Looking for ideas for white balancing multi camera dance recitals.
The only ways I know are using presets but the cameras still do not match exactly.
Or have a guy stand on the stage with a large white board and everyone pull a manual WB with white lights on?
I imagine you guys may have better ideas

Is there any manual control? I had some luck manually adjusting the color temperature on a pro level Panasonic camera to match a consumer grade Sony (that didn't have as much adjustment). I had to do it by eye so it wasn't perfect, but it was close enough.

Two simple options:
1. put a big piece of white fabric on stage
2. before setting up bring the cameras up on stage now you only need a small white balance card.

Spent ages typing and it vanished!

Huge cards don’t work because theatres nowadays do not have white light to balance to. It’s a mix of random white LED and mixed RGB sources.

In precovid times a huge amount of our work is theatre and much dance. Presets are the best solution because some cameras really struggle. We’ve been using JVC for years and they work best I have found. Sony and Panasonic fall down badly in red/blue mixes. They all just look pink. Purple, magenta and pinks are the same. You see them change with your eyes but the camera just sees pink. I have an older Pentax DSLR I use for stills in theatre it’s great. It’s newer brother, another Pentax model is awful, the same pink problem. Sony video is worst, GoPro not too bad and Panasonic in the middle. I’m glad we sold our Sony eng type as it was really poor. JVCs from 100 series can be mixed, so we’re on 750s now and pick them up on ebay when we see them because the colour rendition is good and the presets match. We tend to use 3200 as a baseline preset.

If you have different brand camera this could be your problem not really white balance. The test is to see if their presets work outdoors, if they match there, but not on stage it’s just an LED response issue.

Two simple options:
1. put a big piece of white fabric on stage
2. before setting up bring the cameras up on stage now you only need a small white balance card.

This is absolutely the correct way of doing it, but before you white balance the cameras you need to make sure the stage manager (or whoever is in charge) brings up their typical "show" lighting.
The lighting might vary quite a bit from that mark during the show, but that should be okay. The point is not to cancel out all the color casts and other changes that are being done for creative reasons. White isn't always supposed to look white. If the colors go way off the rails during parts of the show, that is the fault of whoever is in charge of the show. A professional will take into consideration the limitations of the videos cameras -- if recording the program is a priority. If not, then you did the best you could by white balancing for the "show" lighting and then letting the chips fall where they may. Unless they hire you to do the lighting there is only so much you can do on your end to deal with ridiculously wide changes in color or intensitiy.

Doug - it simply doesn't work that way. I run a theatre - quite a big one (1400 seats) and while we do our own video, clients often bring in their own people, who either understand theatre or they don't.

You cannot ask me (usually in the role of technical manager) to bring up typical white stage lighting, because it no longer exists in any meaningful way. White is no longer a constant. If you stand centre stage with your white cloth you have angles to consider. The camera at the rear probably won't be able to fill the viewfinder, the camera at the side will be seeing bounce from lights in one place with one white colour, a camera in the pit will be seeing reflections from a different white and so on - but the critical error come from colours. We are not talking subtle shades, we are talking about one camera seeing magenta, and another pink, or even redder colours. Blue might range from a deep violet blue to a dirty nasty mess. when the video folk turn up during rehearsals, they can give the lighting people a monitor, so when they are programming, they can avoid colour combinations that look bad to the cameras. However, it's rare to have them at rehearsals, so when they turn up an hour before the show, it's too late to object - but they do, and we have a fallback. we always talk to the client or producer when we are doing rehearsals and ask what they wish to happen. IS the show for the audience, or is it for the video - they cannot have both.

I suppose all the cameras could be derigged and brought to the same place where the white screen or card can fill the viewfinder. I've never seen anyone do that, ever! If you have three cameras, for example, all the same make and model - then they would all be the same - that would work. If you have different makes, pointing at a white screen lit by R-G-B LED sources all on full is useless and pointless. They're never on like this during the show, so you have no idea what the result will be.

I see this over and over again. Every model of lights I have has a totally different white. even worse, some where I have added to the stock have different white to the ones exactly the same, but a year older. There is NO consistency in modern LED lighting. Blue especially change greatly from batch to batch. As everyone has a different version of blue, in terms of colour spike frequency - trying to make a usable white is frustrating. Your eye says one thing, your cameras say differently.

This is why I like my JVCs - three different models currently, but the presets produce the same shades.Not the same as my eye sees, but in the edit - they look identical. Adding different makes means a gorgeous purple costume looks pink on the other, but the green costumes look the same?

When the colours go off during the show, it's not the fault of somebody in charge, but the fault of the manufacturers for assuming everyone takes pictures in full spectrum lighting and ignoring LED. They've been around for so long now, it's unforgivable. What I do know is that auto white balance is totally unreliable with different makes. With a 3200 or 5600 light, it works fine. LED lighting is here to stay and is now everywhere. Nobody ever complains to Sony or Panasonic about this - they blame the lights. Watch the broadcasters - talk to a racks engineer. They're happy with a card and one version of white, but with their chains it's uncommon to mix camera models, let alone brands. They also light from monitors so the colour pallet is one that the cameras can deal with.

Asking a typical video firm who turn up at my venue for a monitor for the lighting guy is usually greeted with what?" and them not having one. We keep one it situ - and if the cameras are close, we'll hand them a cable. Some realise how useful it is and plug us in. Others invent the most stupid responses. We don't try to convince them. If they then come up mid dance number and tell us the red for a fire scene with reds and yellows is all sparkly, it's tough. If they also hate the deep blue, same thing. Oddly - the pink/purple/magenta thing is often totally missed when they are shooting. I bet they spot it in the edit. Here's a sell from the JVC's I use - you can see all the colours from blue to red are captured - on my Pentax DSLR they're just all shades of there same colour.

