The preset is not a standard
The person who made the footage reported both bodies set to their tungsten white balance and lit by the same tungsten fixtures, and they still did not match. What they found afterwards was that the two manufacturers' tungsten presets sit at different colour temperatures — one near 2800K, the other at 3200K. Dialling both in manually to the same number matched them far more closely than trusting the preset on each.
The argument about what to grade towards
- The original comment treated grading towards 6500K as the error, on the grounds that the light in the room was tungsten at around 3200K.
- The reply pushed back with a reasonable question: is the target not the look you want to arrive at rather than the temperature you started from?
- The answer given was that a scene lit between 2800K and 3200K cannot be matched at daylight temperature unless the tungsten fixtures are gelled with a blue correction on set.
Where the codec sets the limit
A third reply drew the line that makes the disagreement resolvable. Correcting towards daylight is achievable, but only from raw. From a compressed delivery codec there is not enough colour information left to get there, and the same reply attributed the better-matching camera's performance to its greater dynamic range rather than to anything done in the grade.
What to take from it
- Match the cameras before recording, by setting the same colour temperature by hand rather than by choosing the same-named preset on each.
- Fix the lighting mismatch with gels on set if the scene needs to end up at daylight balance.
- Expect much less room to move colour temperature in the grade when the footage is not raw.
- The thread is from 2015 and the bodies named in it are long superseded. The point that manufacturers' presets disagree is about presets, not about those cameras.