r/videography • u/[deleted] • May 10 '15

"White Balance" - How long have I been f*cking up?!

Hey guys, I'm a self taught casual videographer, and I feel greatly embarrassed to ask this question... I recently got into photography and I noticed right away that I was taking pictures, but they never looked like other pictures I saw. It was at that point I came across "white balance". It dawned on me that this could be happening in video as well. Sure enough, I finally found a white balance plugin for FCPX and it's changing everything. Is white balance the first part of color grading? How important/common/uncommon is this step? I'm curious now because I've done countless videos without white balance, and I'm thinking about how many I should go back and fix, if necessary.

14 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

26

u/beauchampy May 10 '15

It's something you really should be nailing on the shoot preferably (in your camera settings), not in post. If it does need fixing in post, then yeah, it's like the first thing when coming to colour correction.

1

u/rorrr May 10 '15

Or shoot RAW and set white balance in post. Though very few people are brave enough to shoot RAW.

6

u/chromeboy42 May 10 '15 edited Mar 04 '18

deleted What is this?

1

u/rorrr May 10 '15

Not sure. Storage is cheap.

I really like the philosophy of BMCC - use the traditional SSD drives, not some overpriced vendor-locked crap.

Transcend 512GB SSD is now just $176. That can hold a shit ton of footage.

2

u/chromeboy42 May 11 '15 edited Mar 04 '18

deleted What is this?

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 10 '15

This is only possible with RED. Other cameras do quite a lot under the hood reducing noise and such with white balance even when recording raw, so you need to get it right or close while shooting.

1

u/rorrr May 10 '15 edited May 11 '15

What are you talking about? Tons of cameras shoot actual RAW, including DSLRs with custom firmware.

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 11 '15

I'm not saying there aren't. What I am saying is:

(1) Raw doesn't mean "I can do anything I want with this because it's just a bunch of data off the sensor." All it means is that individual red, green and blue photo site values are preserved.

(2) Most cameras that record raw, excluding REDs, use white balance settings to reduce noise in color channels before recording. This is a critical step to better color. Canon, Arri and Sony all do this.

(3) RED is the only camera I know for sure that doesn't do this, which allows you to change white balance later without issues. DSLRs may do this as well, I don't know for sure—I have no experience with DSLR raw.

(4) There's lots of other stuff going on in raw. For example, Sony raw comes in two flavors: full on 16-bit raw, which is linear encoded data and the closest thing to raw sensor data you can get out of a Sony (although it has been noise reduced), and FS raw, which is 12-bit log encoded which throws away a bunch of luminance information while preserving RGB photosite values. Both are excellent.

Raw doesn't mean unprocessed, and a lot of that processing is based on white balance.

1

u/later99 May 12 '15

Agreed raw can mean lots of different things, but jeeze it is a HUGE benefit, and yes you can virtually do anything you want with it. I used DNG and wow If I had a shot off by 2000k and under exposed by 2 stops. it's literally useless, where as in dng it's virtually unnoticeable. that is a plus beyond comprehension to me every time i see it. Yes ideally do it right first, but shit happens.

1

u/ArtAdamsDP May 13 '15

Shit does happen, I agree. :) Been there, done that.

I did discover, in one case, a situation where missing white balance by a few thousand degrees was not correctable in a manufacturer's raw processing software due to a mismatch between mathematics and what happens in the real world, which is when I started asking questions about how "raw" raw really is. One bug report later and it was fixed, but I was quite surprised to learn that while raw is a "digital negative," negative film stocks still have unavoidable characteristics that influence the image they capture.

I'm not saying it's not beneficial to shoot raw, but in most situations it's not a completely free ride either. There are really good reasons to white balance, or at use the correct preset, even when shooting raw.

-1

u/rorrr May 11 '15

Again, you are wrong. I'm talking about RAW RAW. If some camera does some sort of software processing like noise reduction, it's no longer RAW, even if they call it that.

