Very likely, the problem is that you are making videos inside under tungsten illumination. Our eyes are amazing. Scratch that. It isn’t our eyes. It is our brain. Our eyes see the yellowish warm illumination, but our brains automatically make the adjustment so that the colors look normal to us. If we walk into a kitchen with florescent lighting, our brains will automatically adjust to the bluish light.
Most camcorders today will automatically adjust to the different ambient colors. If you are outside, it will compensate for the bluish light. If you are inside, it will compensate for the orange tinted light. If you have one of the older camcorders, you will have to manually make an adjustment.
If you have a newer, video camcorder, it will make these adjustments for you. If you have a newer, more advanced video camcorder, you can either let the camera make the adjustments, or you can improve your results by manually setting the color balance.
What do you do? You carry a white card with you. When you are under new lighting conditions, simply fill the view with the white card and press the color balance button. The camera will take a reading of the ambient conditions and render a properly light balanced video.
What do you do if you are in a mixed light situation? There isn’t a very good answer for this one. Let’s look at a familiar scenario. You are making videos late in the afternoon in the living room. There are table lamps providing most of the illumination. There is a large bay window that is letting in great quantities of late afternoon light. That light is bluish in color. The lights from the incandescent lamps is orange. Your camcorder has to adjust to one of these light sources or the other, but it cannot adjust to both. Your video will either be too bluish or too orangish. It won’t be perfect.
Here is an article from VideoProductionTips.com that does a great job of explaining color temperature, and how to improve your videos by manually setting your white balance.
Remember, if you do manually set the color balance, you will have to set it each time you change your lighting location. For you who are less particular, just leave it on auto white balance and you won’t have a problem.
