I film with a Canon HFG40. Here are some links to some of my videos: One from a little more cloudy day: You'll notice that I regularly get an "orange tint" on the videos in the evening hours. Based on my limited knowledge, I believe this is a white balance issue? I have typically used Auto White Balance in the past, but still run the camera in Manual. Should I be setting a white balance with a white paper? Should I just set the color temperature to a given value? My camera has a few presets that I can set the White Balance to, if that helps. I appreciate any and all advice. Thanks!
I typically set white balance between 5500 and 6500 depending on the natural light. Experiment a little you'll find the right setting.
I set my WB at one of the prescribed settings- sunny, cloudy, halogen, etc. I also experiment with aperture and ISO.
Go out on a sunny day and shoot some test footage. Set the white balance to 5600K and set the color profile to something like Standard (I cannot remember what Canon's out of the box color profile is). Set your shutter to twice your frame rate and expose the image properly. Then see what the footage looks like. If it is crazy orange like above then something is wrong. If in AutoWB, you get orange, then something might be wrong in the Auto setting. Auto can get WB wrong, but seldom as wrong as in those videos. AutoWB falls apart when the lighting changes within a single scene. Even in the WB is off a bit, you can generally fix it (to a degree) in post. Dialing it in manually and using white cards will always be the best, but we all cheat it when in the field at times.
