LETS TALK ABOUT WHITE BALANCE AND RED

[Anson Fogel]

White Balance is by all accounts, the critical foundation for the process of achieving the best results throughout a workflow, and begins at shooting. However, getting it right - for this grasshopper anyway - is not always easy or obvious. How do YOU do it? So many questions I have for the experts here:

I shoot a lot of mixed lighting, outdoors, on location, as well as more controlled studio lighting. I try to get a grey card in there, but often find myself unable to do so, then hunting around in RCX for a good white/grey point in the frame to balance off of, and not always getting great results.

Why does my 5D auto-white balance in camera so well most of the time, while my MX almost never auto-white-balances in camera worth a damn? Am I doing something wrong?

If you are shooting in studio under tungsten or daylight sources, do you get the right results leaving WB as tungsten or daylight, with tint neutral? I'm not talking about grading, I'm talking about getting the WB right before/as the first key step in grading.

Do you always shoot a DSC chart every time for future use? What if you simply cannot, and why do other cameras seem to get it more "right" without this?

Would love to hear how those far more experienced that I handle this critical process.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm not sure why it's so complicated. If I light a scene with tungsten lights and I want it to look a bit warm, I pick a 3700K white balance. If I want it to be more neutral, I pick 3200K. If I'm in daylight and I want it to look a bit cool, I might pick a 4800K balance. If I don't want it to be cool, I pick a higher number.

It's all metadata anyway when recording RAW. I don't need to shoot grey scales, etc. unless a human being is going to be color-correcting the dailies (they won't help with the final color-correction because they would all be edited out.)

Auto White Balance on a video camera is a bit more complex because it's also correcting in the green-magenta direction as well, which may be necessary when working under fluorescent lights. On the Red, I generally just go into Tint I believe (can't remember the menu name) and remove some green when under fluorescents.

This is a digital camera after all, you can see the results of different color settings live on a monitor. Play around until you get something you like. It doesn't have to be perfect anyway, it's just a starting point for display, dailies, etc.

When working in mixed color temps, you just have to decide where to set the color temp setting -- i.e. how warm do you want tungsten to go or how blue do you want daylight to go, etc. Again, it's RAW, you can always change your mind in post.

 

[Anson Fogel]

David, thank you so much again for your time investment and insight. What you describe is exactly what I have been doing as well, however, in some mixed exterior lighting environments, the strategy does not always achieve desirable results. Its encouraging to hear that it is, well, largely what it appears.

In mixed natural lighting, where the white balance is not always obvious, do you basically do the same - adjust the WB on camera until it looks about right?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

The auto white balance is designed to work when the camera is pointed at a neutral grey target. It's not an auto-white balance in the sense that it works pointed at a general scene.

Graeme

 

[ericyoung]

What David said. I tend to just use the Tungsten or Daylight preset (according to the predomininant lighting) and only adjust manually if I want it to look warmer or cooler, and the Tint control if there's a bit of fluorescent green there.

 

[Anson Fogel]

Often in outdoor natural scenes, the "correct" setting often includes significant tint adjustments as well as the core white balance adjustment itself. Simply adjusting the white balance itself is at time not adequate. That is often where the mystery exists for me - the nearly infinite combination of WB value and TINT value, when the scenes is not particularly close the normal tungsten or daylight, can be hard for me to find on camera.

Graeme's comment suggests that my original hunch is still possibly the best approach - even when doing 2nd unit outdoor nature work, I could/should shoot a full frame grey card. Which is, well, less than ideal. Graeme, David's post suggest some reasons for this, but why DOES a 5D work well pointed at a general scene, while RED does not? Is it simply not a software priority or is it simply much more difficult or impossible to do?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The 5D is doing a lot of the thinking for you, as many consumer cameras do as well. The Red One is "dumb" in the sense that it does what you tell it to do, but that's the only way to have full control over the image.

Basically you have colored light in a scene along the warm-to-cold axis and along the green-to-magenta axis. Anything more complex than that can wait until post to figure out and correct.

In a "mixed" lighting scenario, you have multiple color temps with sources with varying degrees of green biases mixed into them. But the camera has to be set to one color response to which everything else will be relative to that spot you pick. But still, it's not complicated, it's just picking a degree of warmth or coldness and a degree of tint. That's it! Just two selections.

