White balancing seems to have lots of confusing opinions bandied about, so I wanted to ad some tips on the concept of white balancing for video and that should give you a baseline to start from and establish your own techniques from there. Feel free to add your techniques, what has and hasn't worked for you.

The easiest way to white balance is to use a pre-made white balancing slate. Amphibico happens to make a fairly slick one show below.



You'll notice that the slate is not really white, but a bluish green tint. This more or less tells your videocam to warm things up a tad. If you white balance on a slate that is of such a greenish/blue tint, this should negate the need for a color correction filter. If you use a perfectly white slate, then you will need to warm it up via dropping down the color correction filter.

If in the event you are using supplemental HID lighting, you are probably doing more or less macro work. With the lights on, white balance with no color correction filter against a perfectly white slate. You should not need a bluish/greenish slate. Because of the daylight color temperature of HID's, you should get the red spectrums without having to artificially warm it up with a blueish/greenish hued slate.

Some HD videographers have white balanced against the surface, against light colored sand, etc. It is more convenient, but experiment when the shot is not critical.

Slight color correction can be done in post, but better to start out with a properly white balanced baseline and tweak it than to try to majorly correct things in post.

So I'd like to hear from others how they deviate from the baseline.