White balance _ hmc150

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bryan777123

Member
I have been using WHITE CARD to manually achieve WHITE BALANCE. The results have been good (not sure what perfect result should be!). I have read Barry Green.s HMC 150 Book. Barry states that white card (or similar) is required. I have also read elsewhere that to achieve "best results" for white balance, that GRAY CARD "18" gives better results. I have also considered a simple plastic White Balance cap to achieve consistency. Can anyone give me their input about the 3 options - a) WHITE CARD (b) GRAY CARD (c) WHITE PLASTIC LENS CAP. Any guidance would be appreciated.
 
Using a white card will let you get the colors right--you are matching the color temperature of the light sources. Sort of like picking the right flim stock for film--outdoor or indoor, etc. You do this with the white balance function.

Using an 18% gray card will help get the aperture setting right. For a normal picture, you want the light coming off the gray card to be in the middle of the contrast range (or what cinematographers call ZONE V). You change the iris until the horizontal line on your waveform monitor (an HMC 150 function) is in the middle of the scale. :happy:
 
After you white balance you can go to scene file-color temperture A or B and warm up or cool off your white balance to your taste thru a +-scale.
 
Just want to add a comment about the lens cap solution. I may totally be misunderstanding what you are proposing, but it sounds like you are wondering if you could have a lens cap that is white to put over the lens so you could then white balance. If that is the case, no that won't work. First putting anything over the lens is going to make it dark just like if you turn on the camera with the normal lens cap. However, even if you are considering holding it several inches away, it will not work. What you need to be doing is white balancing with the white card in the exact area you will be shooting. You want to have the white affected by the light source in that area so that you can change you camera settings to that it reads it as white in that area. White card is best.

However, that last post really threw me a for a loop. I hadn't really pondered that when you white balance you are actually gaining your colors to compensate and in doing so probably introducing noise to your picture. I have been annoyed when I have shot inside even in good lighting, that I still get noise in certain areas. Even blowing out the light and lowering the gain, doesn't seem to fix it unless I have my background the same exact lighting as my foreground...which is obviously not good. So I am hoping maybe someone can shed some light (lol, no pun intended) on this subject with the HMC150...maybe Barry or some other expert can help us understand better the following:

Is it better with this camera to try to color our light so that there is minimal gain applied? If so, should the gels be blue for this camera or what? Is there a way to loose that background video noise I am seeing without flatening the lighting levels to the foreground level? Is the HMC150 balanced for daylight or something else? Is balancing in post with 10bit, really that much better since you are going to be adding gain anyway? What is the meaning of life? (just thought I'd throw that one in as well)
 
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