Grading with film convert and white balancing footage

[Jeroen de Cloe]

Hi,

I'm struggling with film convert. As soon as I import Prores footage into my NLE and start applying a profile, I first select my camera and the way I recorded the footage (BMPCC / film). I shoot flat profile.

The next step is to choose the right white balancing. This is where I experience an issue, possibly because I'm missing the point :-)

Does Film Convert "know" how I shot the footage, from meta data or something? I guess not? Sometimes I need to change the color temperature to something else then how I set my camera color temperature during recording, forcing me to manually change the slider each captured scene.

What is the correct procedure?

Thanks!

[Sean Cunningham]

As an applied effect there's likely no way for it to access the clip's metadata.  Notice how for each clip the WB never changes from default when you add it.  You should only tweak this parameter if the footage looks off or if you wish to add cooling or warming to the clip (ie. shooting outside with tungsten setting or inside with daylight setting).

 

In practice, the WB parameter (in Film Convert) is an offset not an absolute setting.  For instance, with AVCHD footage, if you import a clip that was shot with the tungsten camera preset WB and you shot in tungsten light, giving you a balanced result, you would actually wreck your clip if you then dialed the Film Convert WB parameter over to 3200K from it's default position on Daylight.  

 

The FC plugin makes a load of assumptions, on the WB setting it assumes you shot with daylight WB in daylight (which is why tungsten light shot with the tungsten WB camera setting passes through just as neutral).

[Jeroen de Cloe]

Ahaaaah! Thanks a lot!

 

As an example I shot footage in 6500K today which I then had to set to around 4500 after applying a LUT using FilmConvert. This doesn't really make sense if you think too much about it, so I guess it's finding the right value and then apply the same settings to each clip (assuming they are shot in the same conditions).

 

Here's the result. Hope you like it - mostly improvisational stuff:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y9hwavzqvmf8l50/Wandelen%20-%20BMPCC%20-%20HD%201080p.mov

Hope you like it.

 

I was struggling with exposure without a histogram, but I found out that with enough light in the scene I rather should keep the highlights and expose for the shadows, unlike at home where I didn't have much light and 'lifting' exposure resulted in too much noise.