White balance & backlight questions??

Eagle eye

Eagle eye

Member
:( I have to say I have never been very impressed with the ATW on the DVX100B. I often notice when I am shooting indoors with good light coming from outside that the picture is a little blue to quite blue. I manual white balance and the picture is great. Also if I want to manually focus and switch to manual focus I loose my ATW that seems a strange thing. Then I have to manual the WB. Is this normal??
The other thing that bothers me is if I am panning a room and know that I will be crossing a bright window, I thought I would need to press the backlight button in the dull area of the room thus freezing the exposure. Then pan across the room and expect to see the window appear bright and the room detail would not suffer under exposure. However soon as I press backlight the whole picture brightens up even in the dull areas. Other cams I have used have not performed like this. Is this cam defective, or am I losing it?? I should point out I don't use my cam as much as I would like.
 
I don't think these functions work quite the way you thought they do.

ATW is notoriously unreliable when you have mixed color temperature light in your room, as you would shooting indoors (orange) with daylight (blue) pouring in. ATW will react to whatever ilght happens to be hitting the little sensor on the end of the microphone, and will shift according to any fluctuation, as daylight frequently does.

In short, don't use ATW indoors. Manually white balance according to the room light color temperature.

The backlight function is doing exactly what it should be doing -- increasing gain on the darker portions of the picture while leaving the bright spots alone. This helps even things out if someone is silhouetted against bright light.
 
Hi there,
Just a comment on the location of the White Balance sensor, on the 100B it is on the front shoulder of the camera, the sensor on the microphone is the remote control reciever.
 
Of course. My misstatement. It's actually there for every version of the DVX.

That being the case, think of it this way -- if you have windows to the right of you and your indoor lights to your left, the ATW sensor is getting more light information from the windows, so it will white balance to that light instead of the room light.
 
Thanks for the response. I take your point about the white balance sensor location, I will watch that in future. However the backlight compensation still seems wrong to me. With previous non pro cams all the backlight compensation seemed to do was lock the exposure so the windows glowed white but the room detail was correctly exposed. Anyway thanks for your help.
:dankk2:
 
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