WB with mixed lighting

[wailmich]

Shooting on SRII 16mm (Kodak 500T and 200T), I recently ran into some issues where we had to shoot scenes with mixed tungsten and fluorescent practicals. In particular, we shot some long tracking setups, with different lighting mixtures in different rooms/hallways.

Didn't have access to green gels, so we just grey-carded before the shots, hoping the lab would correct for some of it.

Since we haven't gotten the film back yet, I guess this is a bit premature, but I was wondering if it'll be possible to color correct for the green, especially with skin tones. Also, in the future, what's the best way to white balance a lighting setup where we don't have much control over our practicals?

Thanks, David!

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You can only correct an overall frame or shot one way or the other -- for example, under greenish lighting, you'd shift the image towards magenta to compensate. So a lab can't correct for mixed color temps in the same shot and even them out, though by spending some time in a color-correction suite, you can probably play around with the image to minimize the differences. But for a dailies transfer, you'd just have an overall correction for the shot, so they'd correct for whatever light source the grey card was shot under.

If you want to get rid of the greenishness, you'd have to first make everything in the shot have the same color temp, whether by greening up the non-flourescents or adding magenta gel to the flos (or swapping them out). Once everything matches, you can either correct overall with a camera filter or in post.

You should be able to time out green in skintones, just that if the person has blond hair, sometimes it gets greener than the skin, so even when you've timed the skin to look correct, the blond hair still has a hint of green to it.