During an outdoor shoot, I unfortunately forgot to set a fixed white point on my iPhone. The take lasted thirty minutes, resulting in ten minutes of edited footage. The sky was sunny with light cloud cover. Depending on the cloud shadows, the white point fluctuated, and the image became too warm in sections.
The White Balance filter doesn’t support keyframes. Therefore, I divided the clip into short scenes where I noticed a change in the white point. Some snippets are only five seconds long (cloud appears, cloud disappears – neutral, white, neutral). All snippets were given a neutral white point (using the eyedropper tool and the same white wall in the image). Then, the entire track received a white balance correction of -0.5° (to approximately 6.0) to warm it up globally.
I haven’t found a tutorial to fix a fluctuating white point. My solution works (more or less, though there are still some jumps if you look closely), so I’m interested if you know of any other fixes.
What I would do:
1 - Duplicate the entire clip into a track directly above it.
2 - Do a white balance correction that corrects the over warmed clip on the lower clip instance
3 - In the clip instance on the upper track use Opacity keyframes for a smoother graduated shift between the two white balance corrections.
4 - Render the result and bring it back so that it is unified for further color correction or filter operations.
