Broadcasting Tricaster White Balance

Introduction

The Tricaster system has a way to broadcast white balance information accross cameras that is key to making a shoot come out looking right. If white balance is not properly calibrated, people will often times come out on camera either looking somewhat ghastly, or like they just took a couple of shots and a bong-rip. The best way to avoid said issues is to use the automatic white balance system present in the Tricaster.

For our shoots, the common setup has a camera or two acting as a wide-shot. These cameras have the most knowledge over the colors in the room. Cameras placed elsewhere, usually closer to the subjects, have much more knowledge on textures. The wideshot, though, has all of those textures minimized, and the overall color of the subjects is preserved.

For this tutorial, the widest shot camera will be used as the calibrating master camera for the balancing system. In certain situations, camera #4 (the less wide shot and podium camera) can be used, but if it gets too tight it can mess up the other camera balance calculations.

Step ⇨ by ⇨ Step

This must be done before presets are set on the cameras!

1. Cycle through each camera on the pan-tilt-zoom controller, setting a manual but decent white balance for the room. This calibration doesn't have to be that good!
2. Select the wide shot camera on the pan-tilt-zoom controller, and enable automatic white balance.
3. On the Tricaster, click on the gear that shows up on each camera to pull up the control windows where the tutorial will be completed.
4. Next, in the image settings of each camera, turn on auto white balance and make sure to turn on listen only.
5. On the wideshot camera's control panel, deselect listen only.
6. The control windows can now be closed.
7. Try to keep heads out of the way of the wideshot.