Have to reinforce what Paul says. My hobby is shooting amateur theatre and with the current lighting the set designers can have daylight on one side of the stage and anything they want everywhere else to create the lighting effect they want. A preset or white balance for the whole show will not work to cover all situations. I like to see a rehearsal if there is strange lighting or effects and create a preset for the show on my GH5's. Every show or even scene can have a different white balance because of the lights used so most of the time it is always necessary to do corrections in editing these days. Typical things for the GH5's are red coming out as orange for some costume material and source light. Shooting Vlog helps compared to other picture profiles on the GH5's. I am sure RAW would be an even better solution.

I suppose all the cameras could be derigged and brought to the same place where the white screen or card can fill the viewfinder. I've never seen anyone do that, ever!

This is exactly how it is supposed to be done and I've seen it done (and done it myself) hundreds of times. Perhaps many of the rest of the challenges and concerns you talk about would go away if you took this one simple step.
BTW, I suppose the audio guys don't want to send a test feed to help set correct levels either?

When the colours go off during the show, it's not the fault of somebody in charge, but the fault of the manufacturers for assuming everyone takes pictures in full spectrum lighting and ignoring LED.

I couldn't disagree with you more on this point. It absolutely is the fault of the operator. How silly to say otherwise.
"Hey, it's not my fault I cut off my fingers with the band saw, the damn manufacturer made the blade too sharp!"

This is exactly how it is supposed to be done and I've seen it done (and done it myself) hundreds of times. Perhaps many of the rest of the challenges and concerns you talk about would go away if you took this one simple step.

Not sure how long ago you shot in the theatre Doug but now it is possible to have one scene with daylight white balance and the next totally different, and the next scene different again. The same for a dance show. As Paul mentioned LED lighting can change the colour temperature with scene change so there is no one setting for a show anymore, even for a scene. I stopped doing that about 4 years ago. As I mentioned in my last post even different white balance across the stage. An example would be a window on the set with daylight lighting through it and at the other end a lamp on a desk where the actor stands by the window then walks and sits at the desk with close to standard indoor white balance. My comment of red costume is typical to see the costume change colour as the actor moves across the stage through different lights often by lighting design. This was not possible years ago but is now. Same for a dance show with bright daylights of a sunny dance and dark colour balanced lighting for a more sultry dance. As well as a mix of course where the main lighting is a wash but the central scene is deliberately different. In the past it was how bright or dark the lighting was but now it is bright, dark and colour temperature by scene.

This is a commonly accepted method. You can ask the lighting guy to bring up a regular scene or the curtain call lights. The first thing a custom white balance does is it ensures all your cameras are in sync color wise with each other. Even matched cameras can look different when using the same preset. The second thing you're trying to achieve is a ball park temperature. I've found old theater lighting warmer while newer LED can run much cooler. All you're looking to do is make the normal white light scene look neutral. I think you guys are confusing the OP. Use common sense, have a quick conversation with the lighting guy about what the show will be like and tell him you're trying to set white balance. I guess if you try hard enough you can dream up a scenario that would cause a problem.

It WAS the commonly accepted method, but now it fails miserably to match cameras that are different. The issue is between makes, and even then between models in the range. Even asking for white is often impossible to achieve. I have three different lighting controls that get used for small and big jobs. I use one in my studio, that due to covid has the store full of lighting flight cases - I've been experimenting with the theatrical lights for a bit of fun - so at the moment I have half a dozen video LED panels in the grid, but also ten or so fixed and moving head colour mixing lights. For convenience, the LED panels are on faders. The moving and mixing LEDs are not. They don't work like that. If you asked me for white light from them. I'd have to this sequence of events. This is the button presses and knob turns to get white on the white cloth hanging from the back.

Head 100 thru 104 a@ full. They light up. I then bash position - and turn them to point at the cloth. I then hit colour and turn up the white knob to check it's full - I get a yellowy white. I adjust the zoom, and the centre might get a little bluer and the edges due to the lenses might be a bit yellower, and on a couple there could even be a little edge fringing due to the distance, where I might get a tad yellow. Then I turn up the red, blue and green LEDs and it goes brighter and a little more blue white. I would then enter head 105 thru 108 at full. These won't light up at all, I need to go to colour and manually add the three colours and I get a totally different white. This also has coloured fringing on the edges where the beams don't climate properly, so a bit of fiddling with the zoom to get the most even field. The next lights don't have colour mixing at all, but colour temperature wheels - so head 109 thru 112 @ full snaps these up to white and once pointed I have a third version of white. with my matching identical cameras pointing at that white cloth, the one in the middle might be catching the bounce from one white and the one on the left from a different one. Press the autowhite and the result is awful. Three different whites in this example. This doesn't even touch the differences in makes.

The rules of just three or four years ago don't work now. The lights are so radically different and how they work means that in my example - before you do anything you need to press record and slap that to a fader for recall. The old idea that a full up in white is easy is only easy if the system was programmed to be able to do this. That photo I put up was at a very good theatre, and if you ask their lighting op to slap up white he would have to create it, one light at a time. The notion there is a bunch of faders you can shove that give you white light is outdated - the faders are at a premium, nobody wastes them on functions that don't need. In fact, to get white light might need ten minutes of plans, experiments and tweaking. Things are different now. If white light is planned, you can have it, but in theatres for anything other than straight plays white is unwanted.

