Room fluorescent light advice

F

firehawk

Veteran
Recently shot interviews in various areas in a large room with mostly compact flourescent lights in the ceiling.
We used 2 portable LED lights on stands set to 3200K to give some color warmth and manually white balanced each relocation with a white card.
The cameras were Panasonic HMC150 shooting 1080/30P with shutter at 1/60. Had zebras set to 70% to avoid over-exposure on caucasian faces.
The footage looks pale and possibly green and I'm a little disapointed compared to what it normally looks like.
I used the stock scene files HD NORM. I'm thinking the abundance of fluorescent light is the culprit.
Should I have used the setting for fluorescent? Any suggestions?
 
Forgive me - I am not an expert, but I believe the normal solution is to turn off the house lights and light the room yourself completely. The compact fluorescent lights are likely so messed up in their color accuracy that turning them of or replacing them with CRI 90+ lamps is called for.

This site is good->
http://lowel.tiffen.com/edu/color_temperature_and_rendering_demystified.html

I'm sure real experts will add better wisdom. But I hope this helps some.
 
Easiest thing to do would be to throw some quarter plus green on your lights, whatever they may be, and white balance to that. Any light coming from windows or incandescent sources would appear to be a bit magenta, but at least you won't have a person's skin tones looking green. For movies and TV shows where there's actually time to set up, CFL hi hats usually will get gelled with quarter minus green and sometimes quarter or half CTB.
 
Another option is just using kinos and stealing the globes from
one set of overhead fixtures you don't see. Put those globes in your kinos and kiss your color problems good bye!

Or as someone suggested earlier, turn off the house lights, and bounce a couple HMI's around to get your ambience back and just start from scratch.
 
firehawk said:
The footage looks pale and possibly green and I'm a little disapointed compared to what it normally looks like.
Click to expand...

Possibly green? I practically guarantee it. Cheap building fluorescents are notoriously unbalanced spikey light. Huge green spike is almost mandatory. More green == higher efficiency rating, for one thing. But really it's more along the lines of fewer phosphors == lower cost.

As you found out, doing a manual white balance can take most of the green spike out. But... there's nothing to replace it with. If you compare the spectrum of sunlight with the spectrum of cheap building fluoros, you'd be hard pressed to identify the fluoro spectrum as light at all. Some of them are really spikey and discontinous. And that is why your skin tones look crappy. Because the skin is only reflecting back to you what's in the light; if there isn't any orange in the light, there's no orange to reflect back to the camera. Just sayin'.

As has been mentioned, best you can do is turn them off. Provide your own lights. Next best thing you can do is replace the crappy building bulbs with your own cinema bulbs. As in Kinoflo compact fluorescents. Can be pricy and time consuming (don't forget to change them back and take your bulbs with you when you leave), but this works too.
 
firehawk said:
Recently shot interviews in various areas in a large room with mostly compact flourescent lights in the ceiling.
We used 2 portable LED lights on stands set to 3200K to give some color warmth and manually white balanced each relocation with a white card.
The cameras were Panasonic HMC150 shooting 1080/30P with shutter at 1/60. Had zebras set to 70% to avoid over-exposure on caucasian faces.
The footage looks pale and possibly green and I'm a little disapointed compared to what it normally looks like.
I used the stock scene files HD NORM. I'm thinking the abundance of fluorescent light is the culprit.
Should I have used the setting for fluorescent? Any suggestions?
Click to expand...


first of all, just to be clear, you're turning your supplemental led's OFF when you white balance, right?

second of all, like others said... if you roll into a location and just go with the overheads, especially if they're cheap flourescents... yeah dude you're gonna have a bad time. Scout the location before hand if possible, and if not, bring a big enough kit to light the place yourself.

Best bet at this point is to try and fix it in post.
 
It's impossible to say which particular tack to take in this room would have been the easiest/cheapest/right one, without more details (how high was the ceiling, how many existing fixtures were there, would it have been practical to change them out for this shoot). For a simple interview, I'm guessing swapping out globes wasn't a good option. You said they were CFL's but were they standard Edison base (E26) or some oddball industrial fixture, for instance.

I've gotten by with modern fluorescents and today's more forgiving cameras by balancing my sources to the existing lights and then white balancing out the shift--as long as your subject is lit with legitimate lights, the broken spectrum in the background shouldn't be too much of a bother. This is a good argument for having a color-accurate monitor on set, you can see these problems while there is still time to fix them. And of course, a scope setup if you know how to read them. But the safest choice as previously stated is to either change everything out in the ceiling to color-accurate globes, or to turn them off and light from scratch.
 
It depends a lot on the house fluorescents and what you're shooting/look you're going for. Back in '07 I started shooting a weekly segment for a show I worked on and a lot of it was in race shops and they were all lit by flo's(shutting them off was not an option most of the time). I didn't need to get dramatic or artsy with the lighting, just work with the existing and augment to properly light the subject/talent. I spent the first season mixing tungsten(gelled) or an HMI with them. Then I bought a set of Diva's and life got much easier. The T32 lamps and 1/4 CTB matched almost perfectly most of the time.
 
If you do not colour correct the light sources, then awb is hopeless. The white card will be lit by random bits of nearly white light, only accurate at that exact point. Move the card up, down left or right may make a huge difference. Mixed sources never work. If one is uncontrolled fluorescent, it's even worse because of the nasty spikes, as said above.
 
Thank you everyone for all the great responses. The ceiling was oddly shaped and around 10ft high in places and there were many lights bulbs scattered around the open building. We shot interviews in several places and since it was a place of business in operation we couldn't kill the lights and just use ours. Furthermore since we were shooting in several places and people were walking around I tried to minimize the amount of cabling to reduce trip hazzards and that's why I chose to use the 3200 LED lights for quick ease and safety. My LED lights weren't powerful enough to overpower the house lights but to my eye they warmed up the talent color but the footage doesn't look that way. Sounds like white balancing on the white card made matters worse.
I see now some things I could have done better and that's why I posted on here to learn from you guys in order to do it better next time. Certainly not a disaster and I can make it better in post, but I'm disapointed in myself for not shooting it better.
 
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