Camcorder Tips: Adjusting White Balance

The ‘adjust white balance’ facility is a very useful function on a digital camcorder. However, it is often neglected by both amateur and more advanced users. It is, nevertheless an extremely beneficial tool, worthy of consideration, and one that may notably benefit the visual quality of the captured video.

A digital camcorder gauges all of the colours that it records from a baseline of what it perceives the colour white to be. When a camcorder is ‘white balanced’ it is effectively re-calibrating its understanding of what the colour white is. This enables the camcorder to represent all the other colours in the footage as accurately as possible. This is why it is important to white balance your camcorder.

When should the white balance be adjusted? The answer is simply any time that the lighting conditions significantly change between scenes. Between indoors and and outdoors is a typical example because the camcorder will need to recognise the difference of sunlight. This helps to get the best footage and accurate reproduction of the colour content.

Setting the white balance is very straight forward and can be done really quickly on most digital camcorders. Usually a simple button or an on-screen option, but you’ll need to figure out how to find the feature; referring to instructions if needed.

To adjust white balance on your digital camcorder, simply use something that is white. A piece of paper or a white door or wall would be fine – in fact anything that is white will do. If you’re out and about you could carry a white card with you in your camcorder bag. Point your camera to the white item so that a minimum of 80% of the frame is white, and then simply press the white balance button.

Watching camcorder recordings where the colours are a little bit off; perhaps too much of a blue or yellow flavour upsetting the scene is a sure fire way to recognise that the simple function to adjust white balance was neglected.

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