White Balance on time lapse.

[Jan Tore Soerensen]

Good evening! I have been reading the forum for a couple of weeks now, and it seems like a great place with many knowledgeable users. Good thing I found it.

 

Now, on to my issue. I am shooting a short film/commercial, and I shot a night-to-day lapse this morning. I shot it RAW, thankfully. What troubles me is that the light is changing so much during the shot, that from the second half, white balance is way off. I am editing the lapse in AFX, but right now, I am wondering what the best way to approach this would be. As I see, I have three options.

 

I could split the lapse, and use different grading, which probably would be very noticeable in the end result. I could somehow use color correction to balance the colors, or I could change the white balance in Vegas when editing. The last option is the easiest, but wouldn't it be preferable to do it while I am editing in RAW?

 

Maybe I am overthinking this, and there is an easy way all together.

 

If this is misposted, please move it.

 

Thanks.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Welcome! Yes, definitely do the corrections in RAW. I prefer to use Adobe Lightroom, it's very convenient to edit a large number of raw stills at one time. There's an app extension made for timelapse that is supposed to make the workflow easier, though I have not tried it yet:

 

http://lrtimelapse.com

[Daniel Meier]

It's called LR Timelapse. And it's especially designet to kill flickering issues that come along with when shooting Aperture Priority mode.

But I think it detects any other EXIF data changes as well, including white balance.

[Patrick Cooper]

There have been times when Ive been shooting time lapse and the light conditions have fluctuated quite dramatically - from full sun to dense cloud. In such cases, I manually adjusted the WB of individual Raw frames in Lightroom.

[Jan Tore Soerensen]

Thanks for all the input. I got it pretty good manually adjusting things in Lightroom now. I will then do minor adjustments in AFX.

 

LRtimelapse looks interesting. Probably have to invest in it if I keep on doing time lapses for my films. I guess shooting with auto white balance could be beneficial as well.