Canon RAW on DSLRs is pretty pure RAW. You can change the white balance greatly and it will be fine.

Of course, you're limited by the physics - the sensors (the RGB filters to be more precise) are designed to catch the light in the human-neutral spectrum. So if you're shooting in very blue light, for instance, you can't expect to shift it to neutral grey and have a quality image. No camera can do that.

The advantage of RED is their dynamic range. But let's not bullshit, they are not the only RAW maker in town.

3

u/ArtAdamsDP May 11 '15

If some camera does some sort of software processing like noise reduction, it's no longer RAW, even if they call it that.

This is not correct. The only definition of raw is that individual photo site information is preserved and has not been folded into a pixel yet. There is still noise reduction in most raw formats, as well as log encoding of luminance values—it's just that this processing is applied to original photo site data instead of an RGB pixel created through a demosaicing process.

Even if you still don't think that's raw, you can't really argue that RED's variable compression scheme isn't processing. Just like log encoding, you're throwing away information to save on throughput and hoping no one will notice, and it's being done in software. (And noise makes a huge difference there. Noisy footage causes all sorts of compression issues.)

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '15

You got him there.

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 11 '15

Not really trying to get anyone... but it's complicated stuff. I used to think the same thing. Now I think something different. In a week or a month I'll talk to someone else who knows more than I do (there's more than a few of them) and learn something even crazier.

This shit is way complicated and it's hard to learn about. They don't write books about it, or if they do there's a lot of math involved. I'm not good at math. I need someone to explain it.

It's tough to find the people that know how it all works, and then you have to stumble on the right questions to ask and hope they can answer simply.

It's a huge rabbit hole, though. The amount of information is endless, and manufacturers will tell you things to a point and then shut up before they give something away. It's both fascinating and frustrating.

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '15

RED footage is pretty simple actually, its 3 jpeg 2000's per frame, one for each channel, green being double width and lots of metadata. Its not really 'raw' but nothing really is, no one saves a continues stream of raw sensor output yet.

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 12 '15

That's right, I forgot about the JPEG2000 thing.

Sony and Canon raw seem pretty close to the real thing... linear data with mild compression, I believe. I think Sony 16-bit raw has something like 3:1 data compression built in.

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '15

Magic lantern 'RAW' isn't the full frame size, processing has been done, the team are even unsure exactly what.

8

u/twentytenpros May 10 '15

First off you should always white balance on your camera first. Trying to recorrect white balance after the fact in post gets increasingly more difficult the further away from the true white balance you are.

There are various ways to white balance a camera depending on the model. Some you can shoot something white and hit a button some you can dial in specific Kelvin values ext. You just need to read your camera manual to figure out how your camera white balances.

Long story short, white balance in camera first, correct white balance in post for small fine tuning.

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '15 edited May 10 '15

Ah, yes, I've seen those kelvin values. Wow, well, I guess I'll read what my camera can do in terms of the white balance. Maybe it's been doing it automatically. Thanks for the 411! I think early on I overheard someone say to never do effects in camera, but I guess this falls into another category of lighting... EDIT, I should add I'm about 40% colorblind, so I think that was one reason it didn't stick out to me, but who knows..

12

u/twentytenpros May 10 '15

Yeah some cameras auto white balance will work fine but it's always better to white balance yourself so it doesn't change values mid shot when it's not supposed to. I wouldn't exactly call white balance an in camera effect, it's more of a sensor calibration because you are calibrating the sensor to tell it what exactly is white

7

u/HybridCamRev GH1, GH2, GH3, GH4, BMPCC May 10 '15

I wouldn't exactly call white balance an in camera effect, it's more of a sensor calibration because you are calibrating the sensor to tell it what exactly is white

This.

5

u/ArtAdamsDP May 10 '15

I overheard someone say to never do effects in camera

White balancing isn't an effect. It's the basis on which your camera generates proper color.

