White Balancing Without White Object In Frame

Hi Guys,

Recently did some run and gun work in varied lighting environments. I had no chance of using the white card, so had to go with Auto White Balance.

My Sony A7S tends to pull out green tinted footage. Add some very yellowy lights in the mix and all the footage looked green as hell.

I usually colour correct footage by finding something white in frame and then using the colour board to match up the RBG Parades. In many of the frames, I don't have a white reference point, so I was wondering how to colour balance these shots.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Thank you,
Phil

If any people are in the shot you can balance on their skin by cropping and using the vector scope. The concept is skin color is more important than inanimate objects, since we intuitively know what's normal skin color. Larry Jordan demonstrates this at about 25:00 in this video:

If there are no people you can try the FCPX auto balance function. It often works pretty well.

If that doesn't work and you have a white object in a different clip but shot under the same lighting conditions, you can balance on that then cut/paste the correction to the other clip.

If you know you are shooting under difficult conditions, even if you don't have time to manually white balance you can often just wave a white or grey card in front of the camera -- that only takes 1 sec. Even better is using Color Finale and an X-Rite video color checker card. Even in run and gun situations you can sometimes do this after the shoot, provided lighting hasn't changed:

It's always best to manually white balance beforehand since correcting in post can quickly run into limitations due to 8-bit color channels. However if that's not possible at least momentarily waving a white, grey or color checker card into the frame is better than nothing.