That's how the professional, and now amateur world of lighting theatre is. A theatre nowadays simply does not have it at the flick of a switch. We need to understand this.

The OP is talking about dance recitals not profession music concerts. Even in those scenarios the cameras white balance has to be set to something. You can ask to bring up a curtain call light cue which generally uses all the lights yielding white.

I get the lighting tech to pull up brightest scene and darkest scene. That is for both theatre and dance. As Paul says this would not give them too much of an issue as they know what is the brightest and darkest. Yes curtain call is close to the brightest. I have my cameras set close to 4000 for the theatres I go to as I found this gives me the best shot at getting them looking good in editing. If I get back doing this after Covid !!

Pete - please, I've been lighting professional since 1976. Curtain call - the traditional full up finish simply is not white light any more. when we dealt with gels it was of course, because you wanted punch and heat and a big beam. Maybe the US is hanging far behind the UK, but as far as I'm aware it's not. LED means even communal theatre means saturated bright colours and white light is geriatric and simply not needed. There will rarely be a need for a full up state - it's like advising people to buy good quality tape for your cameras because it's always worth the extra, and having everyone stare at their memory cards and mutter tape?

If you are in venues with full up finishes, they clearly have nobody under 25 working their, are using old lighting kit and an old control. If you find that venue, super - ask them for these things. Just don't try them in more up to date venues of any kind, because it's historic practice.

I'll have to assume that theatre lighting of all scales in the US has not moved with the rest of the world. My experience of video in all scales and budgets is in a number of European countries and all I can say is that requests of this kind would cause some laughter in the crew room. The last time we did a rig with open white in it as a feature was probably 2012? Certainly standing on my stages since then, the finales have colour, colour, colour! One circuit of 32 theatres always paid for a photo call - every scene shot in white light, so the set folk had real colour images of their work. The costs were going through the roof - 32 venues paying for a four hour call to program lighting states totally missing from the 600-800 cues in the desk. Each year the pictures were getting worse and worse because the lighting rigs simply were not designed to be able to do white washes as the lighting designers never wanted them. NONE of the music acts I've done for years have asked for white light, apart from face lights - so we usually half half a dozen special in open white front of house for this purpose - but a wash in white? Nope. New builds are now torn with deciding if they even want to spend money on dimmers. Many here are not installing them at all, hiring in when required.

Asking for things you simply can't have is a bit pointless. Assuming there is a quick way to get white for a auto white balance is a bit silly when the white you might get gets mangled by all your cameras differently. It's harder to fix in post than selecting a preset.

Funny the States are lagging so far behind the rest of the lighting world. I've not bought gel or lamps for three years now. Long live LED. Ron's 4K setting make huge sense.

Yep, in my world of small music venues and shooting on a budget, I've found I can't rely on there being any consistent white reference. There's a lot of mixed LED and incandescent. My amateur level solution is to reduce the variety of makes down to two. My four consumer grade Sony cameras may not be great, but they are close enough that matching them in post isn't too horrible a task, as long as I use the same preset on all of them. My older GoPro has a preset that comes close enough that I can make it work. I gave up on trying to balance to a reference white because it seems to be virtually extinct in the performing arts.

Achieving good colour for stage work is much harder now than when I started more than 30 years ago, especially recording in 4K with multiple cameras.

Adjusting colour balance on the fly is impossible with multiple cameras so I just go for an appropriate preset on each camera and resort to colour correction in post, often scene by scene, camera by camera.

Very rarely am I completely happy with the final outcome, but that is the reality with modern stage lighting.

Yep - that's really the reality now. It is so odd that the camera manufacturers have really done little work on making cameras that are good for stage lighting. I've tried current ones and very old ones and Sony's seem to never really do it well, and when the BBC turn up with a Sony, you know it's going to look very odd on TV. When we first started with LED, we were still piping pictures to screens from the old SD Betacams we had back then and nothing seems to have changed since then.

Yes I think the potential answer for stage work is to shoot RAW to give more freedom in post even for an amateur like myself. Then at least scene by scene has more chance of getting a good outcome. Still of course better with one brand of camera.

I'm formulating a plan for my future stage work which should avoid the above problems - it goes something like this ...

I buy the first affordable 8K 50p/60p camera on the market (it will probably be Blackmagic).

I record stage shows wide with a single 8K camera, manually controlling colour balance and exposure on the fly. A couple of locked-down 4K cameras on full auto will record alternative angles for the occasional cutaway, if the results are usable.

For additional flexibility, I will record in 8K RAW (!?).

I cut all my closeup and medium shots from the 8K master so they would all be of consistent quality and (hopefully) properly colour balanced and exposed.

I tried this with my first 4K camera but the closeups were not sharp enough in HD.
8K would do the trick since my customers are not asking for 4K (most of them still want DVDs!).

What could possibly go wrong?







.

Just before covid, one of my regular clients asked for the very first time for delivery on USB! I'd offered bluray for years ...... and not ONE client wanted it, so 2020 and the first HD delivery! Here in the UK, loads of people have HD TVs, and because BBC is HD on channel 101, and TV's turn on on channel 1, loads of people are watching in SD. Even worse, our National TV often opts out to the regions for news and this is still SD - nobody notices. How weird! 4K and 8K are on the horizon but you have to ask, who actually wants it?

