Can I fix my auto white balance that's adjusting during my video clip using Premiere pro?

[Jeanette_Abrahamsen]

I left my auto white balance on white I shot one long video clip =/ During the clip, the white balance adjusts itself and the video drastically changes from cold blue to warm red temperature. I know how to adjust white balance on one of those frames using premiere. But if I fix the cold frames, then it makes the warm frames even warmer and vice versa. Is there an auto white balance function in premier that will adjust as the video clip plays? Thanks so much for your help!

[JAH_1]

Similar problem with WHITE and in fact a LED spot going bad complicated the issue too (perfect storm). So, your suggestion may work, but what do you mean by "high luma"? Essentially are you using bright areas that are white anyway to "mask-in" the reduction of saturation and therefore make the temp shift less noticeable?

[Michael Grenadier]

just using secondaries to limit the correction to bright areas (high luma) and lowering the saturation to zero.

On the shoot I was talking about, you only really noticed the shift in the white areas which given the location was a whole lot of ugliness.

[JAH_1]

"On the shoot I was talking about, you only really noticed the shift in the white areas which given the location was a whole lot of ugliness" Same here. What are "secondaries" ?

[Michael Grenadier]

The lumetri panel allows you to limit the area affected by the color
correction by hue, saturation and/or Luma/brightness

[R Neil Haugen]

What grenadier is talking about is the HSL Secondaries tab of the Lumetri panel.

It's a two-part workflow in that tab.

The upper half is where you set a "key", the area that will be selected and affected by the controls down below in that tab. And the lower part are the controls to change the pixels selected by the key.

You can start a selection by eye-dropper which is a good way to start, and then improve the accuracy for your needs with the three sliders for Hue, Saturation, and Luma. But to see what your key is selecting, you need to set the mask ... I typically click it on, and set to color/gray. Then where my key is going to be selecting pixels to change, I will see the color. Everything else of the image is simply gray.

Now you can slide any of the key sliders sideways to change the center of the area chosen, modify the width of the three sliders to expand or shrink the area that slider chooses, and modify the feather, the width of the area that will be semi-selected.

Once you have the area selected you want to work on, you can use either a single color wheel/Luma slider control, or click on the three-wheel icon to get the full shadows/mids/highlights color wheel/luma controls available.

And below those are controls for saturation, contrast, sharpness ...

So you start a key, set the mask to check and modify the key, then uncheck the mask to see the change the controls below the key are modifying the image.

Neil

[JAH_1]

grenadier, Neil, Thank you,
Looks like this is going to work pretty well. One thing that really surprised me is how effectively the mask works as you play back the footage in how it reveals the temperature changes. You actually see part of the image that was manipulated by the camera’s AWB setting.

[R Neil Haugen]

There is no software that I know of that would auto-WB video in post. Not Resolve, Baselight, nada. And I'm very sorry to say so, as if there was, I'd have in on my rig in a heartbeat. (Well, depending on cost/usability too ... )

Had a job once that had been shot with a GoPro set on full auto ... I was supposed to salvage the thing. Slo-mo of someone walking around inside a large museum, walking around rooms and rooms to halls to rooms, with different lighting constantly shifting as both the ambient light was shifting over time and the different areas had different types of bulbs.

And of course as other people with brightly colored or light or dark clothing walked close by, the color or brightness could spike or dip ... only to reset a few moments later to something not quite what it was before.

Client wanted me to simply color-correct and do a bit of brightness smoothing, which naturally didn't come near meeting their needs when they saw the tests I sent. And they were horrified that I was saying it was going to need keyframed color & brightness. But ... ain't no other way about it. And off we went.

But with that much keyframing, you need a control surface that can both move around the UI and give you fast control over the image. Working with a mouse would take for flipping ever. Some of the brightness I was able to keyframe-control while playing back at about half-speed. And of course, got faster as I got used to the typical changes that would happen.

For color, I put markers where it changed, then went through hitting the markers and trying to smooth things, not for perfect but just for within a range on the scopes. And no jarring visual changes.

A Tangent Elements panel like the one I've got would be good, but a Wave 2 or if in Resolve their mid and upper panels would work well. Without a surface, I hope it's only a few clips, not hours of video or hundreds of clips.

As this media was (yuck) GoPro 8-bit, naturally some of it was fairly decent image-wise, and some was well under or over exposed. So it was easy to make some clips look better than the next one could ever look ... and I had to be aware of over time blending the better ones "down" to more match with the best I could get from the bad ones. Always nasty to make a great clip less great, but ... it's better to have an 'even' look than one that shifts between good image and crud.

I have full sympathy for you. I wouldn't like to be in your shoes, I been there.

Neil