed light situations, it can be tough to get rid of in my experience. If the lighting is consistent you should be able to WB it correctly.

I just did a shoot in a dance studio that had florescent overhead lights that had *2* different colored diffusers (clear and orange) *and* sunlight coming in a large window. I was not able to control any of it......white balance nightmare!
 
I have had the green tint it was on a cosmetic commercial and if i remember correctly we were using 3 rental dvx 200s with multiple light sources it was really noticeable, i don't remember which set of lights we turned of to remove it but it was definitely the lighting we were mixing lots of lights that day and we turned each different type of lights of until we found the lights that that were causing the green tint. we were shooting in camera with stock scene files which one i dont recollect and which type of lights i dont recall were the problem but it was definitely a light issue. I have not seen the issue since i would try turning types of light of one at a time rewhite balancing that was how we solved it.
 
Yes, it happens in mixed indoor lighting conditions where I can't control every light source. I try all the WB options, i.e manual, ATW, color temp adjustment, scene settings and still see it. Example is interview where I had LED lights set up, but most situations where I see it are run and gun where I am stuck with the lighting as is. I notice the tint in his beard/hair mostly.

https://vimeo.com/212760952
 
Chris Macdonald said:
Yes, it happens in mixed indoor lighting conditions where I can't control every light source. I try all the WB options, i.e manual, ATW, color temp adjustment, scene settings and still see it. Example is interview where I had LED lights set up, but most situations where I see it are run and gun where I am stuck with the lighting as is. I notice the tint in his beard/hair mostly.

https://vimeo.com/212760952
Click to expand...

With mixed indoor lighting there's only so much any camera can do. For example, if you have florescent above and sun from the sides, something is going to be colored incorrectly. Blond hair seems to the worst for capturing the green florescents. You can WB the camera for one, not both. A good exercise for improving your color correction/grading skills...
 
Chris Macdonald said:
Does anyone have a green tint in their footage under indoor lighting conditions? I'm using Barry Green's Scene 4, White Balancing, etc. but I still get a slight green tint in my footage. I don't see it with outdoor use. Any solutions?
Click to expand...

I have a building that I shoot in from time to time that was fitted with what I expect are sub-par LEDs. I get exactly what you are describing. I've since had to turn their LEDs off and shoot near the windows and add my own supplemental lighting. I was pulling my hair out after every shoot in that place. I could get it somewhat acceptable in post. I've never had another location that gave me that same issue. The first time I saw it, I thought it was something that I was doing. After about the third shoot I finally realized what the culprit was. It made me nervous after the second go-around because I thought I was going to have that some problem occur at another location. After about 6 months of not seeing it again I had another shoot in that location and there it was again. It's hard to explain to someone that you don't want to shoot in a particular location because of their lighting, especially when the subject of the video centers around their office environment.
 
Back in the day, it was standard practice to always turn off overhead fluorescents and replace them with our own lighting instruments whenever shooting in an office environment. Overhead fluorescents were notorious for making a horrible drab green tinge on everything. And cheap LEDs are the scourge of today's building lighting too.

You can't really effectively white-balance it out, because (at least in the fluorescents) there's a part of the lighting spectrum that's *missing*. The only solution is to get rid of them and replace them with continuous-spectrum lighting.
 
TL;DR:
Turn off the practicals and use daylight as the key.

Unreasonably long post:
If they're looking at the green tint, they're looking at the wrong thing. lol That means they aren't captivated by the story or the performance and are now nitpicking the image looking for faults, because boredom. Sure, it bothers we videographers, but if you can't control the light sources there's not a whole lot you can do. Correcting in post would be extremely difficult (even with log or raw) as the tint is baked-in and trying to correct for it would mess with the colorimetry of the parts in the shot not affected by the tint. If you're able to, do as Barry suggested and turn off the overhead practicals. But, that might just make the room dark...and in reality work you need to capture the story because story trumps technical issues.

Who cares if there's a green tint? You do. The audience won't, if they're riveted. Then, refrigerator logic sets in.

If you have a client and you're shooting something where you do have control over the lighting and you're using practicals which tint the image, then you have a problem. Reality work is a bit more forgiving dramatically and emotionally. It's just better to get the shot. If skintones look like skintones, great. You WB'd as best you could, but there are parts in the shot where the practicals did funny things to the image...it's ok. Nothing you could do in that situation. But, you got the shot. You told the story. If it were a movie, all those lights (probably the ballasts, too) would be switched with KinoFlos or space lights and the sunlight coming through the windows would actually be big HMI's creating controllable daylight all day long (and into the night) and everything would be balanced for mood and would be controllable and gorgeous. But there's a reason movies look like movies and documentaries and news packages look the way they do.