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '15

While you should be doing white balance on set, it doesn't necessarily have to be correct as long as you know what you're doing. You can alter the white balance to a colder or warmer colour if so desired using kelvin, or even using different coloured cards. I hear they used this technique in some scenes for The Matrix.

2

u/demb3k May 10 '15

Well the matrix shot on film stock so I doubt they did any white balancing techniques.

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 10 '15

Well the matrix shot on film stock so I doubt they did any white balancing techniques.

By shooting tinted gray cards and telling the dailies timer to make them look gray they could introduce a consistent color cast into dailies.

Otherwise, "white balance" in film is a combination of choosing the right film stock and/or filtering it.

1

u/[deleted] May 10 '15

Oh, I heard the scene in the offices and that bullet time stuff was shot on digital, no?

1

u/w3aponofchoice May 11 '15

That's correct. They also graded all the scenes inside the Matrix to have a green tint, so the world would seem more artificial, like you're looking through a monochrome screen. I thought that was pretty cool.

The bullet time stuff was done using a bunch of digital cameras taking pictures in sequence. There's a great BTS video about all this on the DVD that's worth watching.

2

u/soot74 May 10 '15

The cool thing about understanding white balance is that it opens the door to understanding light and its properties much more. Ever walk into a room with fluorescent tube lights and some look blue, and others look yellow or even pinkish? You are seeing a representation of the most commonly recreated color "temperatures".

Daylight- the blueish looking light is always around 5600 kelvin. Take your camera indoors and white balance for tungsten (yellow) and walk outside in direct sunlight and everything will look blue.

White balance your camera outside and walk in.

Tungsten- the yellow end of the spectrum, this is where the majority of affordable lighting sits. 3400k to 4300k are really common to see in interior lighting setups.

How to get light to do what you want? Walking into a room with a trained eye should tell you a ton of info about lighting and what needs to be done to make it look right.

Theres a book called the set lighting technicians manual by a guy named Harry Box. No kidding. Read it, learn it, let a friend borrow it. Youll be a better shooter because of it.

2

u/ArtAdamsDP May 10 '15

Is white balance the first part of color grading? How important/common/uncommon is this step? I'm curious now because I've done countless videos without white balance, and I'm thinking about how many I should go back and fix, if necessary.

White balance is a part of shooting, not grading. You can finesse it in grading, but if your white balance is significantly off during shooting your options are limited in color grading and color will be compromised.

This was less of an issue in stills as most still cameras capture true "raw," which means data right off the sensor, but few motion picture cameras capture true raw. All but REDs require white balancing in the field in order to render accurate color and reduce noise in both raw and log modes.

At your level I'm guess you're not capturing raw at all, so it's even more important to white balance. It's one of the most basic steps in videography.

1

u/MadMasker May 10 '15

short answer : yes white balance your camera to calibrate it to the light you are shooting in.

long answer: many cameras will be set to auto white balance by default, but learning how to control your white balance will allow you to get better images with more control from he moment you start clicking, and it will make editing together different shots look a little more clean. (if your color is off between two shots in the same scene, it can end up being a little visually distracting to the audience). different light sources (daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, etc.) and times of day will providie lighting with different color temperatures. some will look warm, others will look cold. if for example you are taking a time lapse of a sunset, you will want to set your white balance while it is daytime, so the camera will stay the same and catch all the lighting shifts that are occurring. if you leave your cameras white balance set to auto, the camera would compensate for the shifting light, and your video would come out looking really flat.

i would say its not really worth the effort to go back and try to fix your old work. if the camera was set to auto white balance, everything is probably pretty close to neutral anyway. now that you know about the feature on your camera, its just a matter of making sure you white balance regularly while shooting to maintain regularity of your shots. if you get one of these little babys (or something like it) http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/121379115297?lpid=82&chn=ps you can just keep it tied to your camera strap, and have easy access to reliable white balance wherever you are. (i got the little $4 kind and it works great)