white balance

[Tom van Dop]

hello...i'm new to the forum...

i was wondering...i just got my xm2 and i'm using it to film concerts...but do you set the white balance in a well lit room...or in the dark venue with the colored lights...thanks

[Mark Newhouse]

If you are going to white balance, you need to do it under the colored lights. Balancing in a well lit room and then taping in the dark with colored lights is going to throw everything off.

The whole idea behind white balancing is that under different lighting, white will look different. Our eyes are really good at adjusting - so much so that the vast majority of people don't even notice that their eyes are doing any adjusting. But the camera still has a ways to go before it can do as well as our eyes.

The problem with shooting concerts, however, is that often the lighting will change fairly radically from song to song, and even within a song. And if you don't have enough light in the venue, it can be difficult to get the camera to white balance at all.

I don't have enough experience with this, but I wonder if the best thing to do is to go with auto white balancing. Hopefully someone with more experience can speak to that aspect of things.

[Jason Casey]

I just did a live concert with the GL2 and had the same problem. I just used the preset white balance and everything looked fine in the end. I did have to knock down the color level though since those lights can really oversaturate a picture and cause band members faces to glow (especially if they are all sweaty)!

[Tom van Dop]

yeah...that's what i did...used the indoor preset wb....if anybody has experience with this kind of filming...i would love to hear it...

thanx

[Jason Casey]

I actually do a lot of this likd of filming. I work for a few local bands and I basically go to most of their shows and tape them and then I put together DVD's and Cd-ROM's as promotional material for them so they can send them to other clubs and record labels. I just got my GL2 so I am kind of new to it with that camera, but I have shot hundreds of shows with my old consumer cameras.

The main advice I can give you is, Don't leave your cameras unattended in a club, I had some drunk guy try to walk out with one of my cameras, luckily the bouncer caught him at the door!

Get a UV filter for your camera, bars and clubs are really smoky and that can build up on your lens pretty bad. It's easier to take off a little filter and clean it than to try and clean the lens on the camera. The filter also helps cut down on the really bright spotlights when they are on the band members faces.

Use the Zebra stripes when you are setting up, I used to get "glowing faces" all the time using my consumer cameras, I am so glad the GL2 has this feature. Sweaty face + Bright Spotlight = glowing face unless you set up your camera right.

And finally get a diffrent mic than the one on the camera. I was in an emergency for the last concert and I had to pick up a DM-50 for the GL2 and it worked really well, not distorted at all. The only thing I notices was that the sound was kind of "tinny" not a lot of bass, but that is easily fixed in post.