Custom white balance on Canon G7xMark III

Bumping this old thread as I'm interested in the G7 MIII.

Did you find a solution? Previous Canon compacts had a WB shortcut function - I looked into the G7XMIII manual but it's not clear if it's still possible.

I'm also curious for feedback on using the G7XMIII for underwater video, if you managed to dive a little with it since.

Thanks
b

10 hours ago, bghazzal said:

Bumping this old thread as I'm interested in the G7 MIII.

Did you find a solution? Previous Canon compacts had a WB shortcut function - I looked into the G7XMIII manual but it's not clear if it's still possible.

I'm also curious for feedback on using the G7XMIII for underwater video, if you managed to dive a little with it since.

Thanks
b

Hi. Yes, I dived like 100 dives with it. There is no real shortcut to the white balance. You have to take that neutral photo and go in the menu to load it. That won't be such a big problem, eventually. You just let the menu in the right page and it is decently fast to get there. There are two annoying things to conside, if you mention video. One is overheating when taking 4k videos. I really find that you need to manage well the recording time and the pauses between them. Otherwise you get the overheating message quite fast. Recording in HD doesn't overheat, but that was the point to take the Mark III to get the 4k. I have a Fantasea housing, not sure how it goes if you have a larger case and might not overheat so fast, but pretty sure it will. The second annoying thing in video is that you cannot take stills in video mode. Therefor to make the white balance for video, you have to go in a photo mode first, take the neutral picture, go in the menu do the WB and switch back to video...The automatic WB is decent thought.

If I would chose again, I won't go for g7x mark III for video. My oppinion.

Thanks for the feedback - this is so much more useful than most infomercial reviews, or vlogging oriented material found online -  I was curious as I have good memories of the Canon G12 white balance and colours, but given this, the G7XMIII seems like it's not ideal for video in its current iteration, especially with the overheating problem.

For video oriented 1" compacts, the Panasonic Lumix LX10  doesn't have an overheating issue and has easy WB access. On the downside, It's but not possible to take stills in video mode as well, and there is a  crop factor in 4K (which is fine if using a wet lens like the INON UWH-H100) stabilisation in 4K is minimal, , AF is not the best but still workable.

I think the newer Sony RX100 versions (VI +?( have solved the overheating heat issue and improved the white balancing functions.

Overheating should be less in an aluminium case perhaps, still air is a rather good insulator as is the polycarbonate of housings like the Fantasea.  AT least the metal case will conduct any energy out to the water more quickly. 

The 1"sensor cameras are all compromises in one way or another.  The LX-10 may WB better but it doesn't play with wide lenses as well needing to zoom in quite a bit to avoid vignetting and losing angle of view. 

I understand previous generations of G7X had a better WB procedure, closer to one touch but that changed when it inherited the newer imaging processor that was developed on DSLR bodies and it inherited the WB procedure along with it.  The latest Canon R3 has returned to true one touch WB so hopefully that might trickle down to lesser models in the future.

19 hours ago, ChrisRoss said:

The LX-10 may WB better but it doesn't play with wide lenses as well needing to zoom in quite a bit to avoid vignetting and losing angle of view.

True, but as a side note if the focus is shooting 4K video, then no zooming is necessary with the LX10 and a wide wet lense like the INON UWL-H100 - there is no vignetting since the image is cropped to a 36mm equivalent.

With this combination (LX10 in a Nauticam housing with the UWL-H100) , I do need to zoom in a little if shooting in 1080p (I use the step zoom function and zoom one step in) since it doesn't have the said crop factor, but  there is need to zoom in to avoid vignetting in 4K. The cam's 36mm crop factor effectively removes vignetting with the lovely Inon lens, giving you access to the max aperture of its 1.4 lens.

Stabilisation is better in 1080p, which also gives you access to 60fps if necessary, but I've mostly used it in 4K with the Inon wide wet lens.