CCT and Skintones

[silvan schnelli]

How do you guys go about setting your white balance on your cameras, relative to the lights CCTs that are being used.

For example when looking at the train robbery scene from Assassination of Jesse James, shot by Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC. Im pretty sure they used a tungsten balanced stocks and lit with dimmed down 250/300 watt bulbs. I’m not sure what the color temperature of the bulbs would be, but I often see movies shot on Kodak Tungsten balanced stock with tungsten lighting, yet the skin tone still often have a warm, yellowish tone or the practical lights. I would think that the color rendition would be white, if it’s a tungsten balanced film. I know a reason may be that the tungsten’s spectral distribution may affect the rendition of the skintones, but surely the effect wouldn’t be that present.
 

Or for example I saw some behind the scenes of Skyfalls, where Deakins was shooting at CCT  4200 and I think lighting  the scene with a lot of incandescent light and golden foil. 
 

Is there a general consensus on camera white balance vs light CCT used to obtain warm skin tones?

Have people tried using HMI’s and just changing the CCT on the camera? 

How do you guys asses what CCT to use on your camera?

Do you generally correctly white balance and then apply CTOs or Plus greens, to achieve the effect?

 

I’ve also read for example that Darius Khondji ASC,  AFC, likes to color correct the the ambient fill light to match the shadows? I’m guessing the shadows caused by his key lights and what not.

Or  Greig Fraser ACS, ASC,  mentioned also something about either desaturating the fill light or having a cooler fill light, but I’m not sure. 
 

I understand that the best way to find personal preference is to test it, but I am just curious about if some of you have go to settings, rules or guidelines.

Some examples:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Just depends on what is easier, gels (or dimming tungsten) or white balance or both. If I'm on stage with bright tungsten units creating sunlight and LEDs (space lights / skypanels, etc.) creating soft sky light, and I want the hard sunlight to be warm, I might set the camera to something like 4300K so the 3200K tungsten lamps render warmer, and then cool off the LEDs so they appear more blue, let's say, set them to 5000K. 

Other times I'll take the time to gel the big tungstens warmer because in the scene I also have practical lamps with tungsten bulbs and I want to keep them less warm than the sunlight.  Or the opposite, maybe you want the tungsten practicals to render very warm so you set the camera to the mid-4000K range but then you add 1/4 CTB to the big tungstens so they don't also get warmer. It all depends on what look you want.

But often the decision comes down to what is more efficient -- if it's only one or two lights to gel, you might use gel, but if there are 20 lights, let's say, then it's probably easier to change the color with white balance if they aren't bicolor or RGB LEDs that can be programmed to a color.  Often on a set or location, some lights are easier to gel or adjust than others, so the lights you can't easily control are what drive the decision-making.

Keep in mind that if you record raw, usually the camera's white balance setting is just metadata anyway.