Tungsten balanced film and colour correction

[Jon O'Brien]

Let's say you turn up to film indoors at a venue, with tungsten balanced film in the camera. Let's say 500T. You were told it's not a very well lit interior and it's lit with warm tungsten light. It's a sunny day outside. You get there and find out that there's a lot of daylight coming in through windows and the key light is actually daylight balanced. You say to yourself okay, I will colour correct in post, to make the image less blue. If so, when filming do you set your aperture as if you had a color correction filter in place? How much, generally speaking, would you open up the lens by? Thank you for your advice.

[David Mullen ASC]

You just expose normally or for the look you want. The only reason you adjust / compensate when you use a filter is that the filter is cutting down the light, so with no filter, there's no light loss, no filter factor to worry about.

[Jon O'Brien]

Thank you. That is what I thought. The reason I asked is that I read recently online that if you color correct in post that you have to expose for that when filming, just as if you had a physical filter. It didn't make sense to me, so I'm glad to read your words. Best to check.

[Tyler Purcell]

It'll always be slightly blue if you're stuck at 5600k lighting and 3200k balanced stock.

You can attempt to fix in the scan, but it can be tricky to get exactly the look of the 85.

I've done it a lot and gotten away with it, but I choose not to do it unless I'm forced IE; need the stock sensitivity.