White Balance & Other Mayhem

This past weekend I was shooting as usual when unexpectedly for several minutes, it was “open season”, anything goes color wise so the footage from that segment is filled with totally inappropriate tints, hues and false coloration like all of the sudden the white balance went haywire amongst other factors.

Then, thrown in for good measure the lighting keep shifting from light to dark to light & so forth.

Accordingly, my questions are these:

My goal is to somehow salvage these minutes if it isn’t too much work assuming it can be made to look right. The problem is all of my color correcting experience to date has been solely with digital photography. I have none at all with Premiere and CS3. Is there a solution that a newbie to color correction could pursue to some level of success at least as a viable starting point that anyone care to share and explain in some detail?

Does CS 3 have any autofixes or functions exclusively recommended for white balance issues?

For example digital photo editing programs have sliders named just that or maybe they’ll be split between temperature and another associated parameter.

Thanks as any information, suggestions or advice acquired will be used to learn and grow.

You can try the Auto Levels and Auto Color effects, but they take a long time to render once you turn on the advanced features.

And leave out the Auto part, since that breaks more than it heals.

For white balance correction use the Fast Color Corrector.