Help color matching these HMC150 cameras please

F

firehawk

Veteran
These are supposed to be identical cameras but they've never matched. As far as I can tell the settings are all the same.

Here is a shot from each of the three cams.
F/2.8
0DB gain
3200K preset
scene file: Spark

There seems to be a greenish vs reddish difference. And the issue is worse in low light.

If I manually white balance them they look a little closer and they match better outdoors.
Any ideas what to do?
 

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They seem pretty matched (give or take the hardware's threshold).

If I were you (if possible), I would factory reset every camera and try again with a default camera scene file (eliminates any numbers error).

When you're white balancing, make sure there is no special tint setting affecting the colors even though the Kelvin is the same.
 
Thank you NorBro. The images seem to look better on here than when I'm editing footage.
I bought 3 identical cameras back then so they would be, you know, identical. Haha. And they've never been. Two seem to be close but the other is more green in the blacks
 
haha, I hear you.

Less expensive prosumer sensor hardware has to have only a certain passing percentage to make it inside our cameras. You'd expect them to match, but maybe you were just an unlucky buyer with those 3 units (mainly the 3rd greener one).

P.S. I owned and loved the HMC150 (it was my first traditional HD zoom-rocker camera and I was so in love with it).
 
Which one is your favorite to match to? 1,2 or 3. I like #1 but then it has the highest contrast, right or wrong choose a favorite and let us know.

Chris Young
 
My favorite? Well I started to say 3, but I think it's the most different. I like 1 also and really it doesn't matter. I just want them to match so I don't have to color match in post.

Hmm... I've got some other Panasonic cams I'm going to try to match up too but they are different models (HMC40, UX180, AC90A, UCK20, FZ2500) so I'm wondering now if my best approach is to just try to average out all the cameras.
 
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I've experienced the same thing using the built in preset. The best practice is to always set custom white balance by pointing both cameras at the same white/gray card.
 
What I would love to do is get all my cameras closer to matching but the others are Sonys (FS700R, A7S2, A7R3, EA50U) so I do not think that is a realistic dream.
The A7R3 looks the best out of everything I have
 
Peter C. said:
I've experienced the same thing using the built in preset. The best practice is to always set custom white balance by pointing both cameras at the same white/gray card.
Click to expand...
Yes I agree. But sometimes it's fast run and gun or a situation where we cannot pull a manual white balance so I do a preset so they will be fairly close and then match in post. But I'd love to get them to match with presets. Seemed realistic with the came model of cameras but maybe not if the factory variances are off
 
Unless all the cameras have a full SMPTE Matrix and you have the necessary Chroma Du Monde cam align charts and a full set of external monitoring equipment, WFM, Vector, and Osiliscope where you can adjust on the fly it a bit of tall order to align a bunch of disparate cameras.

In situations like this, I pick which one is my 'favorite' and then do a color/luma match on the charts. Once the other cams have been matched to the 'favorite' I then export LUTs for the corrected cams to enable a match with my 'favorite'. Doing it this way with the three cam charts that you shot you can get a very close result. I don't what you are editing with but for example, in Resolve, I just have your three sets of camera clips in three bins and then apply the appropriate LUTs to the footage in the appropriate bins. Doing it this way all your camera footage is basically color-matched as it hits the timeline. Finito! Then just make the minor lift, gamma, gain type of tweaks as you proceed down the timeline.

Always looking for better ways of matching mixed and different brands of cameras. The above workflow generally gets me out of trouble and strife but if anyone has a quicker and simpler way please I'm all ears.

Chris Young
 
Thanks everyone. All I have is my BM switcher connected to a TV to compare and adjust cameras. I worked on it for a few hours today and gave up. Maybe they will match up better together. We'll see. Some of the cams have a lot of adjustments and some don't. So I tried different profiiles to try to get close and adjusted some from there.
 
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