The Importance of White Balance in Video Cameras

"Now I'm going to talk about the basics of White Balance on your XH A1. Essentially, White Balance is, you have to tell the camera what white is so it can accurately represent colors. Basically, there's two types of, the most common two types of light, are daylight and then your indoor Tungsten lighting. Daylight is a little bit more blue, Tungsten lighting is a little bit more yellow. Let me show you on the XH A1. Down here, is where some of our White Balance controls are. Pretty much directly below our power dial. Right now it's set to 'PRE' and that's a preset. So the presets are up here, under where the LCD screen is right here. You can see there's a little, what looks like a sun, and then what looks like a light bulb. That's basically what you do. If you're outside, go ahead and leave the preset on and you can set it to the sun and you should be good to go. If you're inside with a lot of Tungsten lighting, switch it to the middle here and, hopefully, that will help. Indoors is a little bit more tricky because, maybe it's not just Tungsten lighting, maybe it is our fluorescent light, maybe there's daylight coming in, so it's a little bit more difficult. Let me show you how to actually do a White Balance. Back down here, where I showed you before where we were on preset, I can actually set that up to 'A' or 'B'. I have two White balancing options. Now that I've got it set to off of the preset, what I would do is put a white piece of paper in front of my subject or whoever I'm filming. Have them hold that white piece of paper and then you just hit this button right here and your little icon will flash on your screen. Once it's done flashing, you've got a white balance and you should be able to tell. The colors now look accurate. If they don't, try it again to try to get that white balance. That's how you use the White Balance on the XH A1. Setting either your typical daylight or indoors. Like I said, the daylight function is going to work really well when you're outside. Then how you set a true white balance by White Balancing your camera using a white piece of paper, white poster board, or something like that. That's all about White balance on your XH A1."