C100 White balance

[Jeff Cook]

Hello everyone, I just bought my first C100 and I should be recieving it today. I have read several post which talks about the blue lcd screen. I have purchased a c cup for my viewfinder and wanted to know if the blue tint shows up in the viewfinder as well? I tend to always manually white balance my cameras but wanted to know what method is best for the C100. Do you guys manually balance the cameras or use preset, or use the kelvin? I shouldn't say I always manually white balance because I do like to use kelvin at times. So what do you guys do for trusted white balance? I really do not want to bring an external monitor if I do not have to. That is why I ask if the evf is better to look at for white balance. Thanks for your input.

[Jim Andrada]

Color balancing is not so easy anymore - almost everywhere I go I find some mix of tungsten, LED, and CFL these days. To say nothing of sunlight streaming in one window and skylight streaming in another. I guess that's the real world for you.

I either WB with a white card placed more or less where the most important elements of the shot are, or just use Kelvin settings that, on average, have worked well in the same venue before based on experimentation.

And shoot in Cinema mode and sweeten to taste in Resolve using a calibrated monitor.

The one thing I DON"T do is try to color balance based on what I see in any viewfinder, EVF. etc. I just don't trust them.

[Dan Brockett]

While I agree with what Jim says, I have the Ninja Blade. If you buy a Blade, which I highly recommend as Atomos has just dropped the price in half, they sell an optional $150.00 Spyder color calibration unit. I can say with confidence that the Blade monitor, when calibrated with the Spyder, is dead on with what you are actually recording, when you compare the footage to a calibrated editing monitor, it really is a decent little screen. The C100's own monitor, on the other hand, is way off on color calibration and cannot really be matched to reality. But that's the way most camera monitors are.

That said, I usually manually white balance and I usually shoot black, white and gray scale cards. I have no problems in achieving accurate skin tones and proper colors under all types of weird lighting, but I don't shoot many events and I am usually the DP creating the lighting. I did shoot an event at a school a few weeks ago for a friend that was overheard fluorescent cans and a diffuse skylights. I manually white balanced to 3450k and the end results looked okay.

[Jim Andrada]

Interesting - I usually find 3700 works in the wildly mixed mess that I deal with regularly. What drives me absolutely NUTS is that a few of the orchestra members have LED stand lights which reflect relatively bluish light onto their faces - everybody except a violinist or two looks great and there are one or two absolutely magenta/blue faces mixed in.

And the sunlight in June streams through the stained glass windows at just the right (actually WRONG) angle and makes the back of the conductor's black suit look a sickly purple. Oh well I guess I could mask in Resolve and cc each face and track the conductor's butt, but it's a lot of work as the lighting shifts during the late afternoon performances.

I sometimes think of blocking the offending windows somehow but they're 15 feet above the floor. I could use tall stands but the aisles are against the wall so people would be tripping over them. There are days I long for the return of Black and White video!!!!!

And by the way the keyword is CALIBRATED - 100% agree (although calibrated monitors should be used in a calibrated/controlled environment for best results)