EOS R5 White Balance- Is there any easy way to do this?

[nlarghi]

I have a Canon R5 which overall is a pretty good camera. My only thing that drives me nuts is that the white balancing on the R5 is a real pain in the a**. Is there any easier way to do this? Any button remapping that has helped any one? I do some underwater videography and this multi-step process for setting white balance is kind of a nightmare. Any help is appreciated thanks. 

Please don't respond with "just get the R5C" that would be an $8,000 investment at this point. I am looking for better strategies to set video white balance for the R5

[p4pictures]

Hello and welcome to the community here.

What aspect of white balance is causing the issue? Is it the number of steps required to switch between different white balance settings, eg from auto, to tungsten, to custom etc? Is it setting the Kelvin temperature value? Is it doing a custom white balance?

For easy changing between the white balance presets, and or dialing in a Kelvin temperature, you can use the customise dials setting and then allocate one of the camera dials to change either of these white balance settings. 

See this section of the manual and scroll down to Customise dials. 

https://cam.start.canon/en/C003/manual/html/UG-08_Custom_0030.html 

If it's the process to capture a custom white balance, then there is no real shortcut apart from putting the option on the My Menu and have the camera set to only display the configured My Menu screens. 

https://cam.start.canon/en/C003/manual/html/UG-08_Custom_0040.html 

[justadude]

Why can't you just set a single custom WB for underwater, and then leave it as the only custom WB?  Asking because I do that with my infrared photography.  Whenever I'm shooting regular photos or video the WB is set at "Auto".  When I switch over to shooting infrared I simply move the WB selection over to "Custom" which I know has already been set previously to record infrared correctly for color, regardless of the lighting conditions.  Seems like this would work for underwater just as well.

[p4pictures]

The issue with this is that the colour depends on the distance between the subject and the light source, and also the camera and subject. So for video, if a subject is 15 foot under the surface and starts swimming 30 feet from the camera, it will change colour as it gets closer to the camera because the distance is changing. Different wavelengths of light - colours - are absorbed differently in water to air. Reds reduce the fastest. 

[justadude]

Thanks for clarifying, Brian!  I just knew that it worked above the surface.  Wild guess on my part simply because I was thinking in air, even darkening light does not change the color... but I can understand how through water would be different.  

[nlarghi]

Thank you for your suggestion. I remapped one of my buttons to take me to the white balance menu, it’s clunky but it’s a solution for now. Hopefully they can fix that in a firmware update. 

[Ron888]

Thanks,I was just about to ask the same thing.I suspected this would be the case but wasnt sure