Simliar thoughts Tony . I currently use a GH5 and a GH5S fixed on tripods that I manage ( slightly different framing with GH5 wider than GH5S ) and my wife uses the AX100 in HD for closeups. GH5's shoot UHD 60P and AX100 HD 60P as I like smooth motion. As you say real closeups are not possible by cropping with good quality. However most of the edit comes from one of the GH5's with crop/zoom/pan. Nice and smooth much better than I could do manually and timed exactly. Like you my thoughts are an 8K RAW camera would be great for the full stage and then the GH5's could go closer in for stage right and stage left.

I’m interested to see if you US folk have issues with child protection rules? Twice now I’ve been asked to remove a child’s face from the video when it’s been discovered they are subject to orders preventing “their likeness” being published. Luckily both times, the lack of definition in the long shots has made only blobbing the closer shots required? I’d not given much thought to the idea of increasing the wide shot resolution. Do you have this problem? What seems to happen is the parent/ guardian don’t tell the dance school, who don’t tell me. The schools tend to not do releases as we do for other types of video work, they just tell people being in it is acceptance. The costs, so far, of the Re-edit I’ve swallowed, but I’m thinking about a contract term to cover the costs for this as it does seem to be on the increase, or at least, was a year ago.

Lighting wise, on the colour front, I have had one client query the costume colour. Oddly, dance seems immune from face tone colour.

It was always historically difficult to use saturated colour, especially green with darker skin tones. Established lighting design practice to avoid greens because of the strange effect it has on skin appearance , seems to be easing. We now have amazingly saturated colours from LED and that strange ghostly mottling on darker skin tones seem less common. I’ve not read anything about this phenomena being less common but maybe the spikey colour spectrum does have an advantage here when the cameras and lights combine positively?

The dance school I am aware of require parents to sign release for school publicity photos and the recital. As to costumes this is important for parents as the costumes are expensive and they want to see the colour as they see it. I also spend time making sure these costume colours look like I see them. Not always possible if lighting guy is not aware of the importance of not using alternate colour for scene. Dance school are picky about that lighting. Very important to kids and parents. I went through that with both my daughters who danced. Long time ago they have their own teenagers now ! It doesn't seem too important if the whole scene is RED with black costumes and all the detail is gone from faces because the camera has no resolution left, just red blobs with black spots ! Teens seem to like that for some reason ?

For children never had a problem with dance recitals but educational programs a few parents would not sign a waiver so I had to make sure they weren't included. This used to be less of an issue when distribution was only dvds. Now when I do digital download/streaming I always make it private access only through links sent to parents. Some schools would only allow physical media to be sold, no online distribution. You could also send the dance studio your distribution practices to insure their child's privacy to allay their fears.

As for LED lights especially heavily saturated colors things often look weird and there isn't a lot you can do about it.

I suspect many LDs would consider the amazing colour palette now a real boon. We have Lion King = so that's amazing sunsets with reds and yellows, and maybe pinks and oranges, then of course we have selections from Wicked - so that's mega green. We can have lava and volcanos, we can have good vs evil, we can have storms - moonlight on the moors, emerald city, and amazing Samoiloff effects - which dancers love. Costumes that can go from monochromatic to snowy scenes. We can have rainbows, and all manner of mixing effects. Keep it coming. I've done two now with LED screens as background - which is stunning.I'll dig one out if I can find a suitable one.

Just as an aside:

https://www.provideocoalition.com/understanding-lights-color-spectrum-accuracy/

Regarding theatrical LED effects colours, it may just come down to what looks, good on the monitor. Which could prove difficult if you've never seen the show before. It used to be the case that a 3200k preset did the job. RAW sounds like the safest method, assuming it's an option.

Resolution can change with colour there's a reason why why the use blue when shooting on film and green when shooting on video for traveling mattes or chromakey..

Here in the UK, loads of people have HD TVs, and because BBC is HD on channel 101, and TV's turn on on channel 1, loads of people are watching in SD. Even worse, our National TV often opts out to the regions for news and this is still SD - nobody notices. How weird! 4K and 8K are on the horizon but you have to ask, who actually wants it?

National TV is dying in the UK. Every year, audience numbers dwindle. Many of us watch content via Netflix, Amazon and the like. Regional news not being HD is an embarrassment. When I do watch BBC1 it is via iplayer and still get the musical montage when the news switches to regional. What a joke.

The BBC have introduced 4K and HDR for some programmes via iplayer and they look fantastic. Even just for HDR alone. At some point SD needs to die. When you have >40inch 4K TVS in nearly every home, watching at a resolution geared more for 14" 4.3 TVs is just wrong.

I don't do stage shows that often, but shooting RAW does help a lot with changing lighting. I've got 2 cameras that shoot RAW now, one is 6K, the other 4K. I plan to add a third at some point. Even hybrid cameras now offer a RAW external output. These days I spend less time worrying about white balance and it does make shooting a little less stressful.

National TV is dying in the UK. Every year, audience numbers dwindle. Many of us watch content via Netflix, Amazon and the like. Regional news not being HD is an embarrassment. When I do watch BBC1 it is via iplayer and still get the musical montage when the news switches to regional. What a joke.

The BBC have introduced 4K and HDR for some programmes via iplayer and they look fantastic. Even just for HDR alone. At some point SD needs to die. When you have >40inch 4K TVS in nearly every home, watching at a resolution geared more for 14" 4.3 TVs is just wrong.

