High School Football Games

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

If you’re goiung to “Double-post”, I guess I can “Double-reply”.

[EduTVTech] “Is there anyway I set the white balance without having to adjust it every 15 minutes?”

Nope.
In “real” football coverage, there are live engineers operating with full remote-control over all the aspects of the cameras.
They “shade” the cameras iris and black-levels constantly, and can manually compensate of color-balance.

In more “basic” productions without these benefits, you can:

A. leave cameras in “auto-WB” (not so good)
B. ignore WB (worse)
C. regularly, carefully re-WB all cameras during breaks in the game (best you can do).

[Nightdesigns]

Have each camera op keep a white card near by. When you go to a break, have each point at the card, do a quick auto-white for all and continue on.

[Glenn Chan]

If you have post-production time, you could just apply a color correction filter and globally adjust all cameras that way.

Most color correction filters in editing programs can be keyframed. Otherwise just dissolve between different settings.

2- If the camera operators keep a white card nearby, they should have the same color of light landing on the card. And this should be consistent with the light landing on the field.

Or maybe there’s something on the field or near the field that is white, and that the camera operators can fill the camera frame with.

[Charley King]

I agree, Dave.

Charlie

[Glenn Chan]

Sorry, to clarify:

What I was suggesting was this:
At the beginning of the game, all cameras manually white balance to the same thing. Then they don’t touch white balance at all for the rest of the game.

In post, you apply color correction globally (i.e. to a nested project/sequence). This should counteract for the drift in white balance as the football game’s lighting situation changes.

Wouldn’t that work?

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

[glenn chan] “In post, you apply color correction globally (i.e. to a nested project/sequence). This should counteract for the drift in white balance as the football game’s lighting situation changes.

Wouldn’t that work?”

I MIGHT, but it is so unlikely that ANY two (or more, same model or not) isolated cameras will visually “match” at any one time with just a simple white balance that the discussion gets convoluted.

There are going to be many differences in the image from each camera some more pronounced than others.

The iris level (which will CONSTANTLY be running in and out of “too high or too low” with most “small CDD” camcorders) can affect the appearance and the adjustments needed in the Color Correction (CC).
The Black Balance as well as the distinct areas for each camera of “slightly different” lighting will affect the initial WB and subsequent “darkening sky and mixing-in of artificial light” coloration.

So, a “blanket” CC just MIGHT be OK if you aren’t too picky, but I doubt it will work very well.

[Mike Cohen]

The default white balance setting (OFF) on the AB switch tends to be pretty good on the panasonic cameras – it uses the factory setting based upon what filter you are on. Or you could go out to the field the night before and set your A and B WB settings based upon say dusk and night with lights on. Since you start off in daylight, you can also use daylight filter A and B – the filter wheel and WB AB switch talk to each other. You may be able to figure out a set of settings which works – so at the appropriate times of day, you can tell your operators “Switch to filter 1, setting A.” Might take some trial and error, but since only one camera is hot at a time, switching the settings somewhat seamlessly may be possible.