trying to fix white balance mistakes on footage from hvx

[Benjamin Cameron]

i am editing a batch of footage, half of which was shot with the tungsten white balance setting, half with the daylight (3.2 and 5.4 respectively, i think). we used the hvx200, and while i am extremely pleased with the image quality, we need all of our footage at daylight balance. the camera operator overlooked this setting, the balance set to tungsten when we started, and we corrected it to daylight halfway through the shoot.

 

i am running the FCP 6 suite on a dual G5. while i am not new to FCP, a have not used Color yet. i am wondering if anyone has any idea if i can change all of the tungsten balance stuff to daylight balance using Color, and if so, how. any pointers would be helpful, as i am really new at color correction. i am assuming that this is a fairly straightforward problem to fix, switch a batch of shots from one balance setting to another. i hope so at least.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Sooo, why wasn't the DP white balancing? Anyway...

 

I know in FCP's color correction there's an automatic correction filter where all you have to do is select a "white" reference in the frame (not hyper-white or blown out areas of the frame) and it gets you pretty close. You'll still have to tweek it a bit though.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

btw, I'd try and figure out how to do it, but then leave it undone until either the DP or Director are able to sit in with you and get what they want color wise.

[Bruce Greene]

i am editing a batch of footage, half of which was shot with the tungsten white balance setting, half with the daylight (3.2 and 5.4 respectively, i think). we used the hvx200, and while i am extremely pleased with the image quality, we need all of our footage at daylight balance. the camera operator overlooked this setting, the balance set to tungsten when we started, and we corrected it to daylight halfway through the shoot.

 

i am running the FCP 6 suite on a dual G5. while i am not new to FCP, a have not used Color yet. i am wondering if anyone has any idea if i can change all of the tungsten balance stuff to daylight balance using Color, and if so, how. any pointers would be helpful, as i am really new at color correction. i am assuming that this is a fairly straightforward problem to fix, switch a batch of shots from one balance setting to another. i hope so at least.

 

I once set my Varicam to shoot daylight without the orange filter in place for a commercial. My assistant noticed that I had not set the orange daylight correction filter in place and "fixed" it for me. We were shooting with a b&w viewfinder only for these shots and I didn't find the error till later. All the shots were of course very orange looking, like at sunset. We found it impossible to correct these to a neutral daylight and the commercial had a "Magic Hour" look to it in the end.

 

You,I guess, have the opposite problem, images that look very blue. I suspect you will face a similar problem. I'm guessing that to get your fleshtones correct you will find that your highlights and shadows will clip in some color, which might require a high contrast look to hide this.

 

But I'm just speculating here. If you post a still image with the problem, myself or someone else, might be able to correct it as best we can in photoshop and show you what can be done with it.

 

-bruce

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

I've never had to correct from orange in video, but I've done some tests in film and I found it very difficult to recover a lot of the color information. I can only imagine it'd be even more difficult in video. Shooting uncorrected daylight and getting a bluer image seems to preserve a lot of the color information better than getting an orange image in my experience.

[Walter Graff]

You could use the three channel color corrector and swing everything in the highs and mids toward blue and sometimes green depending. But fool around and you figure it out pretty quickly. I use a cool little plug in filter called White Balance that allows you to sample a color and re whitebalnce a picture like you still had the camera. It is available online at CGM's site. http://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_e.html