White Balance chart

Hi,

I am a new users on this forum, and it looks intresting this is the first place where i find other people filming in HDV and talking about the housing etc.

Now my question is what kind of White Balance chart are you using?

LMI is not selling or delivering any kind whit there housing!

Greetings Bruno

www.vui.be

Hi Bruno, welcome to WP.

Amphibico sends a slightly off white/greenish WB chart with their housing. It works ok.... i prefer my slightly cream coloured piece of plastic.

You will find a lot of people here use different methods and of course all different ways with different conditions.

the sun, the sand, a white fin, a grey or white coloured glove... all are used in different situations by difft people.

Hope you enjoy WP and can get and give good info!

Bruno,

Here is my post on White Balance earlier this year...maybe some things in it that are helpful.

Shawn

...but the equation is not simple. If an object is further from you, there is more water between you and the subject...so less color. However, if you are shooting up on a bright day, the subject will have more light so more color (and shooting down less light and less color). As a general practice, it is so much work (and weight) to engineer solutions to move the card away from you for white balance. Experience is a more effective measure.

What I do is consider where my subject is or will be (how far, how much light, shooting up, level or down [try to avoid]). I then hold my slate and adjust the angle of the slate to capture more or less light (cooler or warmer). This will compensate for distance from the subject and whether they are well lit of not. If the slate isn't doing it and things are too red, I point my cam at the surface and balance of light at the surface. Interesting find: by zooming on the surface light (sun) you can cool the picture even more. This is very effective for very red coral environments and for shallow dives where mantas are flying over. Removes all that red burn out and pink water.

Again, having engineered some very complex contraptions for the slate, I can state unequivocally that throwing all that way and learning and experimenting with techniques has delivered far better results for me. A single method will only be good under certain circumstances. I use all the following for white balance depending on what I need to get it right: clouds, slate, water surface, zoom surface, boat bottom, my hand, sand, sponge coral, other diver, etc. Focusing on a single method will only make you good when that method is appropriate.

One of the things I haven't figured out yet is the white balance charts are tiny.....does one have to zoom in on the correct section of the white balance chart so that it fills your viewfinder frame all the way, or does it jsut have to be somewhat centered, but then, what % does it have to fill the viewfinder screen?

The issue was moot when I had light colored sand around, but....there were times when no sand was available....

Dave,

You do not have to cover the entire frame. 2/3rds usually does it for me. Hold it on center of the card.

shawn

Because the LCD's on cameras are so good these days, one can WB on anything to get the colour one is after. After awhile you just get to know when you have the correct colour or not.

Sand, rocks, coral, sun, fins, what ever you can find but if you have lots of time or there is nothing around, then use a slate although at times the result may not be the colour one may be after.

For example, the water is abit green, you WB on the slate and the camera then sees the colour exact like it is with the water looking green. So you then WB again using one of the above methods to get the water looking more blue.

White balancing on a rock you say?

I like to white balance on a duck because ducks are made of wood which is why they float......just like witches, which we know are made of wood because they burn, but witches also float, so to determine of someone is a witch, they should weigh the same as a duck, so you should also be able to white balance on a witch.

(what an eccentric performance)

Ok, now that I have got that Wetpixel adapted Monty Python bit out of me, I am going back to P.G. for my 2nd run at video capturing. All the stuff I screwed up on on my 1st Video Trial By Ordeal, I plan on srewing up again, but LESS.

Since I have now actually figured out how to consistently charge my light pack, I should be able to do some more lit footage. I will do some night dives now too.....

I SURE need to try to hold still better...I really was concentrating on holding things still, but when you are trying not to pick a resting place with too much living stuff growing under your fins and knees, AND trying to keep still in the back and forth current, AND not being able to use your lungs as a BC..well, you get the shaky picture. Maybe that tip to set the image stablization to hard might help.....

For those commensal cleaner shrimp dancing about while rolling side to side seemingly as if on LSD, I need to learn to use manual focus as while on macro the camera never could make up its mind if I was trying to video the anemone tentacles, the shrimp or the sand. Trying to watch the footage going in and out of focus made me feel like I was the one on LSD.

when you headed back to PG Dave? i will be there late august for a few days...staying at El Galleon, teachin a class.

Dave you make me laugh

Push to focus works good for macro or even move the housing in and out till the macro subject is in focus. If you can push the dome guard into the sand/rock/bottom to keep steady works as well, but not the coral.

We are still waiting on seeing some of ya footage as well.

Well, seeing my footage would require that I actually know how to use Final Cut Express, that way I dont' permanently damage your eyes with footage that horrendously needs color correction.

I'd say about 15% of my footage the color is right, and of that, most needs SmoothCam in Apple's Shake......as if I needed ANOTHER program as complicated as Final Cut Express to learn.

I read these forum threads that there are characters who for $35 an hour will take my tape and return it as a HiDef or SD DVD with music in the back and fix it all, color correction, smoothcam, etc. I am thinking to myself, it will cost me 10 times that per hour just to learn to learn FCE and Shake, I ought to just hire someone!

