[Marc Sabatella]

It's not TOTALLY irrelevant. Sure you can change it post but when you're shooting a performance with tungsten stage lighting and a little of this and that mixed in, you have 2 or 3 run throughs, creating a stills documentation of the production, resulting in a few thousand images, a more accurate white balance means less fine tuning of the color post (and no not on every single image, just the ones deemed keepers. Which can still be a lot).

True, but if it's really mostly plain tungsten (or halogen) lighting, then regardless of how far off the auto is, applying a "tungsten" preset (perhaps one you have customized for the particular venue) to the whole batch at once in PP takes but a couple of seconds. And then you're right where you'd have been had the camera really nailed it in the first place. Either way, the shots under plain tungsten/halogen lighting will look great within seconds after importing, but the ones shot under colored gels will need more individual work - and pretty much no camera is going to get that right under AWB. The shots under colored gels will need custom work no matter work. So really, more accurate AWB under tungsten/halogen lighting is not going to save more than a few seconds it took to apply the preset to the whole batch at once in these conditions.

Where it might matter more is in situations where the lighting is mixed as it is in stage performance, but all the lighting types are ones that AWB has a fighting chance with - eg, tungsten, fluorescent, and daylight - as opposed to colored gels. This is something I'd associate more with a wedding or other type of party/event that might span several different rooms of a building as well as the outdoors. Here, the more accurate WB in camera saves the trouble of segregating the shots into those categories (tungsten, fluorescent, daylight) before applying your preset. Here, we could at least be looking at a few minutes of extra time for a shoot of say 1000 images.

[mel]

I recently shot a play that was performed in an art gallery. There was both tungsten stage lighting, natural lighting coming in through high windows, and a bit of flourescent light from the room lights. The amounts varied depending on where the actors were located at any given time, and the angle from which I shot (I was in the staging area with them moving around shooting during a dress rehearsal). There as no one setting that worked for those variables, during the shoot or post, as each scene and angle was potentially different. The K-7 nailed it much better than the K20D. I shot both cams with the DA* zooms.

[Marc Sabatella]

Yeah, that makes sense - you had a mixture of light sources that individually were each possible for AWB to handle.