Re: I sure do miss the ability to "white balance" now that I use X

While I've slowly but surely been migrating my workflow from FCP 7 to FCP X here at work, I was doing a VHS-to-DVD salvage operation at home over the weekend and found a horribly color-balanced clip from an ancient tube cam (image lags and comet-tails and all), which I found very difficult to tweak in FCP X. I got wistful for the old "click on a white object in the picture, and the balance will automagically shift" trick so akin to just hitting the White Balance button on a camera (which I wish the original shooter had done in the first place).

I played around with color settings and even tried to let FCP X auto-fix the color, but... nothing. Terribly pink cast over the entire image. Fortunately, it's only about 30 seconds long and I was able to get something relatively okay-ish after an inordinate amount of monkeying around.

Does anyone know of a trick I'm missing in FCP X that lets you simply white balance a shot in post?

Thanks in advance.

— Mike

I was under the impression that 10.4 could do this?

Mike,

In FCP X, Balance Color (Option-Command-B) does a pretty good job of White Balancing. See attachment. You need to change the Automatic Setting to White Balance.

Hope this helps,
Phil

Cool! Thanks, Phil — I'll try it!

— Mike

If it's a really bad scene, it might not work so well. You can also use the Crop tool to find a small section that should be white and, using the Vectorscope and the midtone Color Wheel, move the dot to the center.

Hey Mike
There is also the "eye dropper" to the right of the White Balance pop down. You sample an area that is supposed to be white to set the white balance.
After that, you just have to work with the various color correction tools in FCPX.
Really excited about the new tools. Color Wheels, Curves…, HUGE improvement over just the color board.

As Phil says you can crop down to a small white area and then use the scopes to white balance as well.

Hope this Helps, Greg