The HV30 White Balance, Part 1

The next part of the HV30 tour is the white balance settings. There are a number of presets as well as a manual setting. For these tests, the HV30 was in 1080 60i mode, with the Cine Look since I think it will be one of the more frequent settings I use.

First up, the automatic white balance. I’m guessing the camcorder looks around for the whitest-looking pixels and picks them to represent what white should be. Here, the snow in the park hands the camcorder an easy one.

The snow looks somewhat grey in the sunlight—only the snow across the road in front of the building looks white. Let’s see what the daylight setting does:
The snow is whiter in this shot, so I’ll avoid the automatic setting, at least on sunny days.

Next, the cloudy setting. The sky on the day of the shoot was clear and bright, so this is not the setting’s best test:

Next, we get into the Shade setting. I assume this setting works to level out contrasts between things in shadow and any hotspots in the same frame?

Leaving natural light settings, we get into the white balance settings for artificial light. First up, the tungsten setting, probably the worst to use in daylight since it’s looking for a much cooler light temperature:
Yup, that’s definitely the wrong setting. Nothing that colour correction in post couldn’t fix, but I’ll bet the reds and greens are probably not as vibrant. We’ll see with the histogram next time.

Next on the bulb part of the tour is the normal fluorescent bulb setting:
This isn’t that bad at first glance—certainly a bit darker, but it’s not blue like the tungsten setting, and the brown building still looks brown. The histogram will tell the tale.

Next is the daylight-balanced fluorescent setting:
This looks less blue than the normal fluorescent setting. The histogram comparison should be fun!

Finally, we get to the custom setting, or the manual white balance. In order to ensure that the framing was identical to the other white balance settings, I didn’t zoom into the sunlit snow to get an accurate white balance as I would normally do, so the white balance in this clip is based on the entire frame you see here:
This doesn’t look too bad—the whites look white, the blues look blue, and the browns look brown. The histogram will tell the tale.

That concludes the white balance comparison for this week. Next week, the long-anticipated histograms of these shots, just to see just how the colour balance changes from setting to setting.