Now some of what you perceive as being "not right" about the Red image is not really due to what's being recorded (which is RAW anyway) but how the camera is outputting a color image. The Canon may not be capturing or displaying as full a color gamut or range and therefore is hiding or minimizing a certain amount of mixed color, giving you the impression it is "correcting" the scene when it is actually just not being sensitive to some of the more extreme biases of colored light in the scene. People have often commented, for example, that the Red One is overly sensitive to the green spike in fluorescents, but that's partly a processing and display issue more than what's getting recorded.

 

[Anson Fogel]

David, again, an immense thank you for that. So, in these situations, you would again simply adjust both axes to taste on monitor, and shoot, generally not also adding a grey card? I understand as well the challenge that the grey card will capture the light only in that particular position which often in mixed outdoor scenes varies from the other elements in the scene which may be quite distant, and quite different from shadows to sun, etc.

I do often find that the white balance picker in RCX will improve the perceived accuracy in representing the original scene - it will look better - than what I set on camera using the 2 axes. Part of that is probably just being able to see it on a large, calibrated monitor at full resolution, but part of it seems to be that the software is better at it than I am. Not all the time.

 

[paulherrin]

if you're worried that much about it you need to shoot charts. otherwise, just make it look good. it's really not that complicated.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

It's all metadata anyway when recording RAW. I don't need to shoot grey scales, etc. unless a human being is going to be color-correcting the dailies (they won't help with the final color-correction because they would all be edited out.)

...

This is a digital camera after all, you can see the results of different color settings live on a monitor. Play around until you get something you like. It doesn't have to be perfect anyway, it's just a starting point for display, dailies, etc.

Remembering these two critical facts... shoot a quick test of your scene. Maybe a tech rehearsal.

Ingest it, and open it in RedCine. Do a fast one light grade to your taste.

Output that as a LOOK file for the camera.

Now your monitoring will have some of the look of your intended delivery, with the white balance you like etc from RedCine.

The better and more consistent your various display calibrations are, the better this will work for you on set and later in post.

Because its just metadata, you can always change the settings you choose- almost completely if you like at almost any point in post.

 

[jake blackstone]

In mixed natural lighting, where the white balance is not always obvious, do you basically do the same - adjust the WB on camera until it looks about right?

Looking right is, usually, in an eye of beholder. What I'm saying is color grading is a subjective art and, yes, setting white balance is an important first step in grading, but up to a point. You don't need to be perfectly white balanced in every scene, just the bulk part. Once there, there are enough controls, in your case, in Resolve, that will get you a perfect and clean grade. Personally, I found, that excessively tweaking RAW white balance can be counterproductive, as you can lose the ability to copy and paste grades. You mileage may vary...

 

[Anson Fogel]

Great input all. Jake, this is less about ME frankly, than about others - I've shot 3 things lately on MX where I handed the files off to...lets say...less sophisticated post production teams. They claimed to be "solid" and "experienced" posting red files, but then complained about the "color being off" - of course, I respond, no worries, its set rough in camera, its all raw, make it look like whatever you like.

The point though, is that I'd like at times to hand files off to an unknown team that look roughly "right" in the embedded metadata. Obviously, as others point out, setting the look on set in RCX and loading in camera is the no brainer, and we do that when we can. But that is not always doable on many shoots, so we want to get it roughly right in camera. And I wondered if there was some magic to that that I was not aware of. Apparently, there is not. As another poster pointed out, so helpfully, its not that complex. I guess.

 

[jake blackstone]

Great input all. Jake, this is less about ME frankly, than about others - I've shot 3 things lately on MX where I handed the files off to...lets say...less sophisticated post production teams. They claimed to be "solid" and "experienced" posting red files, but then complained about the "color being off" - of course, I respond, no worries, its set rough in camera, its all raw, make it look like whatever you like.

The point though, is that I'd like at times to hand files off to an unknown team that look roughly "right" in the embedded metadata. Obviously, as others point out, setting the look on set in RCX and loading in camera is the no brainer, and we do that when we can. But that is not always doable on many shoots, so we want to get it roughly right in camera. And I wondered if there was some magic to that that I was not aware of. Apparently, there is not. As another poster pointed out, so helpfully, its not that complex. I guess.