Fastest thing to do, say for an interview, is turn off the practicals and use a window as a key light. Best light around is sunlight...even indoors.

Another thing is to use daylight led lights to augment your daylight key. Even really cheap led lights tend to perform best at a daylight setting. The bicolors are notorious for horrible green spikes when attempting to match for tungsten. Daylight-only models are brighter and the CRI is usually cleaner. But, cheap ones will get ugly when dimmed. Life sucks. lol But, they work very well as a background light or a kicker. Sometimes all you need is a weak minus green and they will balance with sunlight pretty well. Use a reflector for fill...that could be a white foam core, a sheet of paper, a white wall, or a white t-shirt Hollywooded where it needs to be. Cheap battery-powered daylight led lights are great for reality work...especially the small ones intended for use as Obies. Get fancy and clip some 216 on them. Use them to modify the subject, but they're best at supplementing daylight.

If you want to go crazy, get an expensive Litepanels 1x1. I see a lot of docu-dramas using an LED fill light for outdoor daylight shots (reverse engineer lighting setups by looking at reflections in the eyes. you can sometimes even see the grip hollywooding the 1x1). Looks fine, and the CRI of the 1x1 is quite high. I shot overnight footage for an episode of Restaurant Impossible for Food Network a few years back and used a Litepanels 1x1 bicolor on a stand to augment interviews. It was great. If it were daylight only, I'd have used CTO to correct. Nowadays, you don't even need to buy Litepanels as there are other perfectly acceptable brands making perfectly acceptable, cheaper, alternatives. Aputure Amaran, for example. Doesn't have the kick or the throw of more expensive models...but the difference is usually negligible. A small, diffused and dimmed source up close to the talent, just out of frame, is like having a huge source several feet away. Has great wrap around and is quite flattering for the talent. Even in broad daylight battling sunlight, suggesting reflected light removing racoon eyes...looks great. But, again, we're using sunlight as key.

There's lots of options...again, even a cheap LED, at daylight, corrected with minus green and diffused with 216, looks better than the same LED naked. But, you're still needing to turn off the practicals and use sunlight as the key.
 
Chris MacDonald the green tint is not just in your head and it's not just in indoor conditions with multiple light setups. Here is a shot done at night in low light condition with only ONE on camera light attached to my DVX200. I did proper black balance and white balance before the shot while using Scene 6 setting, 1/48th shutter speed, and 4K 24p mode.

Screen Shot 2017-04-13 at 9.31.17 PM.jpg

The GREEN TINT ghosting that you see around my arms, on the left side of the frame, and a little GREEN TINT you see on my elbow, on the right side of the frame, is NOT suppose to be there. I know that ghosting happens with 24p and certain shutter speeds but not green ghosting. This does not happen with GoPros, with iPhones, the GH4, and it should not be happening with a $4300 camera. The camera is great other than this. There needs to be a firmware update immediately to fix this problem; Chris and I aren't the only one who encountered this problem, there is also a B and H reviewer who mentioned it as well!
 
Cinephile said:
I know that ghosting happens with 24p and certain shutter speeds but not green ghosting. This does not happen with GoPros, with iPhones, the GH4, and it should not be happening with a $4300 camera.
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Okay, first, on that tiny picture I don't really see any green tint, so I don't know exactly what you're talking about, but just looking at the shot and the light conditions I'd bet that you're encountering noise reduction artifacts. For grins, why not try your test again but go into the NR CONTROL menu and set it to -7, to have minimal noise reduction happening, and see if the issue goes away. If so, then you've at least identified the culprit, and can then adjust the NR CONTROL to a suitable level where you get the maximum benefit from noise reduction but avoid artifacts like ghosting.
 
Cinephile said:
Chris MacDonald the green tint is not just in your head and it's not just in indoor conditions with multiple light setups. Here is a shot done at night in low light condition with only ONE on camera light attached to my DVX200. I did proper black balance and white balance before the shot while using Scene 6 setting, 1/48th shutter speed, and 4K 24p mode.

View attachment 122733

The GREEN TINT ghosting that you see around my arms, on the left side of the frame, and a little GREEN TINT you see on my elbow, on the right side of the frame, is NOT suppose to be there. I know that ghosting happens with 24p and certain shutter speeds but not green ghosting. This does not happen with GoPros, with iPhones, the GH4, and it should not be happening with a $4300 camera. The camera is great other than this. There needs to be a firmware update immediately to fix this problem; Chris and I aren't the only one who encountered this problem, there is also a B and H reviewer who mentioned it as well!
Click to expand...

