Much ado about nothing IMHO,
as Peter has said outside of a situation lit for video the color temperature of the lighting is invariably all over the place. Even assuming indoor lighting is tungsten doesn't hold true anymore. I've been shooting speeches where some of the lights were mercury vapor, others were sodium vapor, a couple of tungsten spots, the audience was lit by a mixture of fluros and there was also a good spinkling of halogens to boot. So in one pan you'd have to change the WB setting a dozen times.

I used to do a bit of serious stills work, learnt a lot from a pro who took stills for medical text books where accurate color was everything. He taught me everytime I moved the camera are chaneg anything to take anothe shot of a grey card. If you were rreally serious include a color wedge that stayed with the photo the whole through to the printed book, that way you could tell if the ink had faded in the book and the colors were no longer accurate.

But seriously I think we tend to get a little obsessed by these things, I have to ask how many members of the public change channels because what they were watching had incorrect white balance?
Mostly they're happy if there's something colored moving on the screen and a noise coming out of at least one speaker.

I'm not trying to promote sloppy standards but I could think of many more things we should get obsessed about that Joe Average does notice and will change channels because of.

I have a VX2000 and find that the presets work well. I also use the Custom Preset function for stage lit productions to shift the WB toward cool or warm depending upon the lighting. In addition to that the zebra stripes are important for any exposure control as well and may be set to show for either 70 or 100 IRE. Manual white balance on the camera works well also and any slight problems can be easily fixed with Vegas Color Correction tools. What is missing from the camera is a setup for the blacks however which would be nice. It is factory set to 0 IRE NTSC which is the standard in Japan where it is manufactured.

John

John,
I think you'll find what you're really missing is not so much the setup as the black 'knee' control. We've had a few Indian clients who used to hire our old SP camera (until they bought their own) just to be able to adjust that one parameter.

I know it may sound funny but an Indian wedding where the faces of the happy couple disappear into the black background isn't that funny. You really cannot fix this in post either, once its lost in the blacks it's gone for good and if you try to bring the gain up you risk blowing out the highlights.

I would have suggested looking at the DVX100 which gives you a lot of control in that area but you'd probably hate the low light performance unless you can get one performance of the show lit for video.

Bob

Interesting...and timely for me. I just shot some outdoor video and posted some frame grabs and a video on my website. Some of the first video I took was pretty cold (blue--videoy looking) although not overly so and was easily corrected in Vegas or a photo app. I did get some comments about the "blue." I tend to use auto white balance for the majority of my shooting and it works pretty well, as the other clips I took that day bore out. At any rate, IMHO color curves are necessary to get a better color saturation and dynamic range out of consumer cams when editing, unless you are looking for that flat look.

. .ermm .. the link aint working for me StrongDotGuy . .. :-(

Gets me to a Sony Website . . .

Grazie

Hmmm, Grazie, maybe I did something wrong. The link is :

www.fortvir.net

But, the site won't let me link it with html codes :-( (edit: unless you enter the URL correctly within the code, duh!)