Good point Anson. I keep forgetting, that not everyone is in my boat Said that, welcome to my nightmare. Often, after grading, people would watch finished project on different monitors and complain, that images don't look the same, as they were in grading session. Colors perception is subjective, that is why you need something constant, like grey chart or in my case, calibrated monitor.
Shooting the gray card, obviously, is the best solution, but in reality, not always practical. Having grey card shot once in a while should go a long way in helping to alleviate the color perception subjectivity (if there is such word). But in mixed color sources situation all bets are off.

 

[Anson Fogel]

Other poster have said "its not that complex" - well....sure, in theory, its not. Try to get a decent in-camera calibration of tint and WB, while shooting MX out of backpacks at 12,000 feet and no IT station. Sure, we twiddle the knobs, try to get the tint and WB to match what we see. But its not always that successful. Others point out that the 5D does the work for you. Great. Why can't red's auto-white-balance in camera do some work for me (really, for someone other than me downstream) and get the look roughly right in camera like the 5d? Yes, I know how easy it is in post to get it right, I do it every day. But not everyone else does downstream. When even a strong editor or colorist opens up those dailies that I did not get paid to one-light grade myself before sending it out, and the director looks at it and says WTF, a good auto-WB function would have gone a long way towards making me, and RED, look better. If we then have a ProRes module on EPIC, it seems like a better auto-WB for baking the best possible setting into the file would be, well, more than helpful. Just an idea.

 

[Frank Glencairn]

I shoot with a daylight or tungsten preset (depending on the scene).

I have this little SpyderCube attached to the slate.

It gives me highlights, total black, shadows and neutral gray - so I can easily dial it in with the 3 eye droppers while grading.

http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-cb-spydercube.php#

Frank

 

[paulherrin]

Other poster have said "its not that complex" - well....sure, in theory, its not. Try to get a decent in-camera calibration of tint and WB, while shooting MX out of backpacks at 12,000 feet and no IT station. Sure, we twiddle the knobs, try to get the tint and WB to match what we see. But its not always that successful. Others point out that the 5D does the work for you. Great. Why can't red's auto-white-balance in camera do some work for me (really, for someone other than me downstream) and get the look roughly right in camera like the 5d? Yes, I know how easy it is in post to get it right, I do it every day. But not everyone else does downstream. When even a strong editor or colorist opens up those dailies that I did not get paid to one-light grade myself before sending it out, and the director looks at it and says WTF, a good auto-WB function would have gone a long way towards making me, and RED, look better. If we then have a ProRes module on EPIC, it seems like a better auto-WB for baking the best possible setting into the file would be, well, more than helpful. Just an idea.

the problem with auto white balancing is 1. you give up control of the color temperature (and can get some crazy numbers) 2. if it keeps shifting or 3. if every shot is inconsistent. it can get super hairy in post when someone has shot with an auto white balance and every shot was captured differently and you have to go in and make adjustments... it's just a better idea to stay consistent. i'd rather be consistently a little bit off "perfect" rather than some shots that are on and some shots that are not.

auto white balance can generally be a really bad idea. and graeme just told you how red's auto balancing works. otherwise, you're looking at the stuff you are shooting right? maybe you want a viewfinder for outdoors? i still don't see how it's that complicated to get pretty close without a whole lot of tweaking. i've never had a problem. if you really think you're going to get more accurate color reproduction and better tweaking ability from your 5d because it has an auto-white balance... well.

frank, i like that little toy! that chrome sphere on the top is sweet!

 

[David Battistella]

This thread might help people as a primer.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=54918


David

 

[Richard Foster]

Frank - thanks for the idea of the Spydercube - very nice device. I'm going to get one!

 

[Patrick Tresch]

The 5D is doing a lot of the thinking for you, as many consumer cameras do as well.

The 5D is also full manual and you can make a custom WB when ever you want using gray chart or the white wall.

Pat

 

[Ryan E. Walters]

I have this little SpyderCube attached to the slate.

Frank

Interesting idea- how do you have it attached to the slate? That seems like a great solution.