It does not happen with the DVX200 either. It is called learning how to use your camera and properly light. Where are the comparing shots under the same circumstances using the other cameras you mentioned.

Some reviewer on B&H - LOL - I read reviews on B&H for any product I purchase. Been using B&H for over a dozen years. The people on that site who post reviews are often not experienced or have an axe to grind. You need to weigh all reviews whether on Amazon, B&H, etc.

If the DVX200 had green green ghosting problems the professional reviewers would have been all over that. The fact is, the camera is not doing it. Any green ghosting is operator error. Period.
 
it would be helpful to see all your settings that you shot this clip perhaps the problem lies within a setting or maybe not it would be interesting to see what the community comes up with when you post detailed settings including the scene file settings that you used even if you say they have not been changed it would still be good to see if they match factory settings also the type of light you used.
 
I often run into green tint
especially in multicam production
Setting the chroma phase in the direction of
red can help
 
DVX200 never produced a clean shot WB is very hard. Every body talk great about DVX200 I bet panasonic g7 shot way way way better than dvx 200.
 
I consistently get good results from my DVX200. When shooting in environments I have no control over (reality/docu work) I will get color and exposure inconsistencies that any video camera would suffer. Even shooting raw, you can't completely correct for the weirdness of shooting at venues with lighting of mixed color temperatures, flicker, luminescence, wave length, etc. You will always get the best results when you light for camera, rather than the human eye. Taking into account everything, the best way to shoot with DVX200 is with V-log L. That's it. If the project dictates you use a scene file, then you simply have to do the best you can with what you have to work with. White balance will only get you part of the way. But a yellow light is going to make skintones yellow, etc. All you can do is shoot and hope the viewer understands that there was some colored lights in the venue. As far as colorimetry, if you don't' like what the camera's scene profiles are doing, that's why Panasonic gives you the ability to modify them any way you want and make your own, and distribute them. Just using the camera stock straight out of the box without customizing it isn't professional behavior and it isn't a good way to push the camera to its furthest potential. In fact, you'll need an Atomos Ninja/Shogun Inferno system to do that.
 
I'd like to contribute my experience with "tinging" though I think this discussion has escalated beyond my pay grade. I was suffering from some of that green tinge stuff and orange. Was driving me nuts. Now I know some of the lighting wasn't optimal, and I wasn't in a position to really correct it BUT I do think the camera could do better. What made a world of difference was neutral balancing the camera. Notice I didn't say "white" balancing. Previously I'd use a white card, sheet of paper, t-shirt, or whatever. I did do a "white balance" but rather casually. I began to suspect my white balance technique may be contributing. So I invested in one of those 18% gray fold-out pop-up hand held thingies about the size of a cars windshield sunshade and started using THAT. Minds greater and more articulate than mine can discuss the difference of balancing "white" vs. "neutral" (educated myself to death on the subject, but don't feel qualified to venture a tech discussion at the moment). What was the result?? First off, the DVX is remarkably sensitive to neutral balancing and it impacts the entire color spectrum. It seems to be WAY more sensitive to neutral balancing and less forgiving of sloppiness than my Canon C300 (or 5D3, or 70D, or G30). In actual practice my weird tinging was gone and flesh-tones were coming out much nicer. I really should have been doing this all along and have kinda kicked myself for not having been disciplined enough to do this prior. It made a HUGE difference especially in mixed or low light. In full daylight Auto WB actually pulls it off quite well. Anything short of that I'm getting out my 18% gray "thingy" (the white side works as a nice bounce/fill reflector in sunlight too!). End result, this got rid of maybe 80% of any tinging - the remaining is going to effect pretty much any camera and is down to crap practical lights; but I can live with that!
 
The camera actually doesn't care if the surface is white or grey. It cares if the surface is neutral. A lot of the time, we find ourselves white balancing on walls, sheets of paper, t-shirts, clouds...none of those are neutral white, spectrally speaking. A good white balance card should be matte (read: not glossy) at about 80% white. And you should wb with the card in key light but without spectral artifacts (reflections of the lights, contamination from other light sources especially ones with colors not intended for key, any highlights, etc). An 18% gray card is not only a cute exposure helping tool, but it should also be completely neutral and really hard to catch reflections on...being that it absorbs more light than it reflects. So...it's not that an 18% gray card is necessarily better or the best choice for the DVX200, but it is a handy tool...one with its own limitations and caveats. Again, your best results will always be when you have conplete control of the set.
 
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