Too Blue for Me

[jeffreyT]

Hi Everyone. I am new to this sight. My wife and I have a part time wedding video business, so I am reading about your posts. I have one problem that I don’t know what to do. We shoot with Canon GL2 cameras. Doing an indoor wedding, we have a hard time keeping the brides dress white. It takes on a blue hue. We can use the standard indoor setting on the GL2 and it will look ok, then the sun gets brighter outside and cast the blue everywhere. We manually set the white balance, but still have problems. I tried a filter that was for “UV”, but saw no difference. I will admit, I am ignorate on using filters. Sometimes I can correct in editing, but then that distorts all the other colors. Has anyone come across this and found/know a solution?

[Grinner Hester]

You always need to color correct in post. Since doing that anyway, ya may as well leave it in preset if running indoors and outdoors. This way your exposure will always be usable. Liek I said, you’ll be color correcting anyway… by that it’s not so much color correction as color creation. I tweek avery shot to make it as perfect as it can be, often only treating parts, not the shole shot.

[Anonymous]

I use 3 Sony VX2100’s.

There is one church that I’ve worked at in town on a regular basis that I have this same problem.

After multiple opportunities to film here and figure out a correction:

For my stationary (Unmanned) camera I leave it on Automatic (Depending on the time of year).
Then if the sun shines in, it will at least partially keep the color in check.

For my manned cameras, I alternate between the White Balance (That I set) for indoor and the Sun (auto) setting, depending on the lighting.

Correcting in Post:
I read a very useful article in Videomaker at the beginning of the summer about White balancing in post.
I use FCP but this can be adjusted for any of the Editing Suites.

Use the “Color Corrector 3-Way” in the Video Filter list.
Use the Visual Color Wheel tool. You’ll see 3 wheels; Black, Mids, and Whites.
Click on the eye dropper tool next to the Whites wheel.
Go to the Canvas and find a spot with White on the screen.
Click it, and the white will be corrected.

Now this is not completely error free. You may still have to do a little tweaking to get the color exactly where you want it but it certainly gives you a GREAT starting place. It also helps you match up the different camera. Since the cameras are all at different angles, they are all getting a slightly different Shot of the light.

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