Fixing Constantly Changing White Balance

[Chris Wright]

many layers are hidden with the auto hide button enabled
the 8mm ship.mov has the rebell cc effect that is tied to the expressions on the layer “Master sliders’in the ‘Final output comp’

The exposure compensator works in tandem with the gamma clamp slider to get approx 25 (tilda~ means approx) every 30 seconds. This is only need for flicker removal and you can turn it off by the text layer saying zero or simply disabling the shadow/highlight effect in the 8mm avi layer in the final output comp.

The value of the sliders don’t really matter, just the text layer that computes if the shadow effect is pumping black back into the image. This is because you can have multiple variations of exposure vs. gamma(those two sliders)

Again, if you try to make offset white balance changes, and the image doesn’t change, the expression may be disabled. There is nothing you can’t edit in my template, so hopefully you’ll figure it out by tinkering. You may even come up with a better template.

[Jaeson Jrakman]

Thanks for your patience here.

Okay, I see the Rebel CC now.

I turned off the Shadow/highlight effect as you mentioned, and the footage does look better, but the white balance is still all over the place.

I change the text in the hidden text from 50 to 25, but when I click out of the text box it turns back to 50. Not sure what I need to do with this.

I suspect that this might be over my head in terms of its complexity, so I probably won’t be able to figure it out. But I do appreciate the questions you’ve answered. Thanks!

[Chris Wright]

if you don’t need flicker removal, you can ignore the exposure, gamma clamp, and text layer.

If the white balance is not affecting the image or not well enough, you may have a hue issue which is currently not directly supported.
You’d have to precomp the ‘exposure repair’ comp to get the hues to align to the 2D correction of magenta versus cyan in a vectorscope.

Additionally, your white balance problems maybe so destroyed that there is no data left to recover(I’m only guessing here).

You can use premiere or resolve and use the HSL vectorscope to get the image centered so perceptually it looks balanced. Then you’d cut various offending spots of your clip into smaller sections, fix them, then transition from clip to clip with a dissolve. This may be more accurate and faster if your clips aren’t fluctuating every single frame.

If you have no color data in one of the channels, you can also try using the channel mixer to borrow color data from another channel.

Again, it’s hard to recommend the correct direction you should take without seeing the footage. Also, it is hard to explain how to do advanced color correction in a simple post.

[Chris Wright]

here’s what the hue upgrade would look like.
I added a hue precomp with hue adjustment layer mode transfer hue only. You can now get any hue you want before calculations begin.
(i’d locked the preview to the final output to see what it would be while changing the hue)

I also added a pure b/w catch error if the screen gets too de-saturated.(old bug)

everything’s 720×480. you can modify the comp size and layers with free resize scripts from aescripts compsetter
ae cc 2017
I tested this once again with a massive green gamma to see if it still worked. still came out perfect. not bad for free, lol.

ae 2017 auto white balance plus hue
13509_ae2017autowhitebalanceplushue.zip

[Jaeson Jrakman]

Thank you very much for this, but I’m working with CS6, so I’m afraid it won’t open for me.

[Chris Wright]

no biggie, the precomp is easy to make, right click precompose the exposure repair one. make sure you click ‘leave attributes’ so you don’t move the ‘set grey’ effect from exposure repair comp.

the new hue precomp uses an adjustment layer set to hue for effect-hue. you can also add curves set to color, and curves set to luma for flat images.

the shadow/highlight code upgraded to include b/w you’d paste into Shadow Amount under effect ‘Shadow/Highlight’ under layer ‘8mm ships.mov 2’ in comp ‘Final output’.

r = comp(“exposure repair”).layer(“background”).effect(“Step 3: Set Gray”)(“Color”)[0]*2;
g = comp(“exposure repair”).layer(“background”).effect(“Step 3: Set Gray”)(“Color”)[1]*2;
b = comp(“exposure repair”).layer(“background”).effect(“Step 3: Set Gray”)(“Color”)[2]*2;

mr=Math.log(r);
mg=Math.log(g);
mb=Math.log(b);

a=mr+mg+mb;
if(a<0.01)
{a=0.01}
dd=(0.8-(a/3))+(comp(“FINAL_OUTPUT”).layer(“MASTER CONTROL SLIDERS”).effect(“Exposure Compensator 0-default”)(“Slider”)/100);

if(dd>(comp(“FINAL_OUTPUT”).layer(“MASTER CONTROL SLIDERS”).effect(“[] Gamma Clamp at gamma 20-default”)(“Slider”))/20)
{
roll=(comp(“FINAL_OUTPUT”).layer(“MASTER CONTROL SLIDERS”).effect(“[] Gamma Clamp at gamma 20-default”)(“Slider”)/20);
linear(roll,0,dd,100,0);
}
else
0;

[Jaeson Jrakman]

Thanks again Chris. I’m working with CS6, so some of this may be outside the scope of what my version can do.

The video essentially fluctuates from frame to frame. There is a white background which fluctuates between white, to a cream color to a whiteish purplish color over time. The color stabilizer effect won’t work for me because there are no still shots where a white or black space remains in a constant place. Maybe that’s the hue issue you speak of?

I’m not at all familiar with working with vectorscopes.

I hear you with regards to explaining advanced color correction. I was under the impression that I’d be able to plug my footage in this and get a satisfactory fix with a button, but that seems unlikely. I don’t think my skill level is up to tackle what you’re describing here.

If you want to take a look at the footage to see what is really going on, here is a download link.

https://www.filehosting.org/file/details/810125/Sequence%2001-2.mov

It’s possible that I’m describing the problem incorrectly.

[Chris Wright]

i added a curves to the hue precomp mode ‘color’. then I lowered red white point and green white point(little less than red). i set final output comp -master white balance slider to 35.

everything matches perfectly except the one shot where the cell phone takes up the whole screen. you’d have to mask it in the precomp.
it was never flickering like crazy in the first place, so my template perhaps maybe overkill and if you’d like to learn how to do advanced color grading, I made a 60 sec video in premiere that goes over black point, white point, gamma, 3-D white balance.

I think the main problem you had was a low CRI light source on top of auto white balance in camera. So, not only were the midtones not balanced, and white points, but you have low color information from very little hue variations in the low CRI bulb reflecting back into the camera. Here’s to fix manually if you’re interested.
https://f1.creativecow.net/13510/3d-white-pointing-in-premiere?uploaded=file

The basic idea is to get rid of rapid variations of color/exposure in AE, then perfect in premiere with vectorscopes. Eyeballing it is never a good idea.

[Jaeson Jrakman]

That’s a really nice video. Thank you very much. I’d be interested in watching all of your videos if you have any more.

I’m going to give your description a shot tomorrow evening, with the first template you had which I think was CS3. That works with my CS6.

I’ll let you know my results tomorrow night. Thanks again!

[Jaeson Jrakman]

When you say “i added a curves to the hue precomp mode ‘color’.”

I’m not seeing a hue pre-comp. Are you referring to the new template you just posted here? If so, I’m u nable to use it because I am running CS6, and it appears that file is CC 2017.

I can open the original file though, which was created in CS3.