@CRFilms I'm trying to understand too, as the opposite of Green is magenta. @Vitaliy In a 4:2:0 environment, can the amount of information for Blue and Red be pushed by software (Hack or patch etc)? Would a filter solution make it worth considering the loss of resolution even with top filters? Wouldn't kill any sense to have top lenses?

@terry2 Since the WB is set before encoding to JPEG, it seems likely it is set before encoding AVCHD as well. It would be really odd for it to be the other way around.

So, what would be the difference between setting a more magenta white balance and put a magenta filter? Also, is magenta or purple?

@terry2 no idea. I've never seen any videos talking about pre-filtering your footage. It's all grading after in post.

@Meierhans ...I did try some changing of white balance myself and shooting some 1600 iso footage and it looked bad, FPN same as always. I don't have a filter so I tried taking a purple dry erase maker and coloring a plastic sheet to see how that looked and while the image looked smudgy as hell, it looked a TAD better. Won't be able to do real testing til my filters come in. I think, since the FPN, or other problems are in cam, you need an "out of cam" solution.

Does anybody have any purple or red or blue filters to play around with and see what they can do?

@bitcrusher I definitely think any color filter in front of the lens could have benefits depending on the situation, lighting, etc...

I PM'd eyepatchentertainment if he had any info or experience with this. He said he didn't but he also didn't know about adding that much extra color but....

"What I do believe in is leaving the white balance of the camera at its native WB and then filtering the incoming light to that temperature. On CCD cameras (F900 - DVX100) that brought a noticeable increase in Dynamic Range. "

Now....anybody know the native white balance of the GH1/2s? Would doing something similar work on these cams and is this purple filtering a form of that?

All silicon sensors have a native white around 5.000 Kelvin. Of course, the manufacturer might choose to balance their Bayer pattern filters differently without telling us. That said, I don't see too much sense in weakening the other channels in favor of the noisier ones in most cases – after all, you can never increase light by a filter. Only exception: if you can see that green is blowing out much earlier by looking at test footage with a waveform application with separate display, you could counter-filter to expose the footage higher to reduce noise in the other channels. If most of your noise is in the blue channel (like shooting low-light under very warm lighten like fire/candles or household bulbs) you could apply a mild CTB. Or you can noise-flter blue stronger than the rest, since the human eye doesn't resolve blue very well, so the visual sharpness won't be affected that much.

i think more testing and support should be done by others as well. Vitality should know better how the gh1/2 work internaly with its colors. Maybe some coments from him or other expert could be of grate impact for this proyect. I find it interesting and quiet cheap correcting alternative. Keep on the good work.

No, totally depends on your scene's lighting.

That greenish tint looks awful and I'd suggest you test skin tones to see if you can normalize them at all – they might look like corpses or like pigs …

I'm very sure that there is no difference between setting your WB to pink/magenta and using a colour filter, (unless you're after some kind of vignetting 8 or 16mm film effect and you've got a graduated filter for the job, yeah, good look CCing that to a baseline). I just did some quick tests. All shots were in the Smooth profile all at -2. In order there is a shot of the scene with normal WB, then one where I set WB to green to get pink. The next shot is the version of the pink WB I corrected (not perfect but in the rough ballpark really), then there are shots of the red channel of both the correct WB and the corrected pink WB shots.

The red channel is different, I'll give it that. There does seem to be much better definition of the edges in the shot, smoother shifts (less chance of banding), and better response in the shadows. (more detail perhaps ?). Correcting the footage does make for deeper, and in this case, more accurate reds. Anyhow, more, proper tests are needed. As you can see it creates quite a big difference with only a subtle pink WB shift (although you do drop a fair bit of the overall light too). I'm not sure if this is giving more detail/better chroma sampling, or if its just causing a colour shift to red after correction, although the evidence in the red channel does indicate something positive is happening.

All shots were made with the @bkmcwd GOLGOP3 patch with the Sedna matrix with a GH2. Oh, another note, the average bitrate did drop from 130Mbps to 115Mbps from the correct WB to the pink WB.

Edit : Added a better correction of the pink WB version.

http://www.libraw.org/articles/magenta-filters-on-digicam.html

"The point in using magenta filter is to achieve better exposure of red and blue channels by allowing less light to hit the sensors under the green filters of sensor CFA. This is physical, pre-capture filtration; and as such it can't be reproduced by tuning the camera or through post-processing."

The guy just found this article from 2008 talking about how a magenta filter can create a better image in your DSLR shooting in daylight. Said there is a sweet spot for WB with a filter that can give less noise, but it's different for each hack and ISO so you'll have to test the settings yourself to figure out what works for you at what ISO, bitrate and WB.

I got my filters and did a quick shoot outside and the purple filter gives the outdoor footage a nice look. File Purple is the image with the filter, PurpCC is the video with some basic color correcting.

@dkitsov, I thought the idea was that you're allowing the sensor's Blue and Red channel to get more saturation by basically pushing the amount of light in those bands to hit the sensor as opposed to the dominant Green, which will always have more sensitivity than the other channels. So Blue and Red get what they need in order to lower noise in the Blue and Red. I may not be describing it well, but that's how I understood it.

It depends completely on the lighting situation. If it's daylight with very high energy in blue – in elevated places at noon it can be much more than 6500 K – you'll blow the blue channel very early with purple (or any filters other than orange).

IMHO, any colored filter only makes sense to decrease the strongest channel to avoid starving the others if there is a massive misbalance. It doesn't really help much with the 4:2:0 vs. 4:2:2 issue.