Shasta_man
Contributor
How are people doing white balancing on video these days?
I'm trying to understand what the choices are and how well they work. It's time to invest in something but I'm an infrequent diver so cost is practically important.
With my current older Sony HD camera in the sun down to 30 feet using a red filter with camera set to AWB, I can get beautiful video. The housing has mechanical controls to access the touchscreen for MWB, but it's practically quite difficult to do at depth. Below 30 feet, camera set to AWB, I just got very green video usually with very little color to recover in white balancing as it's all in the green channel and little in the others. Maybe a different WB setting would have improved things. While great video of the critters, green video is nearly useless.
That experience told me that easy WB (a button) is a must, otherwise you get colorless video. However, very few prosumer housings offer such a button (Light and Motion is one of the few and seems narrowed to a small number of cameras). That makes me wonder whether people are doing in post, which in my experience is quite difficult to get good balanced color. Or I am not using the right software or I don't know how to do it well.
Or are people just using mechanical controls to access MWB?
Simplistically, I realize that colors are absorbed at deeper depths and would require lights but it's possible to get good color below 30 feet I currently can do.
I'm trying to understand what the choices are and how well they work. It's time to invest in something but I'm an infrequent diver so cost is practically important.
With my current older Sony HD camera in the sun down to 30 feet using a red filter with camera set to AWB, I can get beautiful video. The housing has mechanical controls to access the touchscreen for MWB, but it's practically quite difficult to do at depth. Below 30 feet, camera set to AWB, I just got very green video usually with very little color to recover in white balancing as it's all in the green channel and little in the others. Maybe a different WB setting would have improved things. While great video of the critters, green video is nearly useless.
That experience told me that easy WB (a button) is a must, otherwise you get colorless video. However, very few prosumer housings offer such a button (Light and Motion is one of the few and seems narrowed to a small number of cameras). That makes me wonder whether people are doing in post, which in my experience is quite difficult to get good balanced color. Or I am not using the right software or I don't know how to do it well.
Or are people just using mechanical controls to access MWB?
Simplistically, I realize that colors are absorbed at deeper depths and would require lights but it's possible to get good color below 30 feet I currently can do.