Jumping into the deep end (or turning a sow’s ear into something resembling a purse, albeit not made of silk)

I recently used the GH2 to shoot some video in a dark pool hall, aided by little more than an LED light. The result can be found here: http://vimeo.com/19075932

This image is a still from the original file. It’s pretty crisp for 720p, but there’s clearly a blue cast on the subject’s face. And this is my first lesson learned – iA Movie mode overrides whatever WB balance setting you had set previously and goes into Auto White Balance.

I had set the camera’s WB to match the 5500k of the LED. But AWB set the White Balance based on the room lighting, which was much much warmer, thus making the LED appear bluish. I suspect it has something to do with the subject being off-center and AWB not being tied to the area of focus.

Try as I may to fix the WB in post, it wasn’t working, so I had to go to Plan B – convert to BW and/or Sepia. I ended up choosing Sepia, partially because one of the bike’s introduced that night was painted in a warm palette of browns. Doesn’t sound cool, but it was in a 70s retro kind of way.

How could this have been fixed in camera? One, I could have gelled the LED to match the room, thus avoiding a mixed WB situation. Two, I could have not used iA Movie mode and shot manually, with WB to match the LED. The room lighting would be off, of course, but at least my subject wouldn’t look like an extra from Doctor Who…