I've always been pro-BBC, and considered the li once fee trivial compared to what I pay the streaming services, but no more. My BBC viewing is dwindling making value for money poor. Their current stance on commissioning PC programmes is shocking - if it ticks the boxes it gets made, even if the programme is simply awful. Realism isn't even aimed for. For instance, if you are shooting a drama, with drama budgets, it's unforgivable to put two actors in a car with green screen rear view and have a crew member or two jump up and down on the springs, or use green screen in such a newbie-youtube way. The way they assume being a graduate means straight into top jobs and your education experience = life experience sucks. Quality, that has taken time to develop gets thrown away. They don't need real cameras, grip kit and expensive camera ops and directors, the runner with the iPhone gets the job, and it's so obvious. The fact they can still get more viewers for a Dad's Army episode from the 70s, than a brand new programme just gets ignored. How many of today's programmes would even be able to be shown in 50 years time? None, probably. Even TV centre - the centre of BBC TV's history now is home to ITV productionion. Madness!

Thank you everyone for all the great comments.

Back in 2009/2010 we actually did detach our cameras and pull a manual WB on stage with white light. But lights were different then and we only had 3 cameras.

The recitals I'm shooting now are still low budget and the results each year are good considering everything but I have to do matching in post which is what I am trying to get away from. I probably critique the colors more than any of them but it bothers me when the cameras don't match. 3 of the camera are identical Panasonic AG HMC150 models bought intentionally so they would match and the blasted things still do not match on presets indoors. They do match pretty good if we can pull a manual WB though but the indoor 3200K preset just doesn't match and it has irritated me for years. Problem is I don't know how to pull a manual WB nowadays in dance/theatre.
I also mix some other cameras too but I try to use my various Panasonics instead of my Sonys together

As far as distribution, we are still doing DVDs mostly as of last year. I have offered Blu-rays but DVDs outsell them and USB. Due to the CV situation all my income dropped so for one client I persuaded them to go to internet download delivery because the budget was so low I couldn't justify the Disk authoring and production.

It's been annoying me for years. A friend of a friend is a racks guy for broadcast and his job is harder now as the LDs push the envelope - and of course he also has to contend with the video screens which are very hard to make match with 1. the studio lights, and 2. the cameras.

Interesting your identical cameras perform differently. The manufacturers really should sort this out as so many people are shooting non-daylight and non-tungsten nowadays.

I don't have just one single way that I approach white balancing for stage shows. When possible, I try to figure out who is in charge of lighting for the show and have a discussion with them about how they are handling the lighting, and explain what I am trying to accomplish with determining a color temperature for "white" light.

Depending on the results of this conversation, there any number of possible outcomes-

1) I'll be able to determine the precise white light color temperature of their lights and manually dial in a specific white balance level to each camera.

2) I'll end up manually white balancing the main center camera, then manually dial that level into the other cameras to match.

3) I'll learn that different parts of the show will have different whites, and will thus take notes and create presets to cover these different parts of the show.

Sometimes, such a conversation isn't possible. In that case, I will try to guess. If it looks like they are using tungsten lighting, I will preset the camera white balances to 3200K. Otherwise, if it looks like the primary lighting is LED, I will use 5600K.

What I don't do is white balance each camera individually. Even a slight difference in angle between the camera and white card can result in a different color of light being reflected. So, when I do have to manually white balance, I only grab that white from a single camera, and then manually set that value in the other cameras.

I’m interested to see if you US folk have issues with child protection rules? Twice now I’ve been asked to remove a child’s face from the video when it’s been discovered they are subject to orders preventing “their likeness” being published. Luckily both times, the lack of definition in the long shots has made only blobbing the closer shots required? I’d not given much thought to the idea of increasing the wide shot resolution. Do you have this problem?

I have never once had this be an issue. For one thing, in the US, there really aren't any special child protection rules regarding video or photography. Individual schools or institutions may adopt their own policies, but from a legal point of view, there isn't much.

We have a first amendment right to pretty much photograph or record anything on video... There are some exceptions to this, like you can't record an image of someone if they have a reasonable expectation of privacy (like if they are in the bathroom). However, it would be really difficult for them to argue that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when they are on a stage in front of a crowd of people.

If such a situation did ever come up for me, I would direct the parents to talk to whoever hired me to do the job to begin with. I would explain that I was hired to do a job, and if I am going to alter that job, that they need to take that up with my client. If the client then comes back to me and asks me to obscure a particular performer, I will happily oblige, but explain my post-production billing rates, and try to come up with a quote for how much it will cost to do that.

Well on my last couple recitals I had them put on white lights (they still have old high power non-LED lights) and I took all cameras down to the stage and pulled a manual white balance on a white board on stage. They all matched excellent with no color correcting needed in post. So from now on at the location I intened to follow that technique.

Well on my last couple recitals I had them put on white lights (they still have old high power non-LED lights) and I took all cameras down to the stage and pulled a manual white balance on a white board on stage. They all matched excellent with no color correcting needed in post. So from now on at the location I intened to follow that technique.
Good to hear you had success. That's the method I do and works well for me.

Doug - it simply doesn't work that way. I

David, are you sure it worked? That's exactly the method I suggested and then Paul said I was all wrong.

No - we're safe. He specifically said they don't have an LED kit. White theatre light with no LED is a mix of 3200 and 3000K if they have a mix of tungsten and tungsten halogen. Few venues will still have tungsten, they're still around (I have ten 1 and 2Ks from the 70s that still work - but it only falls down when you start mixing LED fixtures - phew!

