White Balance Shift

Kimberly wrote on 3/14/2015, 11:39 PM
Hello all:

I'm trying to understand what my Sony cx760v is doing with White Balance Shift in combination with manual white balance.

I understand the difference between the White Balance Shift range of +4 to -4. What I don't understand is what the camera is doing when White Balance Shift is set to 0 (zero). I incorrectly assumed that zero is the same as Off. The difference may not be evident above water, but below water it is very pronounced.

When set to zero, the footage has a red cast. You really notice this in blue water shots and certain fish shots when the blue color creeps into purple. When set to Off, no extra red cast. At this point I'm just going to leave it set to Off except for certain circumstances, but I'm curious if anyone has an idea why the camera would behave this way.

Regards,

Kimberly

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 3/15/2015, 10:52 AM
No matter what the price of a camera head, it seems that whenever a new camera is out , there is always a need to test white balance- one of the very first things that a pro will do before taking the unit on a shoot. Note that many of the later releases of prosumer camera ($4,000 and up) - especially Sony have not fared well in these reviews.

Here is what we know, cameras vary a lot by how good they white balance, vary a whole lot by how well they auto balance, vary a whole lot by how much range they have.

Given that, we know that brands vary considerably, models vary some, and individual units do vary a little - fairly difficult to measure pure performance.