I seem to be really good at plumbing to the point of being able to buy all the pimped out equipment, but all the computer mumbo-jumbo.....geez.....As an example, my Mac's hard drive which has about 70 gigs left is too small and probably not fast enough, so I need to buy a 2nd internal hard drive for my Mac. That way I do not have another box taking up even nmore space on my desk as well as another friggin cord and especialyl another damn electrical plugin! lol

That means before I even can learn FCE, I need to figure out which hard drive to get and order it. So a week later I have done enough reading and talking to Apple about how many pin connector I need and look slike it is going to be a 400 Gig SATA internal Seagate or Western Digital hard drive it is. And I've not even yet begun to edit!

Now once I actually get that, I will install it, then probably call my computer guy and say; "I don't have time to find my mac boot disk, let alone actualyl do it all, so I wil schedule a call for him to come out, which he will do in a couple of weeks. Then hope the new 7200 rpm 16mg buffer hard drive resolves the issue of the footage I did import into FCE where I get this narrow horizontal slowly decending shimmer in the footage that I do not get in iMovieHD. See why this stuff takes newbies so long?!

I wish there was just some character in the L.A. area who knows FCE and Shake, such as a user group, and I could go meet with them, pizza and beer is on me and lets sit down and have at it. Wait, that would require I get a new Apple laptop with a huge hard drive.....oh great, another expense and delay. lol

At times I seem to have the $, just at all times just not the brains.

Mike, I will be there the 5th through the 13th.

Dave you really do make me laugh..hang in there...it's all fun and I'm sure you will find someone over there to help you out.

Yes I ran out of space too on my PC..... $200 AUS for a 300GIG SATA drive and away I go...but wait, I ran out of SATA ports to plug it into...O well had to get a $100 AUS PCI SATA exspansion card and away I go...can now even add more $200 SATA drives.

I have 6 drives in the old girl now.

Wags,

Reminds me of my original graphic artist using Photoshop:

She always had an outdated version of Photoshop and old Macs with zillions of peripherals and wires up the wazoo- AND knew EXACTLY how to use it all.

I ALWAYS had the absolute latst Mac computer and monitor as well as the latest version of Photoshop, AND I HAVE NO FRIGGIN IDEA how to use any of it, then some fool sold me a CCR and let me loose with it (probably hoping to wait for me to kill myself, then"inherit" my Phenom, FX1 and HIDs for sure!) Come to think of it, Mike Veitch DID ask me what dates I was going to be back in P.G. in August........hmmmm....... best if I keep it locked up there lest he sneak in and "recalibrate" my 02 sensors or fill my oxygen cylinder with oxygen and hydrogen and my diluent cylinder with gasoline mixed with carbon monoxide.

I suppose I should just take a few short segments of my first HD footage, try to edit it in iMovieHD and see if I can figure out how to ad sound, then figure out how to compress the clip, save it as a QT file, and then let all you guys grumble it isn't in a WMV format......lol

But would that fit my particular modus operandi?

Reading your rather eloquent venture into HD video Dave reminded me of my indoctrination to HD editing earlier this year. Eventually you will get most of it sorted out. After doling out thousands on the camera, and more thousands on the housing and more thousands on trips to use all of these new toys I returned to find that more thousands needed to be spent on computer software and hardware upgrades. And then, to add insult to injury, it was necessary to learn how to make all of this stuff work together. Having recently completed a 60 minute video of a trip to Bonaire, all trimmed, cropped, colour corrected, contrast adjusted and edited to the background music one of the participants asked, "What took you so long?" Long live the days of instant gratification.

It took me forever just to install a 2nd hard drive on my G5 Mac. In retrospect, now that I accomplished it, it couldn't have been easier.

So since nothing on the Internet tells you everything and how to do it properly, Wetpixel is the 1st:

1.Turn off unit, open side doors, remove clear plastic cooling shroud

2. Locate/remove 4 black button head machine screws from grey plastic hard drive carrier tray inside G5

3. Screw 4 screws into fore and aft sides of new hard drive.

4. Slide new hard drive into open drive bay guiding buttonhead screws into slotted track.

5. You will notice 2 spare black ribbon connector ends just below new drive. Wiggle them upwards, and plug in respectively.

6. Rotate grey arm to the right down retaining new hard drive and close up computer.

7. After rebooting, dusk utility will automatically open, select new hard drive, and erase. Decide if you want to partition the scratch disk and or if you want to have the compute rset it up as a RAID drive system.

Your done. Takes 5-10 minutes tops.

I got a Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) 500 GB SATA drive with a 16mg buffer operating at 7200 rpm's new and factory sealed off E-Bay for $190, about $100 less then mail order.

But once again, the hardware is the easy part! It's the damn softeare learning curve!

Err the manual does tell you in a way... and if you want to add more drives in the G5... look at :

http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2490

Swift Data works very well with the Firmtek card or the Sonnet Card.