Matching colour across cameras
Three cameras in one room give you three rooms unless you decide which one is the reference and bring the others to it.
Two cameras, same table, same lamp, same afternoon, and one of them thinks the room is warm while the other thinks it is grey. Cut between them and your video appears to move house every few seconds.
The instinct is to grade each camera until it looks nice. That is the wrong shape of job, and it gets slower with every angle you add, because you are chasing a look you cannot hold in your head while you switch between three timelines.
Do it the other way round. Pick the one angle you trust, make that one correct, and then match every other camera to it rather than to your idea of what good looks like. One reference, one decision, and the rest is comparison. That is the whole method and everything below is how to make it work on your own footage.
Why do two cameras in the same room look different?
Three reasons, and only one of them is the camera's fault.
Every manufacturer makes its own decisions about how to render colour, so two bodies see the same wall and disagree politely. Cameras also sit at different angles to your light, so one is getting the lamp full on and the other is getting it across the face, which changes both brightness and colour before anything is recorded. And most importantly, automatic white balance is doing its own thing in each camera independently, and it does not stop doing it when you press record.
That last one is the reason the problem often gets worse mid take rather than staying still.
Should you white balance manually?
Yes, and this is the single most useful thing in this post.
Automatic white balance is a camera continually guessing what colour white is in your room. It guesses again when you move, when a cloud passes the window, when you hold up something brightly coloured, and when the shot composition changes. Two cameras guessing independently will drift apart during a take, and no amount of work afterwards will pull them back together cleanly, because the drift is not a single offset, it is a slow wander.
Set white balance manually on every camera before you start and leave it there. Most cameras let you pick a preset or dial in a value, and either is fine. What matters is that it stops moving. If you can, set the same value on every body, even if that value is not perfect, because a matched error is trivial to correct later and two unmatched approximations are not.
What should you film before you start?
A few seconds of the same subject on every camera, under the lighting you are about to use.
Sit where you will sit. Roll all cameras. Hold something with a known colour in front of you, a grey card if you own one and a sheet of white paper if you do not, and let each camera see it for a moment. The card is the better reference: the brighteners in most white paper fluoresce faintly blue, so it reads cooler than neutral, and by a different amount under each light. Then say what you are doing out loud so you can find it later.
That handful of seconds is your reference. When the footage is on the timeline you have every camera looking at the same object under the same light, which turns matching from a taste exercise into a comparison. Without it you are matching a shot of your face to a shot of your hands and guessing at the difference between the two.
What does matching to a reference actually mean?
Pick the angle that is closest to right already, usually the one covering the thing your video is about, and grade only that one. Get white looking white, get the exposure where you want it, get skin looking like skin. Take your time, because this is the only angle you are going to make decisions about.
Then bring each other camera up beside it and adjust that camera until its reference clip matches the reference clip of the trusted angle. Not until it looks nice on its own. Until it matches. Your editing software will have a way of showing two frames side by side, and your eyes are considerably better at spotting a difference between two images than at judging one image alone.
Once a camera matches at the reference, apply that same correction to everything else from that camera and stop. Do not go through clip by clip making each one prettier, because you will drift, and drifting is the problem you started with.
This is how this studio works on multi-camera pieces: one reference angle holds the truth, and everything is matched to it. A three camera lesson has to feel like one room, and it only does if one of the three has been appointed the room.
What if the cameras are lit differently?
Then fix the light, not the file.
A camera sitting in shadow while another sits in the lamp is a lighting problem being handed to post-production, and post-production will only ever half solve it. Moving a lamp costs nothing and takes a minute. Matching a badly lit angle to a well lit one costs an hour and never fully convinces.
If the room genuinely will not allow it, accept that the difficult angle will be the weaker one and use it less. That is a cheaper answer than trying to make it the equal of the others, and it is the honest one.
Where this stops being a colour problem
Every part of this that works is decided before you press record: manual white balance, a reference clip, lamps that treat both cameras fairly. What is left afterwards is arithmetic.
So the thing worth changing is not your grading skill. It is the first ninety seconds of your next shoot, which currently contains no reference clip, and which decides whether matching is a comparison or a guess.
Keep reading
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Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
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