Canon C300 Green Cast / Green Footage

[Oliver Darden]

I am currently working in a food studio that uses Canon C300 cameras. When filming things like eggs or butter we are seeing a very weird green cast / tinge on the footage.

Camera settings - 1920 x 1080 / 23.98P / 5500 K / ISO 320
Studio lights - 4 x Kino Flo 4' 4Bank / KF55 Fluorescent Lamps & 1 x Joker Bug 1600 K 5600

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here is a quick test I did using various custom picture settings:

C300 Green Cast on Footage on Vimeo

[Jon Roemer]

Oliver - I don't have an explanation but I will say in my experience with Wide DR on the C300: I love the color but it does seem more prone to image anomalies than c-log (my usual profile of choice.)

On a recent project I saw issues with Wide DR that I never had on the C300 before. They tended to be in areas of high contrast and more often than not appeared as a green edge line (e.g. edges of light fixtures, window mullions, etc.).

What worked in post for eliminating them or mitigating them enough to not be an issue was a FCPX skin retouching plug-in, Sheffield Softworks Cover Up, and designating the unwanted green as a "blemish".

[Oliver Darden]

Thanks for the reply Jon. We are using Premiere CC 2014. It's unfortunate that I'd have to pay $79 for a plug-in to fix a brand new camera. I reached out to Canon support and so far no help there.

Any one else experiencing this?

[Barry Goyette]

To me this looks like a Wide DR thing...I mean...it looks really natural with the Eos standard...and "dialed out' with the Eos Match (is that a custom look?) My experience with Wide DR was that the colors were often un-natural, which means I just don't use it...

I have found that in general...the C300 is especially sensitive to greens and yellow greens and that on location it's often tough dealing with reflected light coming from the trees. I've seen it amplify the yellow pigments out of a dead neutral paint and turn a wall in my studio to an olive color.. So maybe their is just enough green in the "white" of the egg to trigger that kind of response.

Art Adams has written an article stating that EOS standard matrix is the most accurate of all of the color matrixes on the camera...perhaps a custom look with Clog or Cine1 gamma and Eos matrix is your best bet.....Frankly...though...I'm almost always happy with Cine Locked mode...

[Jon Fairhurst]

Please bring your C300 to a Donald Trump event and use DR Wide as an extreme test case. (I noticed a green cast on his hair on a news report just last night.)

But seriously, I wonder if this points to a potential issue as we move to high dynamic range shooting and the BT.2020 color space. I also wonder if the fluorescent lights add to the challenge. They might have a slight green spike that is accentuated with the color of egg yokes and high dynamic range, wide color gamut shooting.

In that case, it could be related to metamerism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)

The real world isn't made up of R, G, and B. There are spikes at various wavelengths and our eyes mush all the green stuff together in one bin, the reds in another, and the blues in a third. If the spikes of the light, the spikes of the egg, the filters in the camera and the color matrices don't line up, the colors will appear to be incorrect.

I'm sure that Donald Trump's hair would help us find the answer...

[Oliver Darden]

Thanks for the help everyone, I appreciate it.

Barry, I download the Eos Match profile off a website and it's working well. The EOS std looks way over saturated. I have just been turning it to off, and that seems to be yielding better results so far.