White Balancing for Video

I noticed today that the gh4 automatically zooms in when setting a custom white balance. Very handy. Too bad I don't own one.
 
I set my white balance by eye. Not in a scientific way. Because sometimes I want a slightly warm or slightly cool image, or slightly magenta, or green. Just change the Kelvin number until it looks good. However, another approach is to set the "correct" white balance and warm or cool the image in colour grading. It's easy to set correct white balance, just have a white paper under the lighting conditions and change the K until the paper looks exactly white, not blue or yellow. Any white object works very well. Even a guy wearing a white shirt.
 
You usually don't have to even look at your image for white balancing. After some experience you start to know what color temperature you are working with. If you are shooting outdoors you will typically want daylight white balance around 5600K. If you setup you own lighting you should know what your own lighting color temperature is. If you are using dimmers on tungsten lighting you will probably need go below 3200 as your lights get warmer.

It's not worth the time getting an exact white balance in camera unless you have an external monitor that you calibrated perfectly for the specific room you are shooting in. If youa re using the cameras monitor/LCD it's not going to be perfectly calibrated and you are just guessing at that point. If you can somewhat close to the proper white balance it's pretty easy to fix in post if you know what your doing.

Same thing goes for exposure, you are going to be guessing using the camera LCD unless you calibrate it first. That's why zebras are used if you need very precise exposure. Personally I just make sure why highlights aren't clipping and I adjust my exposure in post. Adjusting exposure within .5 stop and white balance within 500K is not going to really cause any noticeable degradation issues to you footage.
 
egproductions said:
It's not worth the time getting an exact white balance in camera unless you have an external monitor that you calibrated perfectly for the specific room you are shooting in. If youa re using the cameras monitor/LCD it's not going to be perfectly calibrated and you are just guessing at that point. If you can somewhat close to the proper white balance it's pretty easy to fix in post if you know what your doing.

Same thing goes for exposure, you are going to be guessing using the camera LCD unless you calibrate it first. That's why zebras are used if you need very precise exposure. Personally I just make sure why highlights aren't clipping and I adjust my exposure in post. Adjusting exposure within .5 stop and white balance within 500K is not going to really cause any noticeable degradation issues to you footage.
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Couldn't agree more. There is no perfect setting for white balance in the camera. You can set it one second, then conditions change the next. The lights affect it. Lights warm up and change color. The sun moves. Hair lights aren't always turned on. Reflections affect it. Exposure affects it. It will never be perfect so don't waste your time worrying about it too much.

That's why you need to be or know a good editor. Someone who knows their way around vector scopes and waveform monitors. In the field, you can eyeball it based on experience. In the post production bay you don't need to eyeball it. You can use the scopes and get perfect tonality. If primary color correction isn't enough then do secondary.

Vector scopes, waveform monitors, and RGB parade are all available in any decent editing suite: adobe, fcp, avid, etc.
 
I can get pretty accurate white balance looking at a white paper on tiny camera screen. I disagree and say it's more than enough for getting a pretty accurate white balance, not RGB parade accurate but pretty damn close. If you want to set a ''correct WB balance in-camera you can, just learn how to change the kelvin mumber and also the tint and shift. In ML in your t3i, white balance is the first item in the exposure tab, press "Q" and there you will find the kelvin number, the magenta-blue tint, and the green-cyan tint, and all adjusted in real time looking at live view. Put a white subject in front of the camera and adjust until it looks perfectly white. The normal Canom firmware only has Auto WB and a few presets, which are inadequate for accurate WB so manually adjusting is the way to go. Also don't be affraid to try changing the values to ge a different look, if you want a cold scene, make it cooler, if you want a hot summer look, make it yellower, with these 8 bit cameras getting the desired look in-camera is very important because the codecs are not strong enough for significant colour changing in post processing. I use WB as a creative tool and don't worry about dead-accuracy.
 
Thanks for the answers! It goes against my perfectionist nature, but it seems reasonable enough to me to white balance "well enough" and tweak it in post. Thanks!
 
Samuel H said:
For the Custom WB setting, Sony only requires the grey card to fill the centre mark in the EVF, but Canon requires that you fill the entire image with a grey card. Very inconvenient, that's why I used a white cap instead back in my T2i days. Not as accurate, but good enough in most cases.
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Samuel, If you had ever bothered to read the manual for the T2i or any other Canon DSLR, you would know that ALL Canon DSLRs can custom white balance by filling only the spot metering circle in the center of the finder. It works exactly the same way as your Sony.

From the Canon manual: Custom White Balance "The plain white object should fill the spot metering circle".

I would like to know what is your major malfunction when it comes to Canon? Why do you feel the need to trash them at every possible opportunity even to the point of making up things to complain about, (like this one) that don't exist.
 
Have many of you missed the entire point in white balance? It's to enable matching ease. Between shots and between cameras. It's not an artistic device or something for mood, it's simple the visual version of ringing out a room some people do with audio to balance out room resonances and deficiencies. Of course you can use presets for daylight or tungsten and do any tweaking later, and I use these more often than auto white balance, but if you need white to look white, that is what awb is for. The great warm look shots, or candlelight are I agree, where the eye matters most, and white balance is out of the window, but if you want face tones or indeed white shirts or dresses to look white, then auto white balance works brilliantly and doesn't need a monitor at all. Adjust all you like afterwards, but if you have multiple cameras, you need as much commonality between them as you can get. It's not an artistic tool or something to get worked up about, it just makes white, white and does it quickly and without needing any other device. If I walk in and see mixed source lighting, I know white balance is going to be important, but it's not a big deal.
 
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