I'm just rigging a venue at the moment - we have loads of distinct different whites. Three cameras installed for the summer already - all set to the 3200K preset. That will do. All these lights, set to white are visibly different on face tones and white bits of set and costume. It's mad!
Source 4 750W
PAR 64 CP62 1K
Arri 1K Fresnels
Strand 1.2K Optiques
Strand tungsten Fresnels 1K
CCT Silhouettes
RGBWUA LED washes
RGBW LED washes
RGB LED bars
RGB LED uprights

The LEDs just mess the auto white balance up.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson View Post
I’m interested to see if you US folk have issues with child protection rules? Twice now I’ve been asked to remove a child’s face from the video when it’s been discovered they are subject to orders preventing “their likeness” being published. Luckily both times, the lack of definition in the long shots has made only blobbing the closer shots required? I’d not given much thought to the idea of increasing the wide shot resolution. Do you have this problem?

Reply, Adam:
I have never once had this be an issue. For one thing, in the US, there really aren't any special child protection rules regarding video or photography. Individual schools or institutions may adopt their own policies, but from a legal point of view, there isn't much.

We have a first amendment right to pretty much photograph or record anything on video... There are some exceptions to this, like you can't record an image of someone if they have a reasonable expectation of privacy (like if they are in the bathroom). However, it would be really difficult for them to argue that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when they are on a stage in front of a crowd of people.

If such a situation did ever come up for me, I would direct the parents to talk to whoever hired me to do the job to begin with. I would explain that I was hired to do a job, and if I am going to alter that job, that they need to take that up with my client. If the client then comes back to me and asks me to obscure a particular performer, I will happily oblige, but explain my post-production billing rates, and try to come up with a quote for how much it will cost to do that.

While we in the US have the amendment right, it may happen that in spite of this, the lawyers may find some wiggle room (particularly if there is money to be had) to make this a grey area. Given the inability of law enforcement to reign in the pedofiles, blurring as a requirement, or even a desirability, might win out. In which case, a similar face tracking procedure that is used now for focus, might someday, be able to be used in the future with an edit feature in the NLE.

Enjoy the good ol' days while you can!

Thanks again everyone. I'm glad they don't have LED lights at that venue. Those identical Pansonic cameras don't match on presets so a manual white balance is the only way to get them to match without fixing in post. I still am not sure what to do at other venues though

all the places I go have LED lights and like colour. I just set all the cameras at 4000 and accept fixing in editing. For me been this way for many years.

David’s comment is what I wish they sort out. That’s why we started on the JVC 100 series, then 200 and 700. I bought a smaller one and was pleased it also matched. In honesty. My manual tweaking of images is pretty er, undeveloped and this is where I found the white issue a problem. I made sure I had a white from each camera but then realised all the whites were slightly different, and adjustments made on white skewed the colours so much between cameras. The method where you pick a colour temp on the cameras works with my JVCs but other brands don’t seem to match response between models which is odd and obviously hard got them to do.

As an aside, I have some imported flat panel LEDs in the studio and had a pile in the stockroom I was slowly selling. I fished one extra one out for a project last week. I hung it up and noticed the packing was slightly different, and the 16mm yoke socket had a different design. Obviously an older or newer version. Clearly the batch of 5500K LEDs was also different as it doesn’t match the others. Not like the 3200K version, but a sort of more clinical hospital like white. Yuk.

The other comment on vulnerable people here is protection orders. Crazily, you are not allowed to know a child has one. The court might dictate an abusive parent must have no link with a child, but that child’s ‘likeness’ cannot be published. They cannot be discriminated against so if they want to be in the school show, then nobody can take video, and of course people do. However, the legal publisher, and even that is difficult to define, is in in contempt of court if they put the video in youtube! So, you don’t know thy have protection, but YouTube could see you in court. Daft. I’ve just renewed my DBS (disclosure and barring service) licence. This gives other people, as in schools, duration and other people running services for vulnerable people access to my records. Police, teaching, background etc. If I get a job working in or around kids, I can be checked to see if I’m ‘safe’. I pay £13 a year to allow others to view my criminal history, as in there isnt any. It proves I’ve never been dodgy, never had issues so am probably ok to work with kids. Not foolproof, but a pretty good system. It keeps the odd higher risk person away, I guess.

all the places I go have LED lights and like colour. I just set all the cameras at 4000 and accept fixing in editing. For me been this way for many years.

I do a similar thing for venues with mixed 3200-5600k lighting. I preset halfway. I preset all cameras at 4400k which is slap bang in the middle and generally I have no client complaints. When you get those horrible LED over-saturated blues and magenta type colors in certain numbers I then selectively desat and tone those colors down in post until they are at the correct levels on the vectorscope. Rarely do I do a post white balance unless a certain numbers have a lot of white.

I had one lighting guy say to me "I'll put a low-level white 4400k wash for you through the entire lighting program routines which will help your video". Sure enough, it was one of the most consistent videos I shot that year because regardless of all the other programmed lighting colors, intensities, and mixes that he ran the 4400k white wash through everything kept the overall balance very consistent. Since then I've convinced a number of lighting guys to try that process and they have admitted afterward that the white wash does work pretty well both visually and for the video.

