Shooting for the first time..

[Mark Suszko]

Question isn’t specific enough to allow for much help. Leave everything on automatic, and pray, I guess?

[Chris Tompkins]

Do you have time to practice and test?

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Chris Tompkins]

The right way to to manually white balance for each settings.

Now, your a noob. SO,

Use auto or the Outdoor preset for outdoors.
Indoor preset for indoors.
Manual set for under the flows.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Zeke Meginsky]

I really only have enough time to test a little and then check the tape a little, so not much time. I might be shooting in two conditions, outdoor in the sun, and possibly indoor on a stage with lighting, or a plain room with lighting.

I’m guessing I just set the white balance for outdoor or other presets..

There’s also a white balance setting for florescent lighting. Though I don’t know what is florescent and what is not..just the long tubes makes it florescent lighting?

There’s also a one-touch white balance where you focus it on a piece of white paper or something else white and it does it that way. So I don’t know whether to use the outdoor or indoor/florescent lighting presets or to do the white balance one-touch thing..

[Matt Love]

Filter 1 inside filter 3 or 4 outside. White balance on something white. Turn your zebras on and dont be afraid to use the auto iris. OR just shoot on auto

Matt

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, just leave it on auto, if you don’t know what you’re doing, and commit to really elarning it as soon as possible. There is no substitute for learning and knowing your tools.

Where autoamtic functions tend to fail is in situations with heavy back-lighting of what you’re trying to shoot, and situations where there are many things between you and the thing you’re shooting, that can fool the auto-focus.

At least try to get decent audio into the camera: viewers forgive bad video with clean audio, but never the reverse.

[Zeke Meginsky]

What should I do if there’s heavy backlighting, other than push the Backlight button?

[Zeke Meginsky]

Are you talking about the ND Filter? There’s only two options on my camera for that, 1 and 2.

[Mark Suszko]

Crop it out as much as you can with a zoom and framing.

[Mark Suszko]

He means most pro and semi-pro cams have additional filters that correct for daylight and indoor (tungsten) light. Your pre-sets are for 5600 kelvin outdoors and 3200 degrees kelvin indoors, roughly. If you get the white balance and filters wrong, your inside footage will look blue and your outside too orange. You may have a continuous adjusting white balance feature, which works pretty well but can be fooled in areas where more than one color temp of light is present.

At this point, it may help to post the exact make and model of the camera, so people can look things up for you and give precise tips.

Promise me you won’t put yourself in this position again.