Auto white balance lock

[amukher]

Dear All,

For many years I have been using manual white balance for video. I find it extreamly inconvinient if you are making outdoor movies. It is not always practical to carry a grey card and set the custom white balance. I can see that Canon recently does an amazing job of setting the white balance in Auto white balance mode. And it seems the AWB doesn't only manage the color temparature, but also the tint. It is almost impossible to get such level of accuracy with manual set of white balance without always taking custom white balance with agrey card and as I said before that is absolutely not practical for outdoor shooting in most of the cases.

So if Canon can offer an option to lock the AWB during video recording; it will be an amazing tool! For now I started using a work around to copy the AWB to the custom WB and use that for the video. But it is dengerous as if I forget to change it; it is kind of a big problem. And this is not that quick either and doesn't always work properly! A bit of hit and miss!

This is specially useful for video as for still you can push the WB as much as possible as normally if you are doing serious photography you would capture RAW images anyway. But it is completely different ball game for video where a RAW is not really an option for common people due to the unmanagable size of image files!

Or is there already such options available and I am just not aware of it!

Any sugessions will bee useful.

PS - Sure I know all kind of tricks of waring a grey wrist band or using grey card or making a chart to see what time I should use what colot temparature or manually trying to match the AWB with the manual WB. But honestly they all look work around and not really practical.

Cheers,

Avi

www.avisekhphotography.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/amphotography

[Waddizzle]

If you wish to lock the WB setting, why con't you take it out of Auto WB?  

[amukher]

Hi Waddizzle,

Thank you for your proposal and that is what I do for last many years.

It is about convinience.

The manual WB adjustment without a Grey Card is never that accurate. And Grey Card outside studio is not very practical. Yes some twick can be done in post, but we don't normally capture RAW videos (R5 8K RAW 20 minutes 256 GB), so the margin is low.

PS -

Just read yesterday that Fuji Films seems to have an option like that. Interesting as I thought I found a new idea, but seems it is not that new idea. There is already an implementation of it!

Cheers,

Avi

www.avisekhphotography.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/amphotography

[Waddizzle]

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@amukher wrote:

Hi Waddizzle,

Thank you for your proposal and that is what I do for last many years.

It is about convinience.

The manual WB adjustment without a Grey Card is never that accurate. And Grey Card outside studio is not very practical. Yes some twick can be done in post, but we don't normally capture RAW videos (R5 8K RAW 20 minutes 256 GB), so the margin is low.

PS -

Just read yesterday that Fuji Films seems to have an option like that. Interesting as I thought I found a new idea, but seems it is not that new idea. There is already an implementation of it!

Cheers,

Avi

www.avisekhphotography.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/amphotography

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Set the WB to "Daylight", or some other option, and this should set your WB to a fixed value, or range of values.  The next step is to then use WB compensation to tweak the way you want it.

[ebiggs1]

I guess you are only interested in video and I know next to nothing about video. But maybe there is a video editor that lets you adjust WB in post. I know for stills I use Auto WB in the camera and set to where I want it in Photoshop.

I have found unless you are in unusual circumstances Canon's auto WB is pretty accurate.

[amukher]

Correct, that auto WB lock would only be inportant for video.

Anyway for still images WB is not an issue at all. One can change and set whatever WB from a RAW image. Unfortunately, it is not that easy with video. Video is like JPEG; once you set the WB and get it wrong, it is not that easy to recover.

And problem is the AWB changes within the shot and then that shot is very much doomed.

Correcting all those in post is very time consuming unfortunately. If at all that can be corrected!