Chris Young

I've seen huge bust ups too! One dance set in Hades - all the dancers in red Devil like costumes - red feathers with orange trimming - orange and black makeup, silk flame effects, smoke, pyros, beams of light. A three performance show, with video coming on the last performance. They arrived thirty minutes before audience doors were opened and while one guy did the setup, the other summoned the lighting operator from his meal break demanding a run through of the lighting states and on reaching Hades, said "no no, this is no good, we need to change it". The lighting guy rang the Lighting Designer, who had been paid to design the show. He was not aware of the video and told the lighting operator that as per his contract with the client, all changes needed to be approved and they weren't - as his name is on the posters and the programmes and he would not allow changes that he could not see. Lots of angry voices, talking into phones and bad feeling. My role was Production Manager and I had the job of explaining the lighting was fixed, there was nothing that could be done, and they simply had to make the best of it. We were very sorry the client had not asked them to be there for the plotting session, and they actually said they were invited but it was not within their budget. I left them to it. The client was actually quite happy with what they did actually. If a production, even an amateur one, decides to use professional designers, and pay their fee - then their contracts always include no changes with out permission clauses - they're standard where credits are everything. You're only as good as your last job. On numerous occasions I have sat down next to the LD during plotting of a scene, and reminded them that there will be a video made for production company archives, and this one might look bad on video. In all bar one cases, they pondered their future contracts and lightened things up a bit, and were grateful for the 'heads up'. If they get judged by the video, they want it good for the video, even if it's less good for the audience. That's the killer - audience on screen or audience in the seats? They both can't have the best. In the early 70s, lighting design was all wash, then it rapidly changed to area lighting, often very small area lighting - with lots of contrast, and now we're moving back to washes, but deep colours.

It's so annoying the manufacturers have just ignored all this over the years. Show videos are not a new thing after all.

I do a similar thing for venues with mixed 3200-5600k lighting. I preset halfway. I preset all cameras at 4400k which is slap bang in the middle and generally I have no client complaints.........

I had one lighting guy say to me "I'll put a low-level white 4400k wash for you through the entire lighting program routines which will help your video". Sure enough, it was one of the most consistent videos I shot that year because regardless of all the other programmed lighting colors, intensities, and mixes that he ran the 4400k white wash through everything kept the overall balance very consistent. Since then I've convinced a number of lighting guys to try that process and they have admitted afterward that the white wash does work pretty well both visually and for the video.

Chris Young

This sounds like a good solution. You guys still doing this?

Wow Paul, what a story! Glad when they realized the video would "document" them they decided to help make it better.

Yes, still doing it. Though every now and again I still get a venue where they will not throw in a white wash, in which case I'm stuck with those horrible over saturated blues, purples, reds etc. If you have cameras with full SMPTE matrix adjustments then you can dial down the over-saturated colors in the Sub-Matrix, that can be a big help. If you don't have that luxury, what I do is go for a preset 4400K balance on each camera and then correct as best I can in post. As per a recent shoot. Sample pix below. If the cameras are the same, once I've got a happy balance, I can then apply that CC to the other cameras. The technique I use to correct is shown in the following YT clip.

Chris Young

Fluorescent lighting fixes with davinci resolve - YouTube

That's a very good 'repair' video - and it did a rather nice job in recreating detail that was just missing.

It's still strange to be having to do this when clearly the post industry have some great tools, but surely it's unreasonable to buy cameras that are so bad at capturing images in anything other than one chosen colour temp, and worst, being unable to cope with things like the light sources that areb monochromatic - the flu's, the discharges and of course most LEDs. Chris shows the amount of effort required, but we have had LED stage lighting for a long time now, and little attempt has been made for cameras to shoot it. We really do have this weird opinion that the work a lighting person puts in should be totally removed for video? One of my shows last year did over 90% capacity on a long run, and it's crazy to compromise that because Mr Sony or whoever cannot build a camera that can cope! The people who watched it live got the amazing look, and video is secondary - and in my case, it's not even publically available. Indeed, some lightuing designers do not get re-engaged if their lighting is not 'wow' enough. Their career made by how the audiences see it. A request for white light was never appreciated, and now contractually, their 'product' is protected. The audience legally will never see a white light version. Video folk have to accept this. Unless the producers write video into a contract, it cannot happen. Looking back at this year's theatre shows, we do not have ANY tungsten sources any longer. So with many fixtures offering red, green, blue, white, amber and UV, the white option probably will not even be programmed. The person sitting in front of the desk may not have even got the white options showing in the pallettes. Whenever you do have a white light for some purpose, it's often white and blue to make it very stark, by contrast to the usual pinks and blues.

A typical dance show day would start run throughs at maybe 8.30am, and the lighting designer would be creating the lighting for each number. Around lunchtime, they might start an out of sequence dress rehearsal in costumes and the lighting gets changed, often radically to cope with the mass of green costumes, which had been lit in blue or red, meaning the green was black. There would be no need to turn the white knob. It does nothing to enhance what we see - so they'll have a colour pallette with all sorts of variations of colours. Then, as happened two weeks ago, the video people rolled up half an hour before the house opened and by the time they were set up, the audience are coming in. Then they ask for a sound feed. Tjhe audio guy had anticpated it and handed over two cables and said he couldn't send them show level because people were in, so expect a lot more than what they were getting. I noted two different brands of camera, so they will struggle with matching the colour balance. They did NOT ask for lighting changes, probably because they knew they would NOT get them. We offered a cable for a video feed = composite or SDI. They only had HDMI on the nearest camera and that was further than our longest HDMI cable - so 'we tried' was the best we could do.

In the whole show, there was not one scene that had any for of white static light - so I suppose a good place to be would be in a preset in the 4-5K range, and have that on all cameras as a best guess.
I've attached a picture - a still from the video. There is not a single light that is white - none! All those colours are a good aproximation of what they looked like. Variations in pink, magenta and the blues are visible. My Pentax DSLR cannot differentiate these hardly at all.

Paul. Very hard working off a JPG as they fall apart as soon as you touch them. All the same, It's a quiet Saturday here and the weather has been c**p, so I thought I have a play with your pix.

As you can see from the scopes, parades, vectors etc that the lighting has thrown everything out of whack. Even out of camera, a 709 image can be corrected for white balance quite easily. Here I use two splitter combiner nodes with a standard node either end. This took about a minute. This is what I do for each song in these sorts of scenarios. I create a Gallery still, which when applied to a clip opens up the nodes for fine-tuning if necessary. Not saying the sample is perfect by any means, but it gives you an idea of what can be done.

Chris Young

No - this is exactly what I mean. The image you have created is not real. If the lighting designer lit it to look like the perfect video image, they'd be out of the job! This is exactly the problem. The audience did not see a stage with the colours in the processed video. The Director spent hours with the lighting designer getting the 'picture' just right. Oddly, we take pictures of the sets in white light - not the stage lit version, because that will be different every outing. The same set can look totally different when lit by a different LD.
I attached the same show, mostly same costumes, different venue to make the point. In this example, I have no idea if the colours the camera recorded are real, as I did not take the shot. The one I posted is as far as I can get, the same colour as it really was.

I'm very interested in what the software can do - but in this case, the result is not in any shape or form, what was created - it's a reimagining. It never looked like that in real life. White balance is pointless when white did not exist in the original. For this kind of show, maybe pink/magenta balancing would be better - but theatrically, white is a seldom used colour. In plays or meetings, or stage use that's being televised like maybe a politician delivering a speech - then it will be white. It's not supposed to be pretty, so then real white, and correction as in your example, is excellent and quite correct. It's just inappropriate for entertainment. It's been a long time now since white light sources were all over the stage, they've always been tints - blues, pinks, ambers. Oddly - I do get the occasional request for face light for some entertainment shows, and if we are short on gear, we will rig some Source 4's over the audience, in open white. Followspots are the other white source, and these do need balancing, but usually that shifts magenta to a purply-pink, and makes blue look a bit odd, but a pink or blue tinged face looks bad in this context. Luckily, for musicals, face lighting will usually be tints again, so in that case, pink is correct - and correcting it, wrong.

I did have to jump in once in a production meeting when a Lighting Designer was being judged based on a show video and I had to point out that in the theatre, it was extremely likely the colours were much more vibrant and punchy and not the kind in the still I attached here. We have learned to never judge the lighting by photos, unless the person who took them understood theatre. My role is not really to take video and photos, but it got added to my job when my results met Directors approval and a hired in video team didn't;t get it at all. When you take 1.5 million at the box office, you want pictures that look like what people see. We now have many photographers who take pictures all over the country who do understand the importance of pink!

Is the floor yellow or orange against the red? In white light it IS yellow, but not when the light landing on it is pinks and magentas.

I think we are at cross purposes here Paul. Maybe I didn't explain myself too well.

Whilst I agree with your comments as to what the lighting and artistic teams have developed, that's for the sitting audience's benefit. As it should be. I've TD'd enough live entertainment shows for TV, well over a hundred over the last twenty-five years and there is no way those out of gamut color levels and saturation would ever make it on a live production. They have to be constrained to broadcast SMPTE 709 color and luminance levels.

Forgetting TV delivery. If producing for post delivery this still applies, whether it be DVD, BD or USB sticks for PC playback, none of those environments can correctly handle out of gamut levels. Including 95% of software players as they are looking for 709 VIDEO levels. Some software players do have 8-bit 10-bit full swing 16-135/64-940 selection settings, but not many. If you encode those out of gamut high chroma levels, they will absolutely be distorted on playback. That's like recording audio well into the red and expecting it to sound good.

What I was attempting to demonstrate is first come back to a neutral, corrected balance. Now if you want to introduce a bias, color correct towards, red, blue, purple or whatever color you choose you do that within the constraints of the 709 video CIE Chromaticity triangle. One should aim to get close to filling that triangle if you want good-looking results. If any of your colors go outside they won't meet any of the above delivery methods I've outlined, and you end up with horrible looking distorted colors and levels on any viewing platform. As you can see from the accompanying pix, the image you supplied has lost 50% of its information, mostly, and what's left is crushed into the red side. There is virtually no Cyan or Green channel there. It's been swamped by the overload in the Red channel. It's there, it just needs to be recovered. In recovering it within the 709 specs the colors whilst different to the image you supplied look reasonably close but more importantly are 100% legal for delivery via TV. DVD, BD, Web or software player.

BTW, all these should be looked at on a true 709 monitor or a quality TV to get some kind of subjective idea. But there again I see so many people editing video on PC monitors in Adobe RGB or sRGB space, so I have no idea how they end up judging the veracity of their images.

Unfortunately, in the production world we have to stick to the defined standards if we want our material to look good on any delivery medium. Not trying to teach grandma to suck eggs but if anyone really wants to understand the process of editing for delivery, broadcast, web, PC or optical medium and feels they are a bit at sea with it, it may be of interest to have a look here for a primer.

Chris Young

https://www.thepostprocess.com/2019/09/24/how-to-deal-with-levels-full-vs-video/

I agree Paul. Theatre is illusion. Follow spots of course tend to change the image but are usually used sparingly these days and the contrast between just them on a dark stage and then full lighting is part of the illusion. Used within a scene will highlight the lighting difference and of course is deliberate. My wife and I try to remember particular colours when I edit. I have the difference between the AX100 she uses and the GH5S and GH6 both V log set at between 3700 and 4000 depending on venue, to give some guidance if I need to change anything. I too use Resolve these days so easy to make minor changes but I find most of the time with GH6 Vlog Colour Managed to rec709 it is pretty close at the white balance settings I have been using. There may be a white wash for actor curtain at end of show in some cases.