White balancing: A step-by-step example

White balancing: A step-by-step example
You need a decent-sized piece of white cardboard to perform white balancing. Follow these steps:

1. Have your talent hold the white cardboard directly in front of her, where all the lights are focused. If it's a tight shot, she may have to hold it in front of her face.

2. Zoom in until the white card fills the entire shot.

3. Find your camera's white balance control, set it to manual, and then set the white balance. Most cameras have a button to push or a menu option to select.

4. Zoom back out, and behold your wonderfully balanced picture.

When your lighting situation changes, you should rebalance the camera. This is particularly important if you're combining footage shot outdoors with footage shot indoors. If your white balance is off, people's flesh tones shift slightly, as do the colors of their clothing (if they're wearing the same color). If you're unsure whether you should white balance, do it just to be sure.

White-balancing tricks
You can use non-white cards when white balancing your camera for a special effect. Non-white balancing cards come in two flavors: warm cards and cool cards. The process is exactly the same as detailed previously, but by using a non-white card to white balance, you can trick the camera into thinking white is something different, and the result is slightly skewed colors in your video.

Why would you want to do this? Well, warm cards have a slightly blue tint, and when the camera compensates for this, the result is a slightly warmer image. This may be appropriate for a very intimate podcast shot indoors, if you want to make the viewer feel cozy. Cool cards have a slightly orange tint, so the resulting image is slightly blue. You've seen the effect in car commercials or computer commercials, where you get a very cool, impersonal look. This may be appropriate for a technology video podcast.

The best way to find out what warm and cool cards do is to play around with them. If you don't want to shell out the money for the professional versions, you can try white balancing with different shades of cardboard purchased at a local art supply store. But be careful; if you want a subtle effect, you want cards that are every so slightly off-white.

Exposure
After you set the white balance, you have to set the exposure. Many cameras have automatic exposure circuitry. However, much like the auto-focus mechanisms discussed in the preceding section, this feature often can be more trouble than it's worth.

Automatic exposure, sometimes called auto-iris, determines the exposure by the amount of light coming into the lens. The problem is that the amount of light, particularly outdoors, is continually changing. While it may seem like a good idea to adjust the exposure, it's distracting when the exposure changes in the middle of a scene.

Going back to the sailboat example in the preceding section, a sailboat with a big white sail coming into a scene dramatically changes the amount of light coming into the lens. To compensate, the camera changes the exposure by closing the iris slightly, and the exposure on your subject is compromised. It looks like a cloud has passed in front of the sun, when all that has happened is that the camera has changed the exposure.

Manual exposure is always a better choice if your camera offers it. Setting exposure properly should be done with an exposure meter. Setting exposure can be highly subjective, as videographers regularly overexpose or underexpose for dramatic effect. The procedure for setting exposure manually depends on your camera, the shutter speed, whether you're using filters or not, and a number of other things. You should, however, be able to set your exposure manually by "feel."

Look at your subject, particularly flesh tones if you're filming a person. Do they look right? Try opening your iris to increase your exposure, or closing it a bit to reduce the exposure. Look critically, and make sure you have what you need. If you're unsure, it's better to underexpose than overexpose. You can always add a bit of brightness during editing.

Easy on the pans, tilts, and zooming
Similarly, you should try to avoid panning (moving the camera from side to side), tilting (tilting the camera up or down), and zooming in on or out from your subject. First, these camera techniques are used sparingly by the pros, so if you use them too often or inappropriately, they're a dead giveaway that an amateur is behind the camera. Second, they place lots of motion in the video frame and consequently degrade the quality of your final product.