Wrong whitebalance - to what degree fixable?

N

NEEL

Active member
Hi, I've got more than 3 hours of footage which was shot with wrong whitebalance settings. This footage is quite important for my current documentary, so I really have to somehow rescue it. It would be a real tragedy if this material was lost. It came from a second HMC my assitant used as a B-cam and all this happened when we moved from an interior location outside and I forgot to adjust his HMC. I am shure this has been discussed here before, but I cannot find it. I am still on location, writing from an internetcafé and have no hands on a color correction system. Just wondering if someone could help me with a short answer. Could the footage be entirely fixed? A simple "yes, it can - try a search in the forum how to" would make me more than happy for now. Thanks so much in advance...
 
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What program do you use to edit with? Most come with a decent color corrector and I see no real reason you couldn't fix it with some tweaking.
 
if you download a trial of after effects you can use the hue and saturation effect to isolate one color channel and decrease its saturation
 
AVID has some super cool color correction on it. Even with just the auto correction, you could probably fix up your footage pretty decently. But, you'll have more control with a CC suite or even After Effects.
 
djbobbyrhodes said:
AVID has some super cool color correction on it. Even with just the auto correction, you could probably fix up your footage pretty decently. But, you'll have more control with a CC suite or even After Effects.
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THX a lot. What do you think - would "pretty decently" be good enough for broadcast?
 
It may be. It really does depend on the footage. You should give it a go when you are editing the footage. If it doesn't pan out, you can further correct the color in AE or another program.

I had to edit a spec sitcom pilot as a project for my AVID class. The close ups were shot hours later for one scene and daylight from the previous shots was gone. I was able to correct the color to match the previous shots. No one even noticed that they weren't shot at the same time. A good place to start is the auto CC controls and then tweak the curves and/or color wheels to get what your looking for.

And again, if it doesn't look good enough, you can still do it in After Effects or even Color from Apple.
 
Neel , dont know much about avid.
But check to see if its got a channel mixer effect/filter like Adobe premiere
Adjust the bluechannel.
The blue channel can warm things up or cool things down.
If its totally off, people look purple, try adjusting the Green channel.

Goodluck
 
Whether the footage can be salvaged will depend on how far out of white balance it was, and whether any of the color channels are clipped. This is easily determined in Avid, and easily fixable. I do it all the time.

When you get back, send me a message and I will walk you through how to do it. You don't need any other software to do this, Avid is perfectly capable of doing this kind of basic correction and even some more complex correction.
 
PerroneFord said:
Whether the footage can be salvaged will depend on how far out of white balance it was, and whether any of the color channels are clipped. This is easily determined in Avid, and easily fixable. I do it all the time.

When you get back, send me a message and I will walk you through how to do it. You don't need any other software to do this, Avid is perfectly capable of doing this kind of basic correction and even some more complex correction.
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Perrone,

How does Avid compare to Cineform Firstlight for color correction?
 
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Well, even in case that you could not completely "fix" your footage, you can always adjust it to some degree and then match the healthy footage to it. I know that this is not the answer to your question, but in similar situations I always actually get some creative boost when fixing mess, so it ends up even better. It somehow forces you to rethink things.
 
two observations:

1- if you didn't know how to or if at all possible to correct white balance, you should not color grade your footage, get someone to do it.

2- you said something about hmc, fix, good enough and broadcast. is hmc broadcast approved.
 
If it's the difference between a tungsten and a daylight balanced setting you should be more than fine. I have to do this all the time and in FCP and Color I can get the footage too extremely close to a "natural" look. If you also totally can't get the look you want you can always make it black and white or sepia toned and then make that a part of what you are doing... When I've had people give me horribly shot greenscreen this is the only thing that really salvages it...

If you could also post up stills that would help people in helping you.
 
The problem with incorrect wb (I could be off but throwin it in there) is that because of the shift in hue on capture, information can be discarded in specific channels. Your blue channel is the weakest, green bein the strongest. So it depends how far off your wb is.

I correct on colorista, and often use the auto wb when i screw up say if i'm out on a quick non-setup shoot. Most of the time it works adequately, but if it's way too far off, it results in the program compensating for color info that wasn't captured.

I would say, set your white balance before you shoot, but that's not the point. It is fixable, depending on how far off you were.

Is your footage in HD? Are you downrezzing to SD for broadcast?

And to el sayed amr rahmy ... the man shot on an hmc, to ask if its approved is another topic, again, going back to discussing if a camera is 'good' or not.

hal haza loh 3alaqa bilmawdoo3? la azun. khallek hilw. salam.
 
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