I shoot football games at night and need to know how to set the white balance manually on the Sony HDR FX 1000. I aways use the intelligent white balance option on the menu but at night under the lights the color looks funny. I guess I'm supose to place a white index card in front of the lense and press something to set the white balance for the lighting I'm shooting in. Can anyone tell me how to do this on my camera. It does shoot great video in HDV. Thanks.

Larry Kropp
L&M Video
Green Bay, WI

Hey Larry,

Page 36-37 of your operating guide will explain it (with illustration) better than I can but in short, your camera must be in manual mode, press the white balance button to enable manual WB (verify that there is an A or B indicator in your viewfinder, make sure your white balance a/b preset switch is in the A or B position and not in the preset position, zoom in on your white card so it fills your screen and then press the little button just to the right of the A/B preset switch, wait for the A/B indicator to stop flashing in your viewfinder and voila, your done. Again, the manual will explain better than I did. Hope that helps.

Michael explained it perfectly. The manual is a little clunky in its explanation, as Sony manuals so often are. But that's it in a nutshell: Manual, WB Button, WB switch to A or B, Zoom in on White Card, Press and Hold "one push" (WB Adjust) button until the little symbol stops flashing. This setting is now stored so you can use it every time you're in the stadium under these lights just by switching to A or B (whichever it was on). And remember you must be in Manual.

Thank you Adam and Michael so much for helping me set the manual white balance on the HDR FX 1000 camera. I would have responded sooner but I had unexpected back surgery. No fun. :(

Adam is right the manual is "clunky". This camera shots excellent HDV video and having the white balance manually set helps it even more.

One final question just for my own education. When I'm in the manual shooting mode and I have the white balance set in the menu set to AWB (Automatic White Balance) "Intelligent" and there is no preset A or B button in use or showing in the view finder, does that simply mean the white balance is now being automatically set by the camera's white balance intelligent mode? This seems to do a pretty good job also. Also I have three sensitivlty options. Low, Middle and High. I use middle just because I don't know which one to use. Do you have any idea on the best option? Thanks.

Larry

The answer to your first question is yes, it's in Auto. From my reading of the manual it seems that Intelligent mode chooses between High, Middle and Low, depending on the light source. It appears the three settings are for how aggressively the AWB will correct, but from their description it also looks like LOW might push the shift in the other direction, although I'm not sure that's what it really means or why you'd want to do that even if it did.

I think your best best is to experiment a bit and after all is said and done, balance manually or leave it in Intelligent.