Matching Cameras

[Jerry Doran]

I was just working on a 2-cam shoot with F900s and white balanced the cameras under the same lighting conditions. One camera came up 5.3K, the other came up 4.3K. They looked virtually identical on the monitor. What accounts for this difference in the two? Is something not aligned at board level?

[Michael Nash]

I was just working on a 2-cam shoot with F900s and white balanced the cameras under the same lighting conditions. One camera came up 5.3K, the other came up 4.3K. They looked virtually identical on the monitor. What accounts for this difference in the two? Is something not aligned at board level?

 

Personally I never trust those numbers. I've never seen them be "right"! But I don't have a technical answer for the problem...

[Mitch Gross]

There are a host of setting in the cameras which are needed to properly match two cameras beyond a simple white balance. The fact that they looked identical means that many of them had been well accounted for by whomever set up the two cameras previously. Controls like white shading, flaring, color matrices all effect this. Adjusting for the individual lenses is also crucial, and no two chip blocks are identical. I agree with Michael that the 4.3k reading has little meaning, as this is something that can be easily reset by the user.

 

The only proper way to match two cameras is with a waveform & vectorscope coupled with some precision charts.