White Balance

[escozooz]

Hi,

For my music videos I've been custom white balancing on a white/grey card. The scenes didn't really have to match so it has worked fine so far.

I am going to shoot a feature soon and I was wondering about white balance. On the cine-alta feature I worked on they didn't auto white balance. They used the in camera filters 1A/1B for daylight and tungsten.

I was thinking that for continuity I would only use the tungsten and daylight presets. Does this make sense? Like if we shoot parts of one scene on different days the white balance will always be consistant.

What do most people do?

 

[smelni]

If you use the custom presets you will need to either block out all external light or make color temp adjustments.

I perform a white balance on the scene (not a white card) moving the camera around and looking at a production monitor until I like what I see for that particular scene. That is my starting point - i then use the scene file to warm or cool it depending and lock that in.

From then on I rely on my produciton monitor to make sure it remains consistent enough for my eye - always making adjustments where needed. The thing is as long as all your shots are in the close neighborhood of each other, minor CC in post will fix any small changes. If you get too hung up on keeping it consistent you will spend too much time chasing the same temp which is not the best use of on set production time IMHO.

The light at a location is rarely exactly one of the presets - outdoor light can vary greatly due to atmospheric conditions, time of day, etc so if you just used the preset your balance would change over the day. Similarly for inside if there is any outside light coming in or if the